January 2012
19 posts
aside:
Whenever I see that scene in The Notebook where Rachel McAdams wakes up in bed to a note and flower from Ryan Gosling, I think about the PA on set who likely cut the white paper arrows that lead her to the room with a new easel and paints—who likely cheered the first time s/he saw The Notebook and said, “I cut those arrows!”
Jonathan Rosenbaum on ELAINE MAY:
“Both comedies are striking in the way they set up an uneasy audience identification with a self-absorbed hero bent on ditching his unsuspecting newlywed wife, rubbing our noses in everything about her that he finds disgusting and abhorrent while creating a surprising amount of empathy and compassion for her as well. It’s a volatile emotional mixture, and if either movie had been...
Elizabeth Hardwick replies to Penelope Gilliatt in...
“I have never met Penelope Gilliatt, nor have I ever spoken to her. She has no knowledge of my private feelings about anything, and no knowledge of my circle of friends. Perhaps one so self-congratulatory as she is in this letter can properly speak only of her own loved ones. The drama in question here is the one being performed in a New York theater, and not some imaginary, personal...
For years on screen, Kirsten Dunst sought to be... →
bdlnds
“The deliberate mismatch of what you see and what you hear puts Badlands in the surreal neighborhood of a Thoreau nature study crossed with Lewis Carroll. One choice small event occurs near nightfall on the prairie. The still faithful and gullible Spacek is reporting Kit’s latest plan to organize their outlawed life. “Kit said we had to get rid of that football because it was...
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On LA, kitchen islands, Demy's Model Shop,...
At the tar pits adjacent to LACMA, my attention was stolen by a white vertical tower. Thirty-one stories tall in a district that upholds a seven-story height moratorium, the Variety skyscraper on Wilshire Boulevard is a stark giant crowned by its name in red lettering. Its stature is somehow comic, especially in Los Angeles. It appeared oversized; as if it was a spoof building, a prop, a...
December 2011
8 posts
Some notes on MARGARET:
A couple times, I was reminded of that scene in Assayas’s Summer Hours, where the sister and two brothers discuss the fate of their family’s estate. Lonergan’s down-to-brass-tacks long takes especially ripen when erratic teenage emotions, no matter how sincere, are on display. It’s as if something on screen thickens, like batter, when the camera stays on a conversation that at first...
2things:
My GQ&A with Christopher Plummer about Dragon Tattoo, Beginners, Rooney, Elaine Dundy, his 2008 memoir, and Jack Russell terriers.
A brief BANG BANG look at some stuff I saw and read this year: Polly Platt, Mia Hansen-Løve, Barbara Loden, and Lucille w/ Dick Cavett and Harpo.
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DOLLS
“Like Annie Hall, Jack hails from Chippewa Falls. And like Annie Hall, the way he pronounced his hometown endowed him with a preparedness that outdid anyone else on the boat. We trust him from the very start: “You jump, I jump.” For all we know Chippewa Falls is the land of boy scouts and tomboys. La-di-da, la-di-da…”
Yep, wrote about Titanic for TR
November 2011
19 posts
7 tags
"Armageddon" as 1998 time capsule:
Liv Tyler in a “Chinese-style” embroidered cheongsam dress with mandarin collar
Mission Control as nerdy yet stylized, high drama staging room—see also, Deep Impact
Michael Clarke Duncan pre The Green Mile
skinny Ben Affleck, three and a half months after “losing would suck and winning would be very scary” Academy Award
‘Texas’ as a yardstick for...
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tradition
christina ricci <3 thanksgiving x2:
ONE
&
TWO
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KD
In a single performance, Kirsten Dunst, like Winona Ryder, has this uncanny habit of reprising (and reminding us of) past roles—well, the culmination of past roles (their moods, marks, and stripes). It’s as if her portrayal of Justine in Melancholia was an amalgam of Young Amy March and Young Anastasia, and in terms of doomed wedding pageantry, Marie Antoinette, and of school girl-type...
Every so often, this:
“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its...
THE DARLINGS
As a kid I remember thinking the most elegant hands I’d ever seen were Mary Darling’s in Disney’s Peter Pan. There’s a close up of them in the movie’s opening minutes where Mary tucks Michael into bed and assures him that George, his father, isn’t really angry at the boys and Wendy, and that he loves them very much. Michael quietly returns the “buried...
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PLAYING DEAD
The last scene in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else is near perfect. After all, a decaying, already strained and starved relationship—callous words and sad days—feels a lot like what Gitti does to Chris. She plays dead.
October 2011
15 posts
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