1/13/25 -- Den of Thieves 2 / The Blood of Jesus / Letterboxd
On Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, The Blood of Jesus, and Letterboxd.
A few days ago, I thought I was having a rough week, and that I’d have a hard time coming up with anything to write about on my blog. Then I found out that there was a deadly fire in the Pacific Palisades. I’m lucky enough to say that my neighborhood wasn’t impacted by the fires, but the devastation of the city I’ve called home for 28 of my 30 years hasn’t left the top priority spot in my mind. Unfortunately, I don’t have much to say about the ecological and political ramifications of this disaster, because I am simply a film critic. So, I’ll stick to what I know, and hope that reading about movies can serve as a worthwhile distraction amidst the chaos for you, just as watching and writing about them has been for me.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
More impressive but less sleazy than the first entry, Pantera moves the two-sided cop/criminal thriller to Europe and gains some respectability. In 2018's Den of Thieves, Big Nick guzzled Pepto Bismol to wash down his Carl's Jr. burgers, but now he struggles to order a croissant while sipping an espresso. The smaller pleasures found in hangout scenes pick up where they had left off, albeit slightly classed up (Butler’s Big Nick smokes an ecstasy-laced joint at a French al-fresco bar, instead of getting drunk in a South Bay strip club). At one point, Butler and costar O’shea Jackson Jr indulge in some gelato, and a certain type of viewer will be reminded of a similar dessert digression in Clint Eastwood’s modern classic, The 15:17 to Paris. Gerard Butler is very fun, with his old-school masculinity defined by his decisions to drink Pepsi and smoke cigarettes while his scene partners sip La Croix and suck vapes. The central heist is impeccably directed, reminiscent of John McTiernan's The Thomas Crown Affair and its elegant masculinity, with the slight stench of a middle-aged divorced man hanging over the proceedings.
Eraserhead
For my first repertory screening of the new year, I went to the American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz 3 to see David Lynch’s feature debut on 35mm. The film anticipates the style of Twin Peaks: The Return a lot more than I had remembered, with the framed photo of the atomic mushroom cloud next to Henry’s bed, the ominous whoosh sound design origins, the creaky old phonograph records, ideas of electricity as evil, and more.
The Blood of Jesus
A shoestring budget fire and brimstone film by Spencer Williams, told in two halves. A man played by the director accidentally shoots his wife, and must live with the guilt. Then, we follow his wife's purgatorial temptations and journey to a literal crossroads between heaven and hell, the latter represented by music, dancing, and games of chance, not unlike the glamorous Pottersville of It's a Wonderful Life. A wall-to-wall soundtrack with gospel and blues records of the day and a dream-like atmosphere created in large part by the disconnect of the dubbed audio and frank visualizations of holy imagery make this more than just a curio– a uniquely pleasurable film.
On Letterboxd
With end-of-year film content stretching into the first weeks of January yet again, I tried to avoid reading these articles, lists, and think-pieces, in order to focus on my own year-end podcasts and blog posts. However, there are a couple that caught my attention. The first was Letterboxd’s Year in Review, formatted as a Spotify Wrapped-type scrolling slideshow, and notably, sponsored by NEON. This made me think about the transformation of Letterboxd over the last decade, since I joined the site in 2015 to keep a log of my film habits. What started as an interactive database quickly became a social media platform, where the currency of likes and followers outweighed the functional use of the site for most users. This was not a surprising turn in our current world of digitized socialization. However, in the past year or two, Letterboxd has shifted focus from being a social media platform to being a public relations wing for the minor-major distributors A24 and NEON. The official Letterboxd Instagram account has been pushing their “Four Favorites” web series ad nauseam, a gimmick that combines press junket formatting with internal promotion for the website. The success of these videos has made them a regular at junkets, with celebrities feigning a certain level of respect or even admiration for the microphone with three colored bubbles on it. Seeing this shift occur in real time has led me to use the site less and less for actual writing. Of course, the original functionality of the site is still intact, and as an interactive database, it is extremely useful for me as far as journaling, list-making, and organizing viewing projects are concerned. However, that is all I feel comfortable contributing to the site anymore. This isn’t any sort of moral high ground that I’m claiming over my fellow “Letterboxd guys” (as I’ve been called in-person, and which kind of hurts), and I fully recognize that writing reviews on Letterboxd is the only reason I have a semblance of an online following. I just feel more comfortable knowing that my negative or mixed reviews of films distributed by A24 or NEON won’t be potentially impacted by conflict of interest here on my own blog.