Jessica Kiang
@jessicakiang
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Off to greener pastures, Bluer Skies. @jessicakiang.bsky.social
Joined February 2009
Here's the @criterion essay I've been bleating about for a while. It's even prettier printed (the liner layout is just beautiful) but while you wait for the physical disc that you've definitely already ordered to arrive, here are some bonus features.
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Now, now, let's not all dunk on the spelling error and the Spotify branding so hard that we fail to adequately rip the piss out of posing an uncapped fountain pen on top of a typewritten page.
Poems on display at Taylor Swift’s “Tortured Poets Department” Los Angeles library installation.
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Biden has won 100% of the states Sufjan Stevens wrote albums about!.
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Just saw my first 4DX film (TWISTERS) and boy does that preposterous novelty gizmo tech elevate the movie from "fine, sure, whatever" to THE MOST FUN I'VE HAD IN MAYBE A DECADE.
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Holy shit, I didn't realise the actors were alone in the house/garden while shooting. What an abjectly, existentially terrifying experience that must have been. I hope the movie had a considerable therapy budget.
“They wired the whole house with cameras. Some of them were hidden. Some of them were visible." Director Jonathan Glazer, his cast and crew on the making of Best Picture nominee The Zone of Interest. Now playing nationwide and opening in the UK.
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Truly one of the only actors I could legit have imagined popping up and stealing scenes in both BARBIE and OPPENHEIMER this weekend.
Remembering the truly peerless and beloved Philip Seymour Hoffman on his birthday ❤️ . Here he is in Paul Thomas Anderson's giddily off-kilter masterpiece PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002).
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Also, not that anyone needs me to continue banging on about this major motion picture, but kudos to the marketing team —this film is not an easy sell — for this chillingly uncanny poster design.
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Still marvelling over the segment of last night that was Mulaney's intro followed by ZONE's enormously well-deserved Sound win followed by I'm Just Ken, which was as good/satisfying/fun a 10-minute run as I've ever seen at the Oscars.
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New vocal warm-up exercise just dropped.
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At every festival I'm not at, something plays that makes me deeply envious of those attending. Today I happily receive all *your* jealousy: THE LIGHTHOUSE is the fucking bomb.
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However bad your day, please remember there is a fleet of post-production people and editors and CG experts and colour-correction technicians and sound mixers who have literally been staring at footage from CATS for MONTHS now.
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Are they only doing a MAMMA MIA sequel because they can call it MAMMA MIA: HERE WE GO AGAIN? Because, fair enough.
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This is nauseating headlining. The deaths have not declined. The deaths cannot decline, they can only mount. The dead people are all still dead.
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May we all, at 90, blaze back onto a scene we've quietly revolutionised for decades, make a final, gracenote work of mischievous self-assessment, and exit with the audience wanting more. As well as everything else, Varda had dazzling timing. RIP.
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God, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT really drags for the first 45 seconds.
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Cronenberg's CRASH is coming to @Criterion in December and I have been BURSTING to tell you that, in perhaps the biggest honour of my critic life to date: I wrote the essay. And my God, look at the artwork!
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Bigger outlets would do well to learn that it is actually possible to write a headline about this horrible tragedy that gets all the major facts across but doesn't unduly cast blame and leads with the actual lead.
Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins Killed On ‘Rust’ Set After Prop Gun Accident Involving Alec Baldwin
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I especially enjoyed the little underseat tremor programmed for when there's no tornado in sight, just Glen P in a 10-gallon hat and a tight white T-shirt as it starts to rain.
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So heartily sick of this line, as if reading a goddamn fucking review made for groupthink, while blindly consuming whatever Disney product/Ed Sheeran album gets shoved down your throat by The Algorithm is evidence of proud individualism. Fuck all the way off.
Ed Sheeran says he doesn’t see the point of music critics in the age of streaming. “Why do you need to read a review? Listen to it. It’s freely available! Make up your own mind.”. 🔗:
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Fascinating to recall right now that this movie exists.
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Well, this fucking sucks. What a loss. She is, obviously, not wrong, but her singular, forceful onscreen presence made the future of the film world seem a little less bleak.
Adèle Haenel is stepping away from the film industry: [It's] "reactionary, racist, and patriarchal."
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Also went in coincidentally with my hair wet and came out with a free blow-dry.
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I guess the Oscars move does mean that PARASITE will be the longest-reigning Best Picture winner since 1930's THE BROADWAY MELODY and yes that's a meaningless, cursorily researched factoid, but Christ, imagine it had been GREEN BOOK.
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Don't know what Cannes people are complaining about. Tickets for the 8.30am screening of 504 BAD GATEWAY TIMEOUT are super easy to come by.
