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…
When the State criminalizes the very poetry of life, from a baby's step to the shimmering glints of a father's napping back, what other options are left to the fugitive and the colonized other than out-and-out cultural warfare, refusing what is handed down, the eventual triumph of yellows and joy against monochromes and mourning?
"The only way we could feel close to the girls was through these impossible excursions, which have scarred us forever: making us happier with dreams than wives." The shoegazy, wanna-be-sedated gaze of the great S. Coppola arrives in full effect. Never has a homecoming king-and-queen dance scene been seen for all its horrific scene-hungry deadness, like we were transported to creatures in the depths of Jupiter's moon. Her needle-drops are the best in the biz: Doesn't help to know you're…
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…
Embarrassing. Robert Eggers sucks the life out of anything and everyone that crosses his one-take path: sex, myth, green pastures, blood, fire, Kidman and Hawke and Anya. This dude thinks he's A24's Kenji Mizoguchi or some shit: what once constituted a radical attention to the negative space within an unbroken frame 70 years ago has now devolved into Hollywood's garden peacockism: an automatic compulsion to frame rapes, separations, and the Aryans to whom tomorrow belongs in expensive, aggressively-centered compositions (have…
