"Dreams are what le cinema is for."
I do theatre and sometimes I watch movies.
Favorite films
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Nashville 1975
"As a matter of fact, Christmas has always smelled like oranges to me."
I was lucky enough to catch this on the big screen with my fiancée. It was my second time seeing it and her first (and she loved it, thankfully). It's just a flawless movie. No notes whatsoever. One of my favorite Letterboxd reviews for the film calls it the Great American Novel and they're 1000% correct.
There's such extraordinary filmmaking on display here, from the directing to…
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Fiddler on the Roof 1971
To celebrate my 26th birthday last week, I fit in some of my favorite movies. After rewatching The Awful Truth in the morning and dipping into the first fifteen minutes of The Social Network while taking a bath (very luxurious!), I managed to coerce a few friends to commit to remotely watching all three hours of this movie.
Listen. Fiddler on the Roof is my favorite musical. No other show moves me as deeply as this one. It cracks me…
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Pleasantville 1998
"Have you got any makeup?"
The first half of Pleasantville is kind of great. Gary Ross, in his directorial debut, takes some big swings, and for the most part, they work: the cast is super charming, the production design and technical elements are well-designed and realized, and its meta sense of humor manages to be consistently funny. Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon, babies both, are adorable as they adjust to life in Pleasantville. Paul Walker is so good in his…
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The Blue Angel 1930
"Men swarm around me like moths 'round a flame,
And if their wings are singed, surely I can't be blamed."Pretty handily my favorite Josef von Sternberg film that I've seen. It's easy to see The Blue Angel as a collision between the expressionism and full-body physicality of silent cinema (personified in Emil Jannings' performance) and the daring, tempting new-age sound cinema (personified, of course, by the iconic Marlene Dietrich), but that almost devalues the skill of the actual storytelling…
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The Departed 2006
When The Departed came out, why was it cool to pretend that it was a minor Scorsese effort?
It's a fascinating film in the Scorsese canon for a number of reasons. It's got everything that makes a great one (bravura performances, his trademark kinetic direction, the frantic Thelma Schoonmaker editing, an impeccable soundtrack, top-notch writing littered with generous profanity), but with its fundamentally classical plot structure, it feels like it is of a different cloth than Goodfellas or Raging Bull…
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The Pumpkin Eater 1964
Man, Anne Bancroft is something in this, isn't she?
Her performance can truly only be described as something of a tour-de-force. It's an outstanding testament to her skill, her focus as an actor. The dedication to physicality, the rich inner turmoil, the clarity and pain in her eyes. It's really tremendous. Pinter gives her an enormous challenge with the role but she succeeds beautifully. Opposite her is a strong Peter Finch, but make no mistake: it's Bancroft's world and we're just living in it.
