⊹⁀➴ ♡

video games

animation

film

books

And same for David Cronenberg after Crash

for the Coen's it's probably

No Country for Old Men

Fargo

Blood Simple

Inside Llewn Davis

Miller's Crossing or maybe O Brother, Where Art Thou

for Cronenberg

The Fly

A History of Violence

Videodrome

Eastern Promises

It’s still difficult for me to come up with a top five because my favorites change all the time. Instead, I’ll just pick ten works of fiction that I like. These recommendations aren’t ranked in any particular order.

NOVELS

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The Great Passage by Shion Miura

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada

Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan

SHORT STORIES COLLECTION/ANTHOLOGY

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin

Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre

The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Marchen

The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime

I love this use of dramatic, moody lighting in Nancy Meyers' remake of The Parent Trap. Overall, The Parent Trap looks, for lack of a better word, like a "normal" movie. But here, when Natasha Richardson's character sees her ex-husband for the first time in years, Meyers and cinematographer Dean Cundey turn up the theatricality. Richardson's face is kept mostly in shadow except for a single shaft of light cutting across it. It's a beautiful example of how expressive use of lighting can externalize a character’s emotion. The shaft of light isn't naturally realistic, but emotionally realistic. It visualizes the shock and emotional weight of seeing someone, you haven't seen in ages, who once meant everything to you. Love when a movie that more or less adopts the principles of realism allows a little stylization to come through at exactly the right moment. This moment would land with much less force if the whole film was stylized.

if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars

literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that. Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?

you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)

if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too

learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life