Like maybe only an amateur can, Eagle Pennell created a lived-in, fully-realized world familiar from real life but foreign to movies, and he painted this canvas in slight variation for two and one-half inimitable films, using the same two actors and practically the same locations. If you were to take Budweiser, rodeos, and baseball caps—the red state signifiers that made American Sniper so much money—and invert them into Lone Star, bar brawls, and hats advertising Big Ag, you might be…
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Mauvais Sang 1986
All the stars.
The kind of movie that, even on a third viewing, makes you ashamed of the last 100 movies you watched, the last 100 days you lived (or rather, didn't), your humdrum existence a pathetic placeholder for what should be called living. A film where not being loved is a kind of dying, where loving without loving is a way of killing.
Transcend life in art and art in life. Jean Cocteau is dead, forever and never. Believe…
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Armored Car Robbery 1950
Instead of triumph, film noir found beauty in the ineluctable fact that the bad guy dies at the end, and if we can call Armored Car Robbery beautiful, then what makes it gorgeous is structure like a freight train, a no-nonsense force barreling toward its conclusion only to slow down at the last minute for a single flourish, a solitary pirouette, which Fassbinder would turn into a dance of death in The American Soldier, stretching film noir to breaking point, to where you didn't know if it was silly or serious. And maybe you never did.
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Metropolitan 1990
In comedy, you don't have to express the universal through the specific, you can, in fact, express the specific through the specific, or even the arcane. I rented this on VHS as a teenager, when I barely understood what deb balls were and had no idea what decade it was meant to take place in (nb: the 1970s, but every fashion Stillman didn't like was removed, that's why it's a timeless period piece. It's personal).
Context makes obvious: Nick Smith…
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Jane B. by Agnès V. 1988
Agnès Varda likes daydreams, not psychology. Her movies jump not from one thing to the next but from one thing to a next, always opening, never closing. One film, a documentary made of fictional parts (Jane B. par Agnès V.), leads to another, a fiction made of documentary (Kung-fu Master!), starring Jane Birkin's daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, and Varda's son, Mathieu Demy.
Birkin said she wanted “to make a feature film about how I really am: jeans, old…
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