The other day I watched Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “Millenium Mambo.” The cinematography, washes of blue and orange glow in nightlife settings, immediately caught my eye. It felt like one of those moody, dead-end world type films, and I love a dead-end world.

What I didn’t expect was to accidentally watch a horror movie, though.

"Millennium Mambo" follows Vicky, a woman in her early 20s, and her life — or lack of one. It’s narrated by Vicky ten years in the future, looking back on her younger self. She drinks, parties, drifts between places and men, mostly because there’s nothing else anchoring her. It’s very real, and very scary.

There’s one scene I can’t stop replaying: Vicky goes out partying, then suddenly, we cut to a grainy CCTV shot of an apartment hallway. She’s lying face-down on the floor, completely still. For some time, nothing happens. Then, she slowly, painfully begins dragging herself toward a door, struggling to unlock it. The stillness of the frame, the silence, the helplessness…is gutting. No dramatic music, no screaming, just this low point that somehow feels even lower than everything else before it.

"Millennium Mambo" is about longing for direction. And as someone in their early 20s, that alone is enough to make it a horror movie. Not in the jump-scare kind of way, but in the quiet, creeping way of realizing you don’t know where you’re going. Or worse — that you might not even be moving at all.

It is a monumental day for the horny and sexually repressed — because my favorite band of all time, Pulp, just released a new album after 23 years.

This is Pulp at their most mature, but maybe more than that, at their most tender. Of course it wouldn’t be a Pulp album without a horny track or two, but what caught me off guard were the genuinely heartfelt songs. So many of them feel gentle yet immediate, soft but unwavering in their message. More than once I caught myself saying “AWWW” out loud. The lyrics are just that sweet — which shouldn’t be surprising, really, because Pulp lyrics never miss.

My early standouts are:

“Farmers Market,”

“My Sex,”

and “The Hymn of the North.”

These lines from the latter actually killed me:

“Please stay in touch with me
In this contactless society
Anywhere that you may be
The Northern Star leads back to me”

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ - This album is fabulous. No notes.

The past couple of nights, I’ve been revisiting some Wong Kar-Wai films. Tonight’s watch was "Chungking Express."

"Chungking Express" is about a longing for something to hold onto. Each character wants connection, even if just for a brief moment. But the film also recognizes how fleeting those moments are — how easily they can “expire,” like a can of pineapples. It’s a reminder that we’re always passing through time, and sometimes all we get is a few seconds of shared stillness before life rushes on again, with or without us.

But instead of that being sad, the film kind of makes it beautiful. It reminds us to be present, to really notice the little things, because they might be gone before you realize they mattered.

“If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries.”

The first recommendation I make here has to go to Richard Ayoade’s “Submarine.” It’s my favorite movie after all. I’m incredibly vulnerable to coming-of-age media because they always remind me of myself no matter how strange it may be.

By strange, I mean that the two protagonists are complete weirdos. In short, this movie is an artsy comedy about a 15-year-old boy named Oliver who is on a quest to lose his virginity, which he eventually does with a girl from school named Jordana.

Oliver and Jordana are wonderfully awkward. They don’t really know how to talk, kiss, or even get along with each other the way that two normal humans do and I think that’s what makes the two so easy to relate to. Especially at that age when you don’t have a clue what’s going on, and you’re susceptible to what the outside world is telling you. You’re just piecing together what you think you know about love and sex from your “more educated” peers or from self-help books because that’s as close as you can get to the real thing.

I cannot talk about Submarine without mentioning the cinematography. It reminds me a lot of French cinema which shows a lot in the various shots of the beach environments sprinkled tenderly throughout the film, mise-en-scène gloriousness all around (see, I did learn something from that French film class I took freshman year). Plus, the film was shot on 35mm, and there’s even a beautiful scene on Super8 that’s just. So. Good.

I don’t know how to end this so I’ll end off on one of the several lines from this film that I can quote by memory:

“Dear Jordana. Thank you for letting me explore your perfect body. I could drink your blood. You are the only person that I would allow to be shrunken down to a microscopic size and swim inside me in a tiny submersible machine. We have lost our virginity but it wasn't like losing anything. You're too good for me, you're too good for anyone. Sincerely, Oliver."