Reviews

It almost comes across as outsider art. A director who understands the craft effortlessly but isn't interested in it. He is too above it. Too intuitive. Reminding me of Welles. But what is here is that ingredient in genius, who knows what that is. Cinema technicalities are all here in droves but the movie isn't concerned with them as the end all, as the trap auteurs fall into. For one that it is adapted from a book shows a respect for storytelling leading the cart, in fact, a critique of vulgar auteurism that was all the rage in the moment. Directors of that era were attempting to work in comic satires, such as Richard Lester, Ken Russell, or Robert Altman, making them culminate in the dark; todays directors start, end, and brush with aesthetic, unconcerned with anything else. You can name them. Rush's film is in the MASH mold, with its preoccupation with grotesque warfare, vietnam, and murderous social politics, alongside its lightness, is saying something about capitalism and the arts. It is fatalistic, but also joyful and celebratory. Like Freebie and the Bean, during many stretches you feel you are watching a masterpiece, but also like it, a defiance against film as a formal artform.

Its cinematic treatment of the dead coming to life is the most interesting take I've seen on the genre. He is like coming apart at the seams. Its job is to cast a spell around the rest of the movie. This is the stuff of high theater. It is both literal and symbolic at once, a very Japanese treatment. Every time I remembered it from my first viewing it was just that guy's portrayal of the undead.

Somebody said it's like a soap opera performance, but this is exactly it. He is performing a soap opera character except vomiting blood, hurling, and having Frankenstein meltdowns. Instead of using soap as a pejorative, we can say it is a high art treatment of a soap. But the average viewer might not realize it, somehow this might play straight to them.

There is something about the contrast of the cable TV movie, with a Nic Roeg film, that is both jarring and weird, but never operating outside the viewer and the screen.

The climax of the movie is a cross being burned into the hill by God, then she runs in his arms, the saxophone plays. The film is about her thoughts of infidelity haunting her, and her returning to live in service to God.

I was not sure if she would run into the lovers arm because that would be a valid reading of the film as well. To forget her husband, he was dead all along, to move on. It would be a tale of sexual healing and grief. But Roeg had made that film several times by that point. Instead, to elevate such a small human dilemma to the grandest stage is the power of melodrama, the power of art.

Some of the early Peter Weir films dealt with white guilt and aboriginal spirituality with some of these tones. Another review said with auteurs we don't watch their filmography expecting them to top themselves, we go for the small pleasure of how they have twisted the dial slightly differently. All that is interesting in his films are here, although it does a disservice to put them into words. So a Christian work is unexpected, but using his avant-garde eye becomes a spontaneous combustion; it is impossible to go wrong dealing with the very symbols of reality, life, death, love, morality.

The lightning bolt awakening becomes something in films; that enlightenment isn't just about that, but about the inverse, a complete intolerance toward immorality. This is why her awakening is triumphant. It brought him back, finally, for real. Roeg was the rarest thing, a western auteur, uncompromising and without commercial interests. But this, his most obscure work is somehow his most directly meaningful, but at the same time you sense that having such direct answers is kind of a problem for him.

It is really hard not to overrate this movie now that it is in Criterion, because looking it at it in the frame of an important film, its satire, its time capsule, its vignettes, and the general intelligence of it, reflects really well with the label. It was always a cult classic, but seeing it as avant-garde, it reaffirms that art and comedy form a productive trade. "This is a fancy restaurant!!" He really detests elitism, giving him targets in every direction. Any of his ire becomes productive for the audience because he is such a good stand-in for our consciousness. Which is the whole point of a clown. Yet there is a specificity to his targets that are so personal to him that it makes it an auteur work. He just made himself the butt of the joke which is a long tradition and why it endures, but also why it endures as an avant-garde kind of experience, is that moment in history is so far removed from today... but what he is remarking on is, the insanity of the western capitalist materialism, the entertainment conglomerate. How the system systematically turns us against our community, our family, through dehumanization, and robotification. These are things we thought the movie was probably about, but in current day it is so glaringly obviously about. Some comments say it is a parody of gross-out films, but I think it is more him showing them how it's done.

