**Not going to spoiler tag this because it’s more of an essay than a review but if you’re spoiler-sensitive consider yourself warned**
I’ve been watching a lot of Paul Schrader’s films over the last few months (including his recently released The Card Counter, which I wholeheartedly recommend). As always, Paul gets me thinking about how much narrative art is focused on people who make important, meaningful choices that (to them at least) give their lives and souls a meaning. This line…
I spent most of the soon-to-be-over summer reading. I got in on The Three Body Problem before the Netflix adaptation kicks into gear. I caught up on some old to-do-list books like The Magic Mountain, Midnight’s Children, and The Rainbow. But most meaningful was possibly my read of Yukio Mishima’s towering and tragic Sea of Fertility tetralogy. After finishing it I took the opportunity for a long-awaited rewatch of Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
Schrader’s film is uniquely…
In the late 90’s early 2000s these types of “hyperlink movies” were everywhere. The young Americans were making Magnolia, Pulp Fiction, and Traffic. Crash (not the good one) won an academy award. In Mexico Iñárritu made Amores Perros, then 21 Grams, and then Babel, each time iterating on themes of connectivity. In 2013 the Wachowski sisters put a stamp on the trend with their woefully under appreciated Cloud Atlas. The trend provided an opportunity for ambitious filmmakers to tell huge stories…
After watching Days of Heaven for the first time last night I read Roger Ebert’s Great Movies Essay on the film. It’s an interesting read, in part because it was written back when director Terrance Malick had only made two films. In the 1970’s Malick made Badlands and Days of Heaven, was lauded as one of great new filmmakers, and then went on hiatus for 20 years.
It’s incredible to imagine now because Malick’s style is so well-known to us now in…
