Tag: books

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Jeanne Dielman: the Best Christmas Movie Ever Made

(The following is the script for a humorous holiday vlog post, with a link to the video. This site does not *actually* recommend Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as holiday classic.)

What’s up, Film Fans! Welcome back to Mark Loves Films.

I just watched a 1975 masterpiece that critics have been SLEEPING on. A film so heartwarming, so cozy, so Holiday-coded that—it is basically the blueprint for every Hallmark Christmas movie.

Meet Jeanne Dielman. Single mother. Brussels. 1974. 


This holiday season… one woman… will find the magic… in the mundane.

The director understands that the kitchen is the heart of the home. She gives us these incredible, uninterrupted takes of Jeanne just… peeling potatoes. For minutes. It’s so meditative. It’s not about quick cuts; it’s about honoring the starch.

And the family values? Chef’s kiss. The dinner scenes are breathtaking. Look at this.

No iPhones. No iPads. No “skibidi toilet.” Just a mother and son, sitting in silence, fully present, mindfully chewing every bite of…   soup. It’s a powerful reminder to disconnect to reconnect.

But here’s where it gets really heartwarming. Jeanne isn’t just a mom—she’s a Girl Boss. She runs a boutique service-based business right out of her bedroom!

Every afternoon, she hosts these exclusive 1-on-1 networking sessions with gentlemen clients. It’s so empowering to see a woman in the 70s thriving in the Gig Economy.

And THEN—and this is the part that really broke me—after each client leaves, she takes me time. She sits. She stares at the wall. Sometimes for like… ten minutes. No phone. No distractions. It’s a vital reminder for the holidays: You can’t pour from an empty cup!

But things change when her sister writes, she’s all: 

“GIRL get out of Brussels! You need a vacay! Miss u xoxo.”

Will Jeanne the “Small Town Girl” from a tiny French village called Brussels resist the call of the “Big City” Montreal? I won’t spoil the ending, but I think it will surprise you!


Let’s talk technique.

The cinematography is bold. The camera never moves. It’s not lazy; it’s grounded. It’s like the film is a weighted Christmas blanket for your eyeballs.

Costuming? Her wardrobe? Timeless red coat for that Mrs. Claus slay.

And sound design! Forget a big, sappy score. The real music is the sound of  home. The clink of the spoon in the coffee cup. The thwack of her tenderizing the veal. The scrape of the chair on the floor. It’s this incredible, minimalist ASMR symphony of domestic life. Cozy Hygge Holiday!

Now, the ending is… I won’t spoil it. But let’s just say… Jeanne makes a choice.

I think it’s a powerful metaphor for ‘cutting out’ negativity and stress before the holidays.

I see a woman who finally gets what every mom wants for Christmas: a Silent Night. No more guests. No more expectations. Just Jeanne, her thoughts, and the profound peace of a to-do list fully crossed off,

So if you want a film that captures the spirit of giving, the joy of cooking, and the importance of a really sharp pair of scissors… Jeanne Dielman is a five-star holiday classic.

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and tell me in the comments: What’s your favorite potato peeling technique? See ya next time–happy holidays!

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The Dark History Buried in Exhuma

While Exhuma is marketed as a straightforward horror film, its true genius lies in its structure as a piece of supernatural “competency porn.” This is a film about experts doing their job with breathtaking skill, only the job happens to be calming the dead and confronting ancient curses.

The narrative begins with a wealthy Korean-American family in Los Angeles, plagued by a series of inexplicable and terrifying paranormal events. They enlist the help of a pairf young, stylish, and prodigiously talented shamans. The pair quickly diagnose the problem as a “grave call”—a cry of anguish from a tormented ancestor whose burial site has been desecrated.

To resolve it, they must return to South Korea and assemble a team: a veteran geomancer, who reads the very energy of the earth, and a duty-bound mortician. Their task is to locate the grave, exhume the coffin, and pacify the spirit through ritual cremation. But when they arrive at the remote, eerily isolated burial mound, the geomancer immediately senses a malevolent energy far darker than any ordinary restless spirit. They are standing on unhallowed ground, and what they are about to unearth is a secret tied to a painful chapter of the past

The film is anchored by a magnetic  performance from Kim Go-eun as the shaman Hwa-rim. She portrays a character who is both deeply reverent to tradition and thoroughly modern. In her ritual scenes, particularly the astonishing daesal gut exorcism, her physicality is hypnotic. The rhythmic chanting, the precise gestures, the sheer force of her conviction—it’s a performance of terrifying authenticity that makes the supernatural feel chillingly real.