There are important films like that, hard exposes of societies in a state of madness and collapse, like the Fireman's Ball, Sweet Movie, or Daisies, of course those are avant-garde European films. But you know there weren't western film artists doing that at that moment in time, just careerists and opportunists, because of the film brats casting a shadow on the generations that followed, that the west had main character syndrome-- look at all the hero savior tropes. Our artists were all too busy participating in the beast attempting to be its champions.

So you almost have no choice but to look to the clowns to understand its time. Like clowns, it's celebrative. It was always fun, but this time it felt substantive

For instance. The scene where Green gets the million dollars, and says, hmm, I wonder what I am going to do with this million dollars; as if it is the most natural thing in the world to blow the money. In film, money is one of the most powerful shorthands for a viewer. The Joker, the Beach Bum are other movies money is lit on fire and it has an effect on our consciousness. Tom Green blows the million just like he is blowing it on the movie itself. It frees us from the material, which is a cosmic ability that only art can do. There are so many tangents in this movie that you can get lost in.

This is the biggest WTF ever. The way I would describe it is a movie you don't want to see, that you are dragged into, and realize that is exactly who the film was made for. It starts as one thing and then it feels like they gave up and just made it up as they went. Like imagine The Naked Gun but as a serious movie.

With San Francisco locales and Laslo Kovacs lensing this all becomes an outright surreal fever dream. I am also reminded of Richard Lester films, how he thinks in comic vignettes but isn't necessarily a comic director. Like, when violence happens it's brutal, suddenly it's like Dick Tracy. The characters yell at each other start to finish but they don't hate each other, it's just how they communicate. The director is doing a madcap comedy, Kovacs is filming for an oscar, the writers are doing like a Neil Simon Dragnet, and the actors think they're making the French Connection.

People should study this movie if they get into filmmaking or screenwriting, it will change how you see movies, because every element is disparate, they're all making a different movie in their heads, but it works. You imagine them writing it off, saying they just made a flop, pointing fingers, but then it came out perfectly. It isn't doing those Pauline Kael big zeitgeist things, it is almost sending them up which is endearing. Its modest ambition may take points off compared to its class, but who cares, it is certainly a classic to me. I only take a half point off because you have two choices, give it an F or give it an A minus.

I have had a strange experience with this movie. I saw it in a midnight screening in 2008, and I found it painfully boring. Tons of people walked out the screening. By the end, I was frustrated and felt I wasted my time. Any time I reflected on the movie I got annoyed and felt it is massively overrated. I never re-watched the movie again.

But about 2 years ago, I woke up one day and out of nowhere, I realized that it is one of the greatest movies ever made. I finally rewatched it now, and I agree with myself. So what I think happens is that we watch a movie, our mind rewatches it, the movie matures as we mature.

Some movies we thought would mean more to us, don't mean much with time. Some films that we ignored, suddenly become important. Some films can latch onto your spirit when you don't expect it.

After 1 1/2 hours you realize you haven't seen them sing at all. Then they draw their metaphoric guns, it becomes like High Noon. The experience of how the film draws you into its world allows it to explore the catharsis of art and pain. The things he's singing about, you have now seen with your own eyes, so it is as shocking for us as it is the audience, because suddenly he rises above even we, the viewer. The doorman going from hating him, to respecting him, becomes participatory with the audience. And the stakes couldn't be any lower. This isn't a TV show in front of millions of people, or a boxing match covered by national media. It's just a basement rap-off. Notice how the song is about authenticity and respect, and he destroys the other guy for having no authenticity, for not earning his art. He has earned it through poverty and pain. Interesting this is not the measure of how the world works--a Clarence will go farther in life in every institution, highlighting how rare an Eminem is in the world. Also illustrated, with the factory manager. So he got extra shifts, who cares? He gets to work a terrible job even more, and it's treated as some kind of victory. Well. The universe is rewarding him with more responsibility. It is treated, cinematically, as a gigantic victory for him.

