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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Aucun regret 2016
I’ve sometimes wondered if it was a terrible mistake to go from writing about movies & doing film programming to spending four years on city council, and to not only serve on city council but to throw myself into it, but then there's Mouret’s lovely short to remind me, “It isn't the directions that matter. But to live fully every detour we take.”
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Past Lives 2023
“Some interesting semi-flirting. To find someone desirable, to express it, to have it reciprocated, and to go no further. Now that is progress.”
Brian Eno
July 7, 1995
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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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