“…he can claim his characters’ memories as his own”

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In “The Lighthouse,” a manual of instructions for lighthouse keepers, from 1881, helped structure the action, and the Maine dialects of Sarah Orne Jewett’s nineteenth-century novels and poems informed the language. Eggers insisted on building his own seventy-foot lighthouse with a working Fresnel lens. The movie’s financiers wanted him to shoot in color, but Eggers stuck with 35-mm. black-and-white film, forgoing around six million dollars (more than half the film’s eventual budget) in the process. Eggers talks about constructing a doll’s house, in which his movies take place, and in which, through a massing of detail, he can claim his characters’ memories as his own.

THE LIGHTHOUSE remains one of my favorite films of the last few years, so I can’t wait for Eggers’s latest, THE NORTHMAN. Knight’s New Yorker profile on Eggers, above, is a must-read. Love the dollhouse analogy.

grappling hooks and guardrails

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As I've been immersed in a bevvy of open-world games over the last several months (FAR CRY 6, HALO: INFINITE, FORZA 5, and my "I can't process any other signal hand/eye/thing" fallback, GTAV), I've come to appreciate the sturdiness of the guardrails contained therein: while I can smash through buildings, over any number of obstacles or concrete or trees or shrubberies, those guardrails don't budge, rendering my flights from Covenant strongholds and/or my escapes with Chicharrón after storming the fascistas over before they begin.

Random FAR CRY 6 - HALO: INFINITE thought: the ability to use the grappling hook in HALO: INFINITE on everything ruined me for all other grappling hooks: that I had to search for conveniently-placed grapple-places in FAR CRY was a major let-down but we'll always have Chicharrón.

HOUSE (1977) / Obayashi

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Perhaps the most gloriously fucked-up movie I’ve ever seen. Jaw-to-floor, first frame to last.

Also: no idea if this is true, as it appears on the IMDB trivia page for the film, but, FWIW, I would watch the shit out of Obayashi’s GODZILLA pitch:

Shortly after this film's release, Obayashi proposed a story for what would have been the 16th Godzilla film. Had that film been made it would have used the same crew as this film with Godiego once again provided the music. This story told of a little girl named Momo who discovers the dead body of Godzilla. After being dissected, Godzilla is revealed to be a pregnant female alien named Rozan who died of diabetes. The brain of the dead Rozan instructs the humans that she must return with her unborn son to the planet of Godzilla and so her body is converted into a spaceship. The newborn child would be reunited with its father and they would have fought a female monster that shot fire from her breasts

So there’s that then.

Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi from a script by Chiho Katsura. Starring Kimiko Ikegami, Miki Jinbo, Ai Matubara, Kumiko Oba, Mieko Sato, and Eriko Tanaka. Released 30 July 1977.