This film, 8 Mile, is teaching us the most brutal of lessons, that enlightenment comes through participation, presenting the most rigged, unfair, horrible conditions through both spiritual constructions (stoicism, buddhism, christianity), and genre film constructions (samurai, western, sports). However art is the most potent of cinematic symbols because it is the direct proxy for mastery and nirvana. It is also why it also doesn't show him getting famous. His small victory here, scales in our imagination, however, he could easily be pushing the rock up the hill for his whole life. Enlightenment becomes a process, just in the case of it being productive for the viewer, it must come with capitalist rewards to make sense for us. This is just the easiest shorthand for a film. He takes the new shifts, accepts the suffering, and churns it all into Art, by mastering this craft he is portraying integration, he becomes Enlightened. Because there is no material equivalent to godliness, so you are just handed the entire kingdom. He becomes 'Eminem', a billionaire, rich, famous, all his dreams happening; but it is just one way there, no other way, and it doesn't show it happening. It fades out at the crescendo, showing wisdom. The good films sort of hint this direction because it puts it in our hands.

This movie was not made for 80s audiences but for future audiences to relive the vibes of the 80s. As a 1980s hyperreal fetish object it is superb. It's why a lot of b-movies from the time have become treasured, but even among a lot of them, the DTVs, the slashers, the Empire films, this is a step up. You start with that Gothic will work no matter what. Every time it cuts from mall settings to the phantom, you are getting cinema. Crawling through air ducts, piecing things through security cameras, these are all details in Gothic noir. Even better that Pauly Shore is there. In recreating a 1980s fetish object directors would certainly put him in their movie, not to say anything of his artistic significance, it is just like palm trees in California.

The camera cannot be cheated. It is a strange facet of cinema that you can go to the ends of the earth, to strain on screen, but then just, mall, gothic, Pauly Shore, the film exists in the simplest way, and works nicely. If I am underselling it to say lower your standards, it is more to have no standards at all and look at it more like an audio-visual National Geographic exhibit of the "mall". I read both essays in the package of the Arrow Video set, and both are focused more on the death of the mall, rather than the film itself, and this concept of the mall, yes it is extremely nostalgic and packed with emotion for an audience. I take more for why this works, the Phantom of the Opera, the Gothic shorthand. Of course it will end with gore, people on fire, the entire mall exploding in glorious fashion. But with the death of the mall, it takes on a double meaning. Gothic always knew the pain the suburbanite, of the 80s/90s kids, our nostalgia, loss and sorrow in great economic change. Gothic knew. This is just one of the films that made a very intellectual association in combining these subject, as we age to become haunted Gothic figures ourselves.

This film is a lot like Groundhog Day, the monotony of 10,000,000 miles might as well the repeating days, but a more pitiful one. Airports and schools (and libraries, and malls) are archetypal places symbolizing the temporal nature of earthly reality from one place to the next (reincarnation, hell, or ascension). The pilot at the end is mythic, a Demiurge. The audio goes quiet, the light around him shines. Clooney won at life... it is important in the pilot representing the Demiurge, he is representing capitalism, not enlightenment. So there's no reward, in fact he is disappointed, they both are. Spirituality is in alignment with capitalism in cinema, these tools, while incompatible, are simultaneously rhyming and opposing symbols of meaning. Clooney won but he lost by not perpetuating the journey to nirvana to extract meaning through family, relationships, and commitment; so he completed the journey but missed the point about sharing, giving, and providing. The movie is not too hard on him for sitting in his karmic lot, of course, the entire thing is a fabrication without an ounce of authenticity. It is as boring as his lectures to corporations.

The fact they fire people, in the film, it is really framed as tragedy, an assassination to be rejected by capitalism, which is nauseating cinematic hyperbole. "Go become a chef/vet/chef, your dream", is the answer that films like Fight Club, Pig, and Up in the Air give to capitalistic despair. Reitman is a director who pretends to be subtle while stating the obvious-- the way it fetishizes the performances of those people getting fired is unbelievably self-important. Compare the subtlety of Alexander Payne's The Descendents, also with Clooney, Payne can nail subtlety while simultaneously going mainstream. And Clooney played a hitman in another thing too, he is always 'the guy that does the thing'. But the concept of someone whose job is to fire people is also a non-starter. The girl quitting at the end is not a journey, it is the obvious thing to do on day one.

