The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar finds Wes Anderson at his most rigorously experimental, committing to Anderson’s curational ‘style as form’ strategy not as a means of ferrying feeling but as its very manifestation.
PositionStaff Writer
JoinedOctober 9, 2019
Articles34
Frank Falisi is a writer from New Jersey whose work has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Reverse Shot, MUBI's Notebook, LARB, and Brooklyn Rail, among other outlets.
"I think this is a thing that will not change in whatever I’m lucky enough to make in the future: a constant prioritizing of the pleasure principle. I lament the moving away from sensual pleasures in cinema."
By theorizing acting as the vessel by which a genuine self might appear in a moving image, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon constantly collapses self and other, truth and performance. It generates its own tension.
On Cate & Kate in The Aviator (2004) and Summertime (1955).
In Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the act of witnessing becomes an act of solidarity, in joy and of pain. This is what a cinema of more life looks like.
The Fabelmans is not a coming-of-age story. There is no answer. It isn’t a parable or lesson or meditation. Instead it reflects, renders in real time, its creator’s relationship to his memories.
Maybe, in order to ‘B-movie’ reality, we need to make a dream of Edward D. Wood Jr.
In its fragments, its gradations and flirtations with the experimental ambience it’s quote-unquote about, Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground renders not a history of a band or even a moment but an alternative lens to re-collect (literally, re-touch) history.
Innerspace is bodily—hyper-bodily, even—and in the way it upends expectations surrounding size, it suggests similar chutes and ladders for emotion, identity, for existence.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid frustrates me like family.
I am thinking of films as haunted houses. I am thinking of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.
Are you humming the four bars of choonka-CHOONKAs that form the first measures of “Get Back” right now? It’s always in the air. It’s always waiting to be remembered.