A cycle I find myself in: falling in love with a door-stopper, a Moby-Dick, something long enough that I feel like I’m living in it, so almighty that I decide that anything shorter must be slight in comparison, only for a ‘Bartleby’ to come along and, in spite of its spareness, open up to fathomless depths.
Old Joy is a cinematic ‘Bartleby’, seventy-six minutes, only Reichardt’s second feature and yet staggeringly and almost inexplicably rich and mysterious.
At face value,…
Flows like water. Colours, shapes, and moods sensually washing from one to the next with a naturalness of rhythm that feels as much discovered by Mann as created. The mysterious twinkle in Kevin Gage’s eyes as he declares himself the Grim Reaper, the steely blues of industry and highways against the high romantic reds of sunsets, the utopic warmth colouring the rare moments of domestic calm. It’s a testament to Mann’s deftness that campy, even silly pieces of acting (which…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
'There may be a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to humanity, to whom, from afar, our disorder may seem order — our unpicturesqueness picturesque; in a word, the earth-angels, for whose scrutiny more especially than our own, and for whose death-refined appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres.'
- Edgar Allen Poe, 'The Domain of Arnheim'
Genuinely a little surprised that this doesn't have an average…
Reasons this may be the best film ever made:
• California Dreamin’
• A twilit Simon and Garfunkel performance shot intimately enough that you may as well be a few meters away from them.
• Transcendent performance from Janis Joplin, with an awed Mama Cass in the audience. It’s funny, considering her legendary status, I’ve never sat down and listened to a recording of hers, nor am I conscious of having ever been around while her music was incidentally playing.…