I saw it in 2009, I hated it then and I hate it now. It's a lousy movie as compared to Groundhog Day or The Terminal, both films I rated as five as masterpieces of symbology. This one is saying participating is not enough, but it stops before the second act to show his leap of faith. I should also say at the time of this in 2009, millennials, like Anna Kendrick, were entering into the work-force. Asserting meaning onto others through work is just the different side of the same coin, it is over-correcting being a corporate cog, by being a nuisance destroying the fabric of society. The same lesson goes to both sides of the aisle, 'work to live, don't live to work'. Only someone like Reitman would think this is a profound lesson, because he has never done either.

I went in hoping for a French New Wave vampire film ala Truffaut or Godard, an elevated amateurism in a gorgeous aesthetic, and free-spirited vigor; and it succeeded at that from the very first minute. But by the end, I was a fanatic. I did not fully understand the film until I read the booklet, where Rollin said he intended the film to be a serious vampire epic; he was horrified that audiences laughed during every screening. Suddenly the film clicked. This wasn't a FNW deconstruction of the vampire film, he wasn't a Godard refreshing the science fiction serials and noirs in his own eye; 'Rape' is actually an unironic vampire film. The film suddenly becomes outsider art. Because we see outsiders doing genre films sometimes, it's not my thing. But when a director is in France in the 1960s, an image-smith, and making outsider art, you are now in the zone of hard arthouse. Just from the time and place, it can never just be the thing at face value. And the amateurism you would not even think to remark on because it is so thoroughly and confidently staged, and gorgeously photographed. What it lacks in intellect it reaches the same ends through its creative force of will, which is the purpose of film prose. Inherent to the subject of a vampire erotica, its very existence is subversive; audiences only choice is to laugh, or riot. It is why artists are drawn to the Gothic, it is impossible to steer wrong because we understand Gothic. The shorthand is so powerful, nothing needs to be added, so these additional filmic ingredients to Gothic create an overwhelming experience. It was one of the more substantive experiences in my recent goes.

This one got under my skin. The three characters are these fetish objects of happiness. The camera clings to them, and I wonder why? Finally I realize it's because the director detests them. They are... white people... normals, the enemy of cinema. He then brings us this outsider foil girl, of course she is a gem, very cute and endearing, and they go on to destroy her. So the filmmakers, they went out their way to cast the realist, most sensitive woman they could find, breathe as much life as they could into her, and then just break her. Beating down a woman, who is already beat down, is non-participatory for an audience, just in the way the film holds us at a distance in their vacation at the start, it is just there to provoke us with its resolution. The movie just did too good of a job of pressing your buttons, and just because they can, doesn't mean they should. It's the rare film that makes me second guess my enjoyment of the directors other works.

An actual good Cage performance, that we have forgotten about after over a decade of utter dreck. I will say at the time, this film was that very dreck. He has been doing these kind of performances, one after another since 2011, but when I go back and see Trespass, I wonder why? He did it all perfectly here, to where the others seem like imitation and are coming up shorter. That is because creating a character rings differently than just running through a 'mad man' shtick he repeats. I think it is because of Joel Schumacher. He was a real actors director, a master director who worked in the confines of mainstream film. Rediscovering his work from ground up from the 1980s, I see his mainstream films in a new light, from Phone Booth, to this, he never lost that artistry, even if it came in more outrageous packages.

