stan cho

**DECENT 7.** a bad bih gets away with anything. if you’re not sure if someone wants you back (or you feel like you need to make them love you beyond what comes naturally), then they probably don’t want you. good call to switch up the excessive limerence trope by making the fine shi be the perpetrator — really puts into context how odd such behavior is. and yet… “what's so bad about being with me?” you’re either hungry or you’re not. fuck this bro i guess i don’t want it bad enough — ion even know if i want it at all anymore. it’s been maybe four years since i watched a movie on cam quality. never again. and the subtitles weren’t even accurate. fuck you ufukbaba.

**LIGHT 5.** the only note that i took while watching *Michael Clayton* was that this flick isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is to have warranted me taking any notes. took me an astonishing amount of sittings to finish it. something so attractive (yet unbelievably unattainable) about a profession built purely off of goodwill connections. how one develops the skillset for it, and why someone would want so desperately to leave it. maybe there’s a far deeper insight to be made about george clooney’s michael clayton (and the things he does, and the things he says, and the things he feels), but that’s not made immediately clear to me, on both a “oh, it’s pretty explicity that…” or a “that’s something more than meets the eye, and i want to find out...”

**LIGHT 7.** i love my mom so much. i wish to write a book about her some day. maybe there are certain things a parent must not share with their child — though it is my naivete on life experiences that bottlenecks to console i can provide her, it is my boundless love that hopes she may at least confide in me. i wonder the kind of misogyny she must have suffered in her young maternal responsibilities. family matters are the one thing i seem to truly keep to myself. *Cria Cuervos* explores that generational misogyny in the context of an orphaned daughter — something, yet again, i cannot wholly connect with because i am but a son. i have outgrown my childhood. maybe it was so easy to do so because of how much i wanted it to be over when i was still attending busan foreign school. maybe the self-hatred i'd been coerced to take on by my peers required me to mature early. maybe (probably not) the mortality i'd been exposed to early on etched themselves into my very being. maybe it was spending my most formative years away from a hometown i never got to explore in delinquency. and yet, i find my inner child reflected off the eyes of my mother.

**DECENT 6.** not nearly as weird as audience discourse makes it seem, *Mulholland Drive* starts off as a movie that criticizes the moviemaking industry, but ends up as a jealous vendetta. wish it didn't make that switch. while i do think david lynch is quite intentional (which is made evident by how the "confusing parts" are explained almost immediately), i don't think he manages to tie everything back together sufficiently. he strives for both surrealism and logic in his plot (how the neighbor is able to make an omen out of camilla, the disappearance of betty, the significance of the burned beggar, the laughing old couple) — but you can't have your cake and eat it too. after some post-watch digging, i must say my immediate interpretation was that diane is the ‘real’ character here, with betty being at most an elaborate manipulation and at least an imagination of what could have been with camilla. almost reminds me of *Memento*.