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Rowlands in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE taught me more about the utterly transcendent and transformative power of film acting than any other performance. RIP to the greatest ever to do it.
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Yes yes, we all know she is a great director but why is no one discussing her excellent posture.
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Honestly this is a fascinating phenomenon, born of such spectacularly basic terror that other people might be getting more out of art (and therefore life) than you, a profound tool.
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Extremely blasé about a note Cronenberg sent to the Criterion people calling my CRASH essay "a great piece" that he "loved." I mean, I scarcely even care enough to tweet about it. It's like, whatever, you know?.
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MEGALOPOLIS is a folly of such gargantuan proportions it's like observing the actual fall of Rome. Had a great time with it, in an extremely haha-yes-sickos-meme kind of way.
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My "Quick! Duck!" Oscar opinion is it's perfectly OK Gerwig didn't get a director nomination, given BARBIE's Picture and Screenplay nods. Let her get nommed again (and win) for something more personal than a highly competent and smart solution to a tricky IP-creation problem.
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This is right and good. Chloe Zhao is the fucking real deal, and sorry to get idpol on you but having Bong hand over Best Director to an Asian-American director is amazing and wonderful.
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Aside from anything else I cannot believe Film Twitter finally won Best Picture!.
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I've followed this account through a lot of wtf why bother moments, but it's all been worth it for this momentous 30 year anniversary.
Aug 12th 1994 - The best before date on this tin of pineapples. 📽️📅 Chungking Express (1994)
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Very sad news about Terence Davies. I do hope people will honor his legacy by seeking out what is now his final film, the terrific BENEDICTION which never seemed to get the release it absolutely merited.
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Don't really get how after 2 years of voracious film and TV bingewatching, so many people have somehow reverted back to 1895, "the train is really coming out of the screen!" levels of media literacy. But here we are.
This is it, isn’t it, the discourse that is finally going to break my brain
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Finally caught up with THE GREEN KNIGHT which I hereby declare a) extremely good and b) a Christmas movie. Also, FYC Supporting Actor: Barry Keoghan, for his rambling, haranguing, lunatic wide shot intro on the battlefield alone.
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SO ANGRY that I held off watching GONE WITH THE WIND for 80 years because I needed to stream it on a confusingly marketed, fortnight-old premium service and now I can't and can only find it on like 6 other online channels or in literally any DVD bargain bin on earth.
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Flattered but also slightly embarrassed (flambarrassed?) to have my raptures so bigly quoted.
Just when I thought the marketing for Poor Things (“Bella Baxter is a feminist hero for the ages!”) was rubbish, I run into THIS banger on the underground.
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Genuinely embarrassed for the few good films awarded last night that they have to be associated with the Oscars. I really hope DRIVE MY CAR can live it down.
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Busy day for the "Oscars are about *quality* not gender or race" brigade. Takes real, blinkered, moronic dedication to post this on every single critical article as if it were some unreturnable mic-drop and not the most skullfuckingly basic take since the dawn of takes.
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OK, a top 50. With apologies to the docs I haven't watched (which is all of them) plus TOP GUN: MAVERICK, FUNNY PAGES, TURNING RED, BURNING DAYS, CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH, METRONOM, WOMEN TALKING, EMILY THE CRIMINAL and, indeed, EMILY which all landed just outside, merry Christmas!
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I am a non-gay, non-black, non-American, non-working class female and I found MOONLIGHT to be the most resonant & moving film of last year.
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I adore Bong Joon-ho anyway, but even by his standards PARASITE is extraordinary.
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RIP Bruno Ganz. While everyone's (rightly) memorializing THE AMERICAN FRIEND, WINGS OF DESIRE and DOWNFALL, I submit the scene between him and Frank Langella in UNKNOWN, which is one of the greatest ever examples of masterpiece performance in a film that's, um, not a masterpiece.
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MONKEY MAN: look, I know establishing shots are not the sexiest things to shoot, but God, do we miss them when they're not there.
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is that the daughter or the date or is the daughter the date
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Werner Herzog if he had waved cheerily at the abyss rather than staring into it all that time.
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And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win the Oscars even when you've famously never won an Oscar.
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Catching myself smiling all the way through my bazillionth watch of this, but the first in years. Genuinely grateful I got to grow up with this film.
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FOR FUCKS SAKE stop trying to imagine how you'd feel if it was your daughter; start wrapping your brain around how it'd feel if it were you.
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The @berlinale awardees' impassioned expressions of solidarity with Palestine and calls for a ceasefire being decried as "anti-semitic" by the Berlin mayor is just breaking my fucking heart. I scarcely recognise this city right now.
