After my first week of atomized, eye-searing remote teaching, of course I was willing to skip the usual sub-Stage Door backstage bandying that accompanies a Busby Berkeley film and, to quote Carly Rae Jepsen, cut to the feeling and watch this all-Berkeley program that's apparently an actual disc on my peak-DVD Berkeley set.
I'd seen them all before, but twenty-one of his numbers in succession certainly simultaneously exhausted me and made me absurdly giddy, fully aware that this was a…
I imagine this is comprehensible, but it's probably best to ignore its science fiction plot and just lounge in its CinemaScope ratio visuals. There's nothing mindless about Boorman's film, but what it's mindful of is either generally not interesting or the film is ill-equipped to handle its heady themes. So, it exists in a weird zone between art and entertainment. Fantastic visuals aside, I found it fascinating how in the 1970s it was enough to have Sean Connery with his…
I hate to lean into a familiar trope for first-films, but this very much felt like the one that it is (well, it's not, technically, but the first of his to eclipse an hour). Desplechin's gifts are well on display for someone at such a young age, but the voice is not fully developed. It frequently feels caught between oblique paranoid mystery and the free-flowing narrative strands that would make the rest of his work so addicting and him, one…
I broadly prefer Assayas's work when he's working outside 16mm (which could be the difference between Lenoir and Le Saux) even as Cold Water, etc., are essentially masterworks. This one is too, and one I've weirdly underrated for years. This would call for an Assayas weekend, but his film with Léaud apparently only exists with a German dub, I cannot find his three-hour period drama, and I don't know that I'm prepared to enter the Wasp Network.
If you're of…
If pressed, Malick is probably a favorite filmmaker, and I am admittedly nostalgic for The Tree of Life upon its tenth anniversary—nostalgic for such a hyped film delivering beyond expectations, nostalgic for unwinding to it in an empty Wichita theatre after a shift at the local independent bookstore. It remains the only film I've seen more than three times in a theatre. Anyhow, for this one, something of an extension of a sequence from The Tree of Life and ultimately…
