#smokeflix

"Emma Stone's kinda fat, don't you think?" "Oh no, I think she's just big-boned." What a beautiful movie about a terrible malady. I am describing Hollywood's hatred of eating. Because these days not even cartoon characters (Offender #1: Homer Simpson) sit down for a meal and actually consume anything.*

I'm sick of it. Eating in movies should be forbidden, along with brassiered sex. You must earn them back, Hollywood: food and copulation. Think of it like a points system at a group home for "rexies," as the haunted young people who cannot chew and swallow identify themselves here. To the Bone is Short Term 12 excellent. It is Andrea Arnold excellent. And what a cast!

The "baby bottle Pietà" scene between Lili Taylor and Lily Collins is why you make and why we watch movies about tragedy and suffering and the will to live and love. By "difficult" art like To the Bone we may experience true hope for the too-humanness of us. (And here's an actually miraculous double feature on Smokeflix: To the Bone and The Wonder.) —Margaret Yang

"Since they're long shots that may end up two miles away, it requires a lot of rehearsal." So says [making-of spoilers] Romain Gavras, son of Costa-, and the writer-director of Athena on Smokeflix.

A bravura mise-en-scène is the only way to begin to comprehend the enormity of the globalized nightmare: this mass-murderous occupying force — serving only the parasite one percent — that self-identifies as "public safety."

"I don't mind not being attractive. I don't care. I do get annoyed when attractive people are shoved down our throats in every walk of life. We're constantly being given the message that attractive people are the best at everything."

Does it not matter to Romesh that I find him attractive? Romesh Ranganathan is the funniest small-town English egomaniac standup comedian since Ricky Gervais. I thought Romesh was a classically trained actor, not an ex-maths teacher who hails from possibly the saddest little village in the South of England.

Don DeLillo wrote White Noise in 1983–84 in Bronxville, New York. Today the posh "bedroom community" is famous as the home of NFL kingpin Roger Goodell. Bronxville is also where humanity formally surrendered to the sports utility vehicle. Bronxville's "public face" on 31 December 2022 is mostly parking lots, acres of gray. DeLillo said this would happen. He said many other things about America, mostly with unnerving accuracy.

White Noise might not be "unfilmable." But we will never know it if this important book — read White Noise alongside DeLillo's Mao II (1991) — is entrusted to movie directors whose technical incompetence is matched only by their self-satisfaction. Noah Baumbach's insipid, play-stagey White Noise isn't even a cartoon of what might have been. The oversharing trailer is all you need to know. At least you are not confused, American.

Will someone please announce when Bullet Train actually departs the platform? The "platform" is the usual claptrap commotion of cartoon violence and villain speeches and lame quips and bloated back story and A-List cameos (Ryan Reynolds pays off an IOU from Deadpool 2: so cute!) + pop culture railroad references (Thomas the Tank Engine; Peter, Paul and Mary). Bullet Train may as well be the consequence of typing a prompt into Elon Musk's dreadful Dall-e: Brad Pitt and Sony Corp on Tokyo–Kyoto bullet train to Tarantino-Deadpool. But! You forgot to include not tedious.

The train that never leaves the station will always be the first to arrive there. Is this "Zen Wisdom" such as Mr Pitt and the stalwart Hiroyuki Sanada proffer in snail's-pace Bullet Train? Or is it Hollywood horseshyte I thought up on the spot, just like the hack who scripted this stupid movie? "Yeah, well…" (Brad Pitt's catch phrase.)

—Margaret Yang

P.S. It's a little over a two-hour trip. JR Group does not run empty Shinkansen cars for the sake of exposition and fisticuffs, no matter which criminal mastermind wants to "buy all the seats." Thirty-one trains a day every half hour at peak travel times. There ought be enough movie in those amazing facts. And there is: the timeliness of Japanese trains is a topic in one of Werner Herzog's greatest dramas, Family Romance, LLC on Mubi.