To me, this is not a "microbudget film", it is simply film, and it is the work of a seasoned, natural filmmaker operating outside of capitalism, becoming an important bit of counter-culture. The craft is razor sharp, in fact this is an aesthetic filmmakers today, even on budgets, are driving to emulate in their desperation for the authentic. They are shoplifting the styles of the past attempting to consume it. From the inherent subversion of the existence of DIY filmmaking at all, the beauty is how the forms contrast. The naturalism is profound, and this hint of Herzog or Weir-esq poetry that seeps in the scenes that builds to the transcendent. I found the performances the sort of pleasure I get out of Mike Leigh films, or Italian films, everyone is memorable and the characters are lived-in. There is a fly on the wall quality that this is going on with or without a camera capturing it, high praise, yet the formalism comes through at key moments, across these perfect, tight compositions. I am reminded of Sidney Lumet saying a great filmmaker realizes that you only need one or two close-ups across an entire film, but they must be at the exact right moment. When you are involved in the film festival circuit, the true indies, they're often quite good, and not disposable as one assumes. So I have seen films like this that weren't given new life, or life at all. But history brings things into light for a reason, and here, it is the sheer integrity of the filmmaking. Every moment of the movie felt that everyone involved was treating it like the most important film in the world, and that reads twice as big from the David v Goliath feat of its existence.

You watch these movies young and are right there with the infectiousness of the movie. I watch it older, and suddenly I'm a 1950s audience who is taken aback by how gleefully immoral it all is. The novelty of crime as fun is painting a picture of youth itself, and the picture of aging by contrast. The vigor. Beatty's performance is so natural you take for granted he is carrying an entire film with his charisma. The film has a cozy quality to it, almost like a sleepover, and even finds time for vignettes like the Gene Wilder bits. Or these unforgettable characters like CW's dad, a Hackman performance so good that you go, oh yeah, he's an actor and not actually that person. I also adored The Sugarland Express which is almost a remark on this movie, taking it into the 70s loser rebellion, there is something to be said with the suits and hats and tommy guns here, the charisma and class, and the total lack of glamor to those Sugarland characters. I found both Bonnie and Clyde, and Sugarland to be tremendous films. The point of these movies is the audacity that may be lost on people. They are two films simultaneously, you have to watch the movie, as well as watch your own reaction to it.

The fact there was a Hollywood director using his power to do slow films like those has become a little bit of American film history. This even before the digital revolution took over, the film is as great as ever.

All the vignettes, how it's weaved and structured, they set in all at once. The slow films plant the seeds and blossom in the days after. One criticism is they should utilize the face more, instead of buildings and nature. But Buddhists consider the landscape, the world, on the same plane as the face. It is playing to the memories.

Then that it's Cobain is an entire movie inside a movie that is always registering huge even as it does nothing. This is the biopic he would have wanted. That it does not end on a rock song but some kind of choir is saying something how we only pass through our lives. The subject of the rock star is so great I thought of David Bowie too, in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and his general commitment to the art world. There was this awareness of being a modern myth, a modern Egyptian god, and the only way he could stay sane to it was by creating a professional distance, making his myth a frame he could walk within and out. It's the ones like Michael Jackson, or Cobain, their lives become the art, then they drown in it.

Gus Van Sant didn't continue this style after his trilogy, although occasionally he will put something in his films making you recall them; even now they still remain as important as ever to the American arthouse. And who has followed his lead? I can't think of a single one.

An endless mosaic of eroticism, literary, foods, and fashions. It is a film that traps you in its enjoyment, with no escape. It is offering this study of the artists mind, resonating with the carnal. If it is reaching for something it does not grasp, it is enough in the tactile of what is on screen, to arrive at what it is saying without saying it, perhaps, something about hedonism and ideology. Eroticism is the bravest frontier of cinema that will show you the subject of its artist in a direct way, so it drowns, dwarfs its intellectual interests, but this also becomes a full experience on screen. That is a lost artform by people like Lynn, Malle, Roeg, Bertolucci, only possible in that period of 80s and 90s. But where the film becomes crass in her going between the three men, it is countered by its cinematic elegance. Eroticism on screen can be taboo, frank, or titillating, Kaufman is a director who is totally awestruck by it. His film Quills arrives at this as well, an even greater film. Here is cast so modestly that you would not imagine these actors in such a grand way, the french girl, I never knew she had a whole film being cute. It is also a very odd role for Fred Ward, that uses his strengths in a new way. You see why people want to be actors. I liked Uma Thurman's puppeteering. One can complain about this movie. However to me these are the raw subject in parallel, to the point that style and substance is the same. I rate it highly because it gives the viewer everything that it promised, in fact way more. It makes me long for braveness in the arts again.

