Comrade Yui posts
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December '25 Review Round-Up
The final round-up for 2025, and it's a big one, here early before Christmas! Thanks again for all of your requests!Cutie Honey, requested by Riley:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/cutie-honey/Winter Light, requested by Chasen:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/winter-light/The Feath...
Treasure Hunting Is More Than 'Fortune & Glory'
The professional treasure hunter seems like one of those jobs that the movies made us think was a viable career instead of a strange fantasy. Of course, there have been real 'adventurers', soldiers-of-fortune, wanderers, gold-miners, but the person who makes their livelihood out of bagging r...
November '25 Review Round-Up!
Lots of noir-ish requests for this Noirvember, got to catch up on plenty of great blindspots! Thanks again to all who requested. Elevator to The Gallows, requested by Chris:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/elevator-to-the-gallows/Second Breath, requested by Chasen:https://letterboxd.com/comra...
Another Appearance on Pod Casty For You
This time, Jake and Ian invited me to discuss all the adaptations of The Killers, and we had a very good time together. Their Patreon feed is great, so I do recommend checking that out in addition to this episode we did!
We Will Not Be Saved From The Fallout
The standard line on the late career of Tom Cruise was created in the anticipation and wake of Mission Impossible -- Fallout: that he will move heaven and earth, and himself, marshal the whole industrial apparatus of film production, to entertain, and through that entertainment, to keep alive a cert...
The Infinite Underworld of B-Westerns
Lately I've spent many hours with the westerns that have been abandoned by time -- before it became a prestigious genre with John Ford's Stagecoach and Cecil B. Demille's Union Pacific, the vast majority of westerns were either serials or B-pictures pumped out by the studios and sustaini...
Man On The Borderland, Premiering at CINECITY!
Man On The Borderland, the short film that my friend Tom Oliver directed from a script that I wrote, will be premiering at CINECITY, The Brighton Film Festival!It will be on November 11th, on the Part 2 of the CINECITY OPEN screening, where the viewer can see a number of other short films:https://ww...
The Dying Theatrical Mystique
I'm not any economist by any means -- the numbers surrounding the movie industry have seemed to me to be fickle and arbitrary things, one film's bomb becomes another's belated blockbuster, especially these days in the age of streaming data where there's no outside source like theater...
October '25 Review Round-Up!
Another month of reviews and requests! We had a good variety here for the spooky season, films about the corruption of the mind, body and soul. Hunger, requested by Francis:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/hunger/To Sleep With Anger, requested by BrokenFlowers:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_y...
Don Siegel: No Time For Flowers
The art of Siegel is one that, no matter how much time may pass, how many retrospectives there are, or how many books written about him, will never quite get its 'due'. I first came across him as a named entity in Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema, which features him and several other &...
End of Evangelion, End of Eschatology
Spoilers for Neon Genesis Evangelion and The End of Evangelion are found below. In retrospect, I do feel that I ended up first watching The End of Evangelion (and Evangelion as a whole) precisely at the perfect time when I needed it the most. I watched it right after I graduated from high school, du...
September '25 Review Round-Up!
Another month, another eclectic series of requests!Hobson's Choice, requested by Konstantin:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/hobsons-choice/That Man from Rio, requested by Francis:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/that-man-from-rio/Hundreds of Beavers, requested by BrokenFlowers:htt...
Remembrance, Reflection, and Red Sonja
Yesterday I celebrated my 30th birthday, and the unavoidable cliche of using such a milestone to reflect on the past and present is something I imagine I share with most people. There was a time in my life where I couldn't even imagine living to twenty, much less thirty -- through a series of ac...
Preliminary Observations on Keisuke Kinoshita
As of this writing I have seen 19 of Keisuke Kinoshita's 50 films, enough of a survey that I can begin to analyze the broad strokes of his artistic effort. I have not seen all his most popular works, but have focused on the immediate post-war period and then his contributions to the 50s 'gol...
August '25 Review Round-Up
A great and eclectic assemblage of films this month, many classics I am glad to have seen. Thanks again for your requests!Beauty and The Beast, requested by Chasen:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/beauty-and-the-beast/The American Friend, requested by Francis:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yu...
The Forbidden Files
Watch closely for what is about to happen. From 1988 to 2010, television commercial director Jean-Teddy Filippe created a series of 13 short films in a series known as The Forbidden Files, with each episode purporting to be a discovered document of mysterious phenomena and experiences. With its elli...
The Auteur-As-Event
An insecurity that plagues cinema as an artform is the dogged question of authorship: that, when you 'boil down' to the 'essence' of a work, who is responsible for it, who is in command?Because our default dogma today is to answer with 'the director', the figure who oversees ...
Anthony Mann: The Universe In Contrast
The salutary effect of Anthony Mann's work is that, despite its insistent violence and psychological intensity, he is still a figure in the immediate post-Fordian tradition, not ever working in pastiche or abstraction. In what I am coming to understand as the Neo-Classical era of Hollywood cinem...
July '25 Review Round-Up
Another big month of reviews! Thanks again to everyone for their requests.Funeral Parade of Roses, requested by Francis:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/funeral-parade-of-roses/Ritual, requested by Riley:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/ritual-2000/Charulata, requested by Herbert West:...
In Search Of Raoul Walsh
The work of the old vanguard of the film business is intimidating -- when I started out doing this in 2017, I hadn't even heard of John Ford, Henry King, or Raoul Walsh, much less contemplated working through the entirety of any of their surviving bodies of work. It is something I've slowly ...
The YA Bridge To Nowhere
On a lark, my partner and I watched 2014's Divergent and 2015's Insurgent, not out of a particular interest but because both of us needed to watch something that wouldn't prove challenging after we'd had a taxing day and were mentally exhausted by it, and that these films were availa...
The Crowd Audio Commentary is now LIVE!
Pretty sure this is the first silent film we've done, I hope to continue doing many more!
June '25 Review Round-Up!
A boatload of requests this month; thank you all once again!Pride, requested by Riley:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/pride-2014/La Belle Nouiseuse, requested by Chasen:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/la-belle-noiseuse/A Silent Voice: The Movie, requested by Mavzli:https://letterboxd...
The Detective and The Vampire
Over the past few months, in my efforts to write a new screenplay, I keep coming back to attempting to pen two types of stories that I am very fond of: the vampire story, and the detective story. Running them both through my mind, I wondered why this fixation existed, and what these types meant to m...
Escapism in Screwball, Candy, and Cemetery
When the term 'escapism' is brought up in film discussions, it generally serves to denote two separate but related ideas: the notion of 'empty' escape, a rejection of responsibility, morality, and dignity as the filmic space is reduced to a flight from the hard truths of reality, and...
May '25 Review Round-Up
Kuroneko, requested by Chasen:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/kuroneko/Blood Tea and Red String, requested by Riley:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/blood-tea-and-red-string/Bad Lieutenant, requested by Francis:https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/bad-lieutenant/Why Has Bodhy-Dharm...
They Drive By Night Commentary is Live!
Hoping this is the first of many Walsh films! There's a lot to get to...
