There are worse ways to ride out the pandemic than mainlining some three dozen or so movies in a week, finding delights where you least expect them.
The Green Knight seeks not simply to retell or reimagine the poem’s story, but to interrogate or cross-examine the poem itself: to cast a shadow of postmodern skepticism over the original telling, and indeed all of Arthuriana.
"People have flocked to the theater forever to feel something, to experience what it’s like to see a reflection of oneself, distilled in stark revelation. To share in communalized trauma or joy, to escape one’s daily humdrum and strife, and for a brief moment to possibly be cleansed by laughter or tears. To be brought closer into a fellow traveler’s shoes, or to learn about comparable travails and customs of foreign and alien cultures. To be punched in the gut with a vicarious experience. To share in what it means to be human."
Once I noticed the Kimberlys in Nora Ephron’s work, I couldn’t stop noticing them. If we’re accepting Ephron’s own assertion that real-life hurt and heartbreak can be put into fiction with impunity, what did she have against some woman named Kimberly?
Two films featuring Michael Nyman's "Fish Beach" seem so utterly opposed that it’s hard to believe they could share anything at all, but a deeper shared resonance can be drawn out thanks to the particular ways that Nyman’s style of composition works upon picture and viewer.
"I always made choices based on my gut and sometimes they ended up more commercially successful and sometimes less so. I have to make something that I might want to watch, or show a world that I find interesting."
When I watch My Own Private Idaho I feel a profound nostalgia for the person I was, for the city I loved.
The core of Purple Rain lies in the psychological lives of Black men. What makes the film revolutionary, besides its sympathetic gaze, is that it positions music as a vehicle for redemption.
Crafted as though from everyday observation and fantastic dream, About Endlessness marries the magical and mercurial, the simple and surreal.
There were days where I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be able to sit with loved ones and share these first-time viewings in real time, and others when the combination of quarantine cabin fever and less-than-stellar runs of films made it seem like everything would be mediocre. A privilege and, 32 movies, shorts, and episodes later, a pile-up.
An Unmarried Woman, 20th Century Women, Freaks & Geeks, and the malaise of being an American woman during the Carter era.
NASA made the Mercury Seven men into a myth. Tom Wolfe made them into (slightly flawed) idols. Philip Kaufman makes them the prototypes of all the insouciant heroes of the Reagan era, who reinforce the American status quo while still breaking every rule.
