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right now, I can’t help but think about all that the country’s had to overcome. the 1968 coup d’etat that sent Modibo Keita to prison for the remainder of his life subsequently led to a long era of surveillance & human rights abuse on the country’s population under Moussa Traore’s regime. throughout the 1980s, protests on the regime were suppressed. Mali in the midst of its political and social crisis launched military attacks on then-Thomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso in 1985 and clashes between the two countries commenced at the expense of economic instability until the two made a peace agreement in early 1986. in 1991, 150 individuals died in the midst of a protest march against Traore’s government — subsequently leading to Amadou Toumani Touré getting him removed from office and subsequently arrested and jailed. this bit of the timeline is only a smidgen of the hardship faced since my mom’s country’s inception. this doesn’t even account for how since the turn of the century, electoral corruption, locust infestations, droughts, guerrilla warfare enacted by the tuareg rebels, northern mali taken hostage and operated as an islamist state, french intervention intervened again, and a few overthrown governments in between.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

I’m not even sorry to say it but this is one of the best movies I’ve ever watched in my life. After finishing the movie, I couldn’t help but languish after knowing that I’ll never get the chance to tell David Lynch just how much of a genius he was for writing this screenplay. Much like the last film I watched in Oldboy, the build-up all the way to the ending showed me a calculated elaboration of the conflict within the main character’s psyche and social life. At face value, the movie articulates a slow burn of love in the midst of a crumbling universe for almost everybody involved. However, the farther you step back, the less it becomes about a slow burn of love — and more so, the gruesome stranglehold of guilt.

Without giving up many spoilers, if at all — the movie predominantly follows Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress from Ontario who comes to Hollywood to fulfill her aspirations of becoming a star actress. With a personality seemingly written as the glowing ray of light, she seeks out to find the identity of “Rita” (Laura Harring) the nervous amnesiac deuteragonist who snuck into Betty’s apartment before any of the other tenants knew. The two grow close in proximity and in fondness of each other, but as the story progresses, Los Angeles becomes less and less of a pristine atmosphere, all to grow more and more eerie of a workspace. This leaves the viewer, specifically me wondering — was this a noir or a horror film? The movie blurs the landscape of reality in such a way for the better part of two hours, that the last twenty-four minutes embrace a desolate feeling of hopelessness and stark parallels that flip the viewer’s psyche.

Oldboy (2003)

The last thirty minutes contained a sequence that completely rattled me to the core. Just when you think the story has culminated — the entire thing completely flips on top of itself, and it’s genuinely one of the best and the most grim of movies I’ve ever sat down to watch on my own accord.

The movie begins in 1988 — Oh Dae-Su, a businessman is arrested prior to his daughter’s 4th birthday. His friend Joo-hwan comes to collect him but Dae-su later disappears and wakes up in a hotel room locked away. Framed for his wife's murder, he's locked away for the next fifteen years with his only companion being a television. Attempting suicide by wrist-cutting, Dae-su later fails and finds himself practicing martial arts as well as digging an escape tunnel. In 2003, he's freed but not before a hypnosis. Dae-su’s initial quest is to find his daughter, but after learning that his daughter emigrated in the midst of his sentence, the movie now becomes a hunt to find the man who held him captive in jail. In addition, Dae-su seeks to learn as well why the captor ever had him stashed away in the first place, and along the way he falls in love with a woman he met at a sushi restaurant.

I genuinely just clicked on this thinking it would be a cool ass action movie, and I slowly learned that the two-hour work was psychological warfare. At its core, the movie illustrated a man experiencing death multiple times over. In the words of Sade Adu, “have you ever seen a man break down?” The work was shot on a ARRIFLEX 435, ARRIFLEX 535 B with both Angenieux Optimo Zoom + Zeiss Super Speed Lenses in tandem — making for a pristine watch in its two-hour runtime. I was also drawn to the attention to detail within the mise-en-scene, clues that might otherwise whiff over your head on the first watch. If I had to pick a stand-out trait, I loved the way color was used to convey certain motifs; to bat, red symbolized revenge and purple symbolized melancholy. However, I can say that there was one moment in which I felt red symbolized lust, passion, sensuality; the scene where Dae-su slept with his love interest, Mi-do.

Eid al-Fitr

CDG Pegasus

CASINO: Journal Entry (9/22)