Gus Van Sant is a director of the "middle way". This does not play to hyperbolic tastes of his time, but creates works that resonate years after. Here I also see a swan song of the 00s manic pixie indie, not quite a subversion of the genre, but the best distilling of it.

You see her illness makes her an angel figure, placing her outside the frame of our society, therefore quality to remark on it through our pity. The performance becomes amazing because her impending death is casting a weight on her every single scene. It is not how we see her but the way she is countering it. Occasionally the tension begins as her dreaminess clashes with the cold hard reality. The pain she quickly distracts herself from; she is almost pushy she is grabbing him by the hand and pulling him off to have this young love experience while she can.

The film is in love with her, afraid of her. She brings these details to her scenes that are like little lines of poetry, this sort of moment only a truly great director can bring. But she is also only as a frame around the boy. We are seeing the memories of her that he will carry with him for life. During one scene they are playing their parts, as theater, reflecting on his frustration in playing a role. He is questioning how real the love is.

Henry Hopper has those intense moments that give you a shade of his father, there are scenes he is so intense he is almost in a trance, showing a boy in an impossible circumstance. That reflects the journey that life will imprint, the teenagers are asked to bear it all at once. Yet for all this the film is a beautiful film of autumn. Of course it will pay homage to Japan through the character of Hiroshi. It is just the kind of films the Japanese make, the love of youth, nature, the whimsical, and darkness.

I also realize when comparing it to its genre, pretty much all movies like this are good, because anything giving compassion and attention to the young is a service. The movie is like a dance, or a ballet.

I believe it is Polanski's only documentary, making it a fascinating study. The shots of racing are cool as well as the period details and people. The breakfast scene sipping orange juice and discussing racing philosophy, drawing out maps, it is indeed like one of his labyrinthic films. Also, it's obvious he had a cinematic crush on the wife, maybe why he is there. She would fit in those early swinging 60s thrillers. The great twist is the post-interview 40 years later. I sense he always felt the movie was missing something and the new frame brought it to life. It's very touching. They talk about how safety has improved since then, pay tribute to those who passed, and reminisce about monuments and end on a point of view race scene which really brings it home the speed at which they go. This says something about life as well.

Jackie Stewart even remarks to Polanski, why did you make this? Polanski said, he loved racing. But I mean hot women, racing, documenting a champion, it's all cinema. He was a man who despite the elegance of his art was sort of an adrenaline junkie. The documentary is definitely worth seeing; at surface there's not much there, but like his films its pleasures, its statements and nuances are not obvious, then they hit you at once, they are all there looking back.

Bill Murray doing Shakespeare is the cutest thing ever, it may be the first time Polonius steals the show. Incredible for the NYC buildings, streets, and upper class apartments, creating one great slice of atmosphere after another. The self-awareness of it makes it funny too. All those young 90s actors having fun, and McLaughlan as the King is so great and nuanced you somehow feel bad for the villain. A festive celebration of Shakespeare, cinema, and Gen X. So, films like this are a joke when they're released, hence its reputation, but in time they become works of art. One, because Shakespeare is immortal, and two, this era here of 2000 New York, this is a painting of nostalgia, from a long-gone era of history. It's incredibly fresh.

Otherwise this is the perfect way for young people to understand the play, how the casting gives you an immediate impression who these people are, framing the dialogue in a way that you always understand it. The irony when you get a good rendition you bond to it and don't want to imagine it any other way.

His first traditional creeper since The Ninth Gate, the film is genuinely unnerving, boasting Polanski's trademark scares and sprinkled with just enough meta-storytelling elements to pique the intellect.