Yet, outside of these ancient rites, she is a pragmatic professional. Kim Go-eun shows us a confident expert who approaches a paranormal crisis not with fear, but with a clear, systematic methodology. She and her team are consultants for the supernatural, and their meticulous process is utterly compelling to watch.

This sense of historical weight is not accidental. The director deliberately named his main characters after famous Korean independence activists who fought against Japanese colonial rule. This choice reframes their ghost-hunting as a continuation of that historical struggle. They are not merely exorcising a ghost; they are finishing the work of their ancestors, liberating the land itself from a curse born of occupation and oppression.

Exhuma is a great film blending folk horror with historical allegory. You can find it on several streaming services, and it is a must-see for anyone who appreciates a horror film that is as intelligent as it is terrifying.

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Where Horror, Comedy, and Kung Fu Collide: Mr. Vampire

Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s was a creative cauldron, bubbling with relentless commercially driven energy and an “anything goes” mentality.. Unlike Hollywood’s often more rigid genre structures, the most electrifying Hong Kong films of this era thrived on audacious collisions—action crashing into comedy, romance bleeding into horror, creating crowd-pleasing mashups that shouldn’t work but absolutely did.​

But sometimes, when you improvise wildly enough, you don’t just bend genres—you invent entirely new ones. Case in point: Ricky Lau’s 1985 masterpiece, Mr. Vampire.


The film tells the story of Master Kau, a stern Taoist priest whose unibrowed gravitas anchors a world gone deliriously mad. With two bumbling, girl-crazy apprentices in tow, he’s hired by the wealthy Mr. Yam to exhume and relocate his father’s remains—a practice hoped to improve the family fortunes. Upon opening the coffin, however, Master Kau discovers that twenty years have failed to claim the body. It remains pristine, unmarked by decay—a sure sign that it’s transforming into a jiangshi, a malevolent hopping vampire.​

He relocates the corpse to his mortuary for observation, but his apprentices’ spectacular incompetence allows the creature to escape, unleashing terror that only spiritual kung fu can stop.​

Mr. Vampire didn’t just create a film—it codified an entire jiangshi subgenre for the next decade. The film established the tropes of hopping vampire movies: the Stern Master, , the Bumbling Apprentices (whose incompetence drives half the plot), and most crucially, a specific set of esoteric combat principles for battling the undead.​

Sticky rice draws out vampire venom, paper talismans inscribed with blood-ink spells can immobilize the creatures, and holding one’s breath renders you invisible to these sightless predators. This last was actually improvised by the actors during the filming, but became so central that the movie was released in Taiwan with the title “Hold Your Breath for a Moment”.​

While Mr. Vampire essentially invented the cinematic jiangshi, the film’s visual inspiration springs from a genuinely haunting historical practice: corpse herding. During the Qing dynasty, the practice of “autumn executions” concentrated the killing of convicts into one brief annual period, creating a logistical nightmare: corpses often had to be transported vast distances for burial in their ancestral homes. Traditional funeral processions with four pallbearers were prohibitively expensive. .​

The solution was as ingenious as it was eerie. Taoist priests would bind corpses to flexible bamboo poles, and when two men carried these poles on their shoulders, the natural flex and bounce of the bamboo made the bodies appear to “hop” in unison as the procession moved through the countryside. This practical transportation method spawned folktales of hopping vampires. 

Mr. Vampire was Ricky Lau’s directorial debut, and its success instantly made him the go-to specialist for the genre.. His key technique was the masterful balancing of the film’s wild tonal shifts, ensuring that the slapstick comedy, intricate fight scenes, and moments of horror felt like a cohesive, exhilarating whole.

Mr. Vampire was a massive box office sensation in Hong Kong and across Asia, striking a chord with audiences who delighted in its unique fusion of screams and laughs..   

Today, the film’s reputation has only grown. It is beloved by cinephiles as a great example of the mashups that defined the golden age of Hong Kong’s cinema.

Right now, in October 2025, you can find Mr. Vampire and it’s sequels on the Criterion Channel.