• I think the trick to surviving these times is to simply pick which snarky expensive insincere nonsense to arbitrarily enjoy and to ride that train all the way down.
• Fuck yeah, this is the slop I lie for! I love IP. Feed this bullshit into my veins. Live and learn. Gotta go fast cast. Let's escape from the city! What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed!?…
• My first Miranda July (I know: boo, hiss, get off the stage, etc) and I was truthfully not expecting something that blew right past the indie-quirky-twee realm I was expecting it to inhabit and straight into Greek Weird Wave territory.
• I'm a real sucker for directors with the guts to put performances from different totally schools of acting into the same movie, and so I am naturally 100% in the bag for the fact that a good half…
• My first time genuinely watching this as a piece of narrative fiction rather than as a cinematographic object to pick apart. Interesting.
• There's a particular shot of Claudia Cardinale in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST in which Leone holds for what feels like ages on her face as she stares in the mirror at a moment of profound existential confusion and despair. After it held for something like thirty seconds, my dad once shouted "SERGIO, HER…
• Yeah, "French WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD" gets us around 75% of the way there, with the remainder being "...but it's a debut feature with hints of UNCUT GEMS and Rohmer*."
• Damn near the platonic ideal of a promising indie director's rough-around-the-edges first feature. Bourgeois-Tacquet is clearly more comfortable directing exterior scenes than interiors: the former are often dynamite, filled with expressive (and oftentimes shockingly propulsive) camera movements and fairly gorgeous lighting. The latter are a real mixed…
• I am constitutionally unable to watch duel-related cinema in which the term "my seconds" is used without thinking of the scene in THE MERRY WIDOW in which Maurice Chevalier and Edward Everett Horton bumble into and out of a duel arrangement. We all have our crosses to bear, etc.
• Curtis Hanson making a pivot to the hang-out mode makes sense: insofar as they are compelling, his three neo-noirs and one period noir are in large part made so because of the offbeat and dysfunctional characters that inhabit them. And that's the greatest disappointment here: this is a hang-out movie nearly bereft of characters that I desired to spend time with. I'm wholly unsure as to what broke down here in terms of Chabon's source material of Clove's adaptation,…
• Old entry here, which I largely stand by.
• We also did a podcast with Tim about this way back in the day, which I also stand by.
• "I found myself going into her hotel" - there are so many lines like this, in which a statement that would usually be mere plot description is laden with character information. Ricki Tarr is subtly eliding his own agency here, and therefore his reasons for going into Irina's hotel, which…
• This is an old bugbear of mine for films like this, but my overwhelming reaction to the discourse about this is "why aren't more people talking about how this is a screwball comedy?"
The central pleasure here is in watching a familiar genre plot populated with characters who are split into exactly two camps: those who buy into the generic structure, and those who act in ways at odds with it, much to the annoyance of the former characters.…
• Curtis Hanson was apparently unable to direct a non-period-piece neo-noir without the plot going totally off the rails in goofy ways. This isn't altogether a bad thing.
• Our villain here is remarkably thinly-sketched, even by the standards of yuppie-in-danger thriller flicks. Koepp and Hanson pass up just about every opportunity to sketch out something resembling subtext or an inner life for him; by the time Lowe is spouting stuff about how "we're not so very different, society and…
• A film whose shortcomings tend to directly sabotage the stuff that works. The sets, props and costumes are full of good ideas rendered tacky by the baffling lighting and grading decisions and largely ineffective camera direction; Erivo's skillful performance is in service of a character who, as written, is frustratingly static; the plot features around ninety minutes of distinct beats which are spread thin across one hundred and sixty minutes of screentime; some pretty neat reinterpretations of the source*…