Emmanuelle Seigner, often Polanski's muse, to mixed results, shines differently here. Instead of playing the femme fatale, she channels the essence of Peter Coyote's character from Bitter Moon. Drenched in sweat, reactive and constantly piecing together the puzzle, she offers a fresh on-screen exploration, showcasing the dynamic director-actor partnership they share.

"Based on a True Story" is a delightful flirtation with meta-storytelling elements. Although it doesn't delve deep into fiction versus reality or authorship complexities, it stands as an homage to films that do. Seigner's portrayal of a writer becomes Polanski's medium to tip his hat to the films that traverse the ambiguous boundaries between life and art. The narrative is like a scenic tour of meta-cinematic themes. It feels familiar yet offers a refreshed perspective, akin to revisiting known terrains with a new lens.

Interestingly, while Polanski's style has inspired many, including Darren Aronofsky, shades of Aronofsky's influence are palpable in this piece. Artistic inspirations often come full circle.

The film evokes memories of classics like Misery, and the co-dependent merging reminiscent of Persona. It's not merely a thriller; it's an exercise in "thriller". Every character, even the background ones, are meticulously cast and memorable, elevating the movie-watching experience.

However, there are unexplored territories, especially the ending which left me anticipating a specific revelation. It's a familiar tune but rendered beautifully.

It's rough to go from the '95 one to this one. The '95 gets the emotions so right, you get lost in the story, it stayed with me for days. This one is strictly a work of cinema in my view, one to admire but keeps at distance. I am losing interest in Welles filmmaking bravado in general, his lightning mind, camera wizardry, and effortless staging. With age I see more value in a Kazan or Wyler. For Welles magic tricks, the true magic trick of cinema is the invisible craft. That is not to take away from all that is happening on screen, as a virtuoso and dazzling work, the father of the auteurs... a great creativity, unreal for its time. Ultimately I do not find him convincing as a dramatist, but more as an entertainer. He will do the big things like the eyes, the dramatic moments, but can't be arsed to give the rest much attention as a performer. Welles goes to these great lengths to tell these important stories but yet he never seems to fully give them over. They are like toys to him.

The irreverence rubs wrong, against the sanctity of the plays, as if the actual Shakespeare is just getting in the way of his fun. I sense that these plays are requiring older directors with more life experience to have lived his lines instead of admired them. I don't think Welles took life very seriously, either from a gigantic narcissistic ego, or from a depression that he uses these big works of art to hide in, rather than to reveal in the human condition. It makes these nuanced plays come off as shallow, or silly.

Still at the end of the day you can't reject his works without rejecting the idea of cinema, they are going with the medium itself. In terms of the symbolic meaning of an independent artist pursuing his craft outside the studio system, it is without a doubt a five star film. But as Shakespeare, it didn't exactly seem like Welles could be bothered.

One of the finer discoveries in my search for obscure and unseen films, Moira Kelly is such an incredible, plunky, tomboy leading lady. One of the unsung stars of recent decades, from Gen X. This shows she could have been big in the 40s, 50s, or any era. Directors who knew, knew.

It was produced by the Paulist Fathers, a Catholic religious order, and directed by Michael Ray Rhodes, and the question is... who are these people? Because this is powerhouse filmmaking start to finish. The film's scale is unbelievable, every scene is crammed with energy.

The camera is so effortlessly free flowing and expressive, almost like a Japanese film the way it captures movement. When it's not moving or taking you through crowds, it is printing these beautiful human moments. It's pitch perfect acting and directing in total lockstep.

I am never one for the what if an average person meets a celebrity, genre. This one begins very hokey. This is one of the craziest films I can recall, in fact, from a tonal standpoint, it is going between a children's movie, to a character piece, to a period piece, and this ridiculous figure at center.

There is zero resistance to him taking in this family, and not much reflection about it. He might as well be Santa Claus really.

Robards I am not used to him in 'character' like this, behind make-up. It is kind of amazing. He is always an actor of larger than life magic, so seeing him like this is almost too big for the screen.

At the same time it feels he is stranded on screen. Like inviting an impersonator to a party. He is giving it his all, but you sense him lost, wanting to turn to us going, now what?