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Hyper-hyper-hyperventilating. Sometimes good things happen. I had forgotten it was possible. So, so, so well deserved, the best guy and the best critic and I could cry. @JustinCChang wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism
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Had a lovely time revisiting the terrific selection of Deborah Kerr movies now on offer @criterion and writing my way into an even deeper appreciation of this often undervalued actress.
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Hey, look I have some of yon "personal news" people have been going on about! via @variety.
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Well, so THE SOUVENIR II is not just masterful, it's the kind of masterful that retroactively engulfs and electrifies the already-very-good THE SOUVENIR,reshaping it, too, into a subtly different magnificence.
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I find the heat AMERICAN FICTION is picking up in Adapted Screenplay — of all the most competitive categories — baffling. I don't outright dislike the film, mainly because of Wright, but the one thing it is not is a good, or even wholly adequate, adaptation of an incredible book.
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Fuck it, I'm doing a top films of 2019 thread, now that they're no longer the rage. It's bloody long, but I wanted to give some shine to the many underseen or as-yet-unreleased festival titles that I loved across a very busy year. Get yer mutin' finger ready!.
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I've never related to anyone quite as much as I do, retroactively to Jane Fonda, for that little pause where it's like she's treasuring being the only person in the room to know, for just one precious little beat.
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Ok, now that any danger of being topical or timely has passed, here's my top 50 (and then some) favourite films of 2023. Late to the party, but at least I'm showing up – thanks to all those who've gently prodded me to do so.
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Kind of feels like they managed to develop a blacker black.
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Very little in life brings me same jolt of joy as randomly remembering that the casting director on LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER was Leah Daniels-Butler.
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You know who ought to be getting way more Supporting Actress love, because a) she's amazing and b) her role is *actually* supporting? Aitana Sánchez-Gijón for PARALLEL MOTHERS, that's who.
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In addition to an unassailable legacy, Stanley Donen delivered maybe the most delightful ever honorary Oscar acceptance speech. RIP, and thanks for the lovely movies. Like that!
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Finally, someone standing up for the unjustly maligned superhero minority.
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Only Céline could give the Paris Olympics opening what it really needed: Thierry Frémaux on the piano.
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Love how this press release suggests every nation has a Spike Lee and – just to clarify – we're getting the US version.
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Covid-19 giving Italians new ways to flirt: a museum usher took my temperature today and when I asked if it was ok, he said, "36 degrees - perfetto! The most beautiful temperature of them all.".
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HOLY FUCKING SHIT! My favourite Jim Thompson novel is being adapted by my favourite THE FAVOURITE director! Though tbh it's a little rude I'm not writing the screenplay.
Yorgos Lanthimos (@the_favourite) will write and direct an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1964 novel POP. 1280 @DEADLINE —
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Whoever did this to the Russian embassy in Dublin this morning, I owe you a pint.
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Happy to report that Venice is still a shameless attention-grabbing stunner.
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Everybody shut up, stop moving and don't disturb anything in the universe until my godfather has got this in the can.
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Great, I look forward to an entire Cannes spent defending the fact that I like BIRDMAN.
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Super ironic mistake to make (conflating "Black" and "African-American") given what this movie is actually about. Also, watch SAINT OMER, you idiots. It was the best film of last year.
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RB: Look, it's the future, it's 2023! You're going to be the first woman to solo-direct a billion-dollar movie!.GG: Yes and you. well, you're going to have a hit TV documentary made about you.
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Love the pre-Oscar tradition of watching non-film types grapple with not liking Best Picture nominees, and film types grapple with liking Best Picture nominees.
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I don't think we're getting to the heart of the theatrical vs home viewing debate. It's not about screen size, production value or even potential revenue.
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Is this where I confess to finding Aaron Taylor-Johnson unrecognisable anyway?.
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Extremely excited this cat is now out of the bag. Almost certain they made a mistake but haha, joke's on them, too late to pull out now!
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I was mesmerized, disturbed and profoundly, existentially grief-stricken by Claire Denis' HIGH LIFE. (Which is a ringing endorsement, to be clear):
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This is dreadful news, and it's hard not to read a whole more into the spaces between these tersely polite words.
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Thought my Paris apartment couldn't be any nicer but then this sweet, friendly and perfectly Tournée du Chat Noir cat started showing up whenever the windows are open.
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Everything is terrible except the new Berlinale artwork.
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On top of all of the superlatives that have been heaped on SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, allow me to add my own: it is quite the most bored I can ever remember being at a blockbuster movie.
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Also: first time ever a Palme d'Or and a Palme D'og have gone to the same film. Well done, ANATOMY OF A FALL/Messi.
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Excited to be doing my second @Criterion essay, for Jacques Deray's LA PISCINE, out in July and looking extremely, extremely hot.
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