"My diamonds..."

Less formally inventive and far too self-congratulatory to ever be considered top-tier Soderbergh—yet I enjoy it all the same. Pacino as casinobaron of the Nevada wastelands is wonderfully camp, as is Elliot Gould donned in Reuben’s Zebra-print suits, purple shades and gold chains. Could have done with more women, or, like, any women to help balance off the quickly annoying, impish eroticism falling flat between between Clooney and Pitt, but…again, again! this shit’s still as fun now as…

"Do I really have to finish? Do returns always diminish? Did that I say that right?"

The first great bedroom opera. If it’s true that the owl of Minerva “takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering”, for stand-up comics and philosophers alike, then so be it. The purpose of an era can only be beheld at its falling action, when it fades; as if an era ever ‘falls’ or ‘fades’ anyhow. Our great realizations are mere…

Answers are given. Questions remain. There is no finality. The melodrama of Twin Peaks--governed by that steady pulse of commercial breaks, small-town Americana, the wild, beautiful, vicious, violent outbursts of love, phantoms and angels lurking in the corners of the dark--transitions into something all the more horrific, all the more unbelievable, all the more real than was ever imagined before. 'Fire Walk With Me' is a truly genuine cinematic experience. Harrowing. Transcendent. This work of art doesn't merely 'explain' Laura…

How should we begin to discuss this film? Indelicately, of course. Call Persona a bifurcated tale of psychic fissure, a tone-poem on the traumatic rupture of motherhood, a treatise for middle-class malaise or of cinema as a battle between visceral non-narrative arthouse and pure sequential storytelling. Better yet, call it a critique of Swedish conservatism, gender norms, white counter/culture, sapphic lust, M.P.D. Yadda yadda. All in all, decades worth of intellectual energy has been expended trying to 'figure out' Bergman's…