It is so thankless for an actor, almost exploitative, in the way of celebrity itself. He is a bottomless well of charisma and has to entertain everyone he comes across, you see how exhausting it would be.

If you can get through the silliness of the first half, it settles and director Daniel Petrie's mastery settles in, the way he captures the world, the way the script unfolds, the performances finally have room to settle. It does become the pleasant, beautiful little film it strived to be. The movie was not easy to find, so I am glad I saw it. It is not forgettable, that is for sure.

It is a bigger canvas with more characters than Starting Out in the Evening, which I believe to be a masterpiece, and this is adapted by the same novelist and director. The NYC relationship ensemble is a tradition in film, about upper class writers, publishers, intellectuals, their lives in shambles. They always have that sole articulate black intellectual.

The film is dated by about ten years when this genre was all the rage in indie film. It shows how the landscape has changed in independent film that it only has 200 views on letterboxd, with a cast like that (and the top reviews here straight up graffiti...)

Still, the movie is a magic trick. Once you get to know the characters, it plays you in interesting ways.

Shaloub is the writer this time, he is a toxic narcissist. Hunter, she becomes stranded by happiness and seems lost and one-dimensional. Milioti is obsessed with dating the least interesting man in the world and exists only to be his sex mommy. (I like how she is teaching a class and she looks no older than anyone there.) This is basically the worst group of people to focus a movie around, and maybe that says something about the randomness of existence.

Because there is all this movement, as the melodrama unfolds everything we assumed was wrong.

Milioti falls into post-partum depression that is as terrifying as her manic pixie was uplifting. Her boyfriend we expect will be haunted the whole film, ends up becoming sensible. Shaloub begins, almost monstrous, but you find a weird respect for him.

The movie sets up these characters and takes them on a journey, and therein is its pleasure.

What it lacks is Starting Out's myth-making, a film that makes the audience feel like geniuses because it is putting down so much psychic drama that reads perfectly to us. Maybe there is something to be said about that film's silence too, here every ugly thought is expressed, becoming an alienating experience.

In fact, this feels like how Starting Out in the Evening talked about author Langella's flops, clouded, less definite, more real to a fault.

Still there is a journey on screen that resonates, nothing stands still across the film. Then its ending.

1- The theater director's fake play wins acclaim.

2- His wife knows because she knows.

3- His intent is to step into the spotlight because art exists beyond its author.

His gobbledy guck logic becomes redemptive. This to me is a spiritual point about how there is no distinction between the swimmer, and the current. It's not real? Well when was theater and storytelling ever real to begin with?

This has an impact of breaking the fourth wall to invite us into its celebration as the audience, of art, melodrama, and our own flawed lives. Like I said, it is a magic trick. I hope they make a third.

It is a Japanese melodrama towing the line between treating the subject of the incest mom with dramatic seriousness, and turning her into a creepy psychopath, without abandoning either genre. In this way it is much like a prototype Almodovar film, and is an interesting character study constantly watching and wondering when she is going to start killing people, or eating people. The fascination of the film is how it crosses back and forth.

Interesting to compare it to La Luna which I watched last year. The difference is Bertolucci has this Catholic obsession with how taboo that is, as well as the Marylike love of the act. That entire film is one long erotic build up to the moment, it expects you to know what you are getting into so that you are bringing that anticipation with it. And when it gets there, the moment has a ton of quotation mark and punctuation around it.

This film on the other hand could not be more open about it, it's very matter of fact, never questions or discussed, just is. It is almost as if the Japanese Furuhata is answering that film saying, "What's the big deal? It's shocking, but what next?"

Not only that, but it seeks to understand it in a frank, factual way. She abandoned him, now she is back. I am always impressed how Japanese directors handle erotica with none of the baggage the west does.

More of the film itself, it is really fantastic how well told it is, through the performances... it is based on a novel so there is this detective element, that is less strong, but necessary. Then there is the rivalry with the girl his age, that is building to a boil. It is unexpectedly good, if good is not the right word, it is thorough, the mark of a great director on some tangent. It is only let down by the creepiness of the subject.