Legendary directors Max Ophüls and Luchino Visconti are all over its sets and settings, but in its bones Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel pays tribute to the effortless glamour, ineffable humor, and pleasurable melancholy of Ernst Lubitsch.
An illustration of the titular Amy (Joey Lauren Adams) from CHASING AMY in front of a blue comic-illustration-style background.
The first few times I saw Chasing Amy, I loved it. Central to my adoration was the inimitable Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams)—her confidence and swagger as she sat on a playground swing set and impishly demonstrated the act of fisting with her hands, interrogated heterosexual men about their limited perceptions of sexuality and desire, and played gratuitous tonsil hockey with another woman on the crowded dance floor of legendary NYC dyke bar Meow Mix (RIP).
The older I get, the more I find myself impressed by Audrey Hepburn as an actor who was great in spite of her packaging; by the evolution of her raw and untrained talent over the span of her relatively short career; and most of all, by the undeniably prickly undercurrent of her most iconic films.
The now of Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 masterpiece Between the Lines is a major concern for the characters. What is this generation’s identity now, another decade into adulthood and another decade removed from the days in which they believed they might actually change the world?