I’ve been working on this Jacques Demy essay going on 6 years. I’m glad it’s now come to fruition in the Fall 2020 Gagosian Quarterly; you can read it on pg. 96 here: gagosian.com/quarterly/issues/fall-2020/
At the end of the day, beyond these small words, we can console ourselves with proof of the existence of a few grand miracles in the worlds of Lola, La Baie des Anges, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Model Shop, Peau d’Âne, Lady…
"In my favorite of her films, Reichardt teases us with big climaxes, as big as the bomb exploding the dam in Night Moves, but she instead pivots and ends each of her Certain Women stories in sad, dejected puffs. A would-be gunman (Jared Harris) is captured off-screen, and sits glum-faced in the back of a police car in dead-still embarrassment. Auberjonois simply recedes McCabe-style back into his empty house, into the cobwebs of his jigsaw puzzle, as his memory-scarred native…
Très sympa to the vision. Ultimately, it’s not my speed, not my dawdle: I’m more lost in translation but romantically involved in the world, not stuck in transition and, behind texts and windows, watching the wheels go round and round.
How little we know…The more you watch it, the less it becomes horror, and the more an anguished, devastating melodrama on the grieving process and the death drive. The look of sublime, accepting, calm serenity on Julie Christie’s face near the end made me tear up like crazy this go-around. Nic Roeg’s experiments with time show how little the cinema has done to extend one’s fragmented perception of it — while simultaneously proving it is the medium in which such an extension will take place.
I had one of the most exciting encounters at a movie theater EVER yesterday, so bear with me.
Yesterday, I re-watched It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (Bland-ley Kramer, 1963) in glorious 70mm at LACMA! It's gotten a lot of hate around these parts for being cataclysmically unfunny. And while I can see why people would think so (Kramer has an awful eye for comedic direction, and the sheer pomposity of his statement that he would make "the comedy…
I grew up in a South Central L.A. ghetto neighborhood--the corner of 59th Street and Slauson Avenue, to be specific. Every new day was as trivial as the last, and yet as a kid I was never aware of the constant danger surrounding me. I didn't even have an inkling of my family's own poverty, though I had my sneaky suspicions that because we crammed 3 to a room (in a cold apartment that only had two bedrooms and one…
