So dearly these people they loved their sun, Their eternal youth and happy ends, their cowboy guns, And on real-estate developing fast making mon- Aiyee! But of water they had none, And even others’ was bound to run… Read More ›
movies
Carol, Rooney! Smoking? Gun
“Entertainment” is an unsatisfactory word for all that Carol makes possible A friend (not!), Ken, writes — I have a ridiculous friend. I don’t know why I go to the movies with him. Carol—the closing credits haven’t even started… Read More ›
Divine Wisdom (and of course emotions)
{Click for pdf} Love, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been translated (perhaps inaccurately) as saying, involves giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist. It might be more simply proposed that movies involve offering illusions to… Read More ›
Deux jours, une nuit (Two Days, One Night)
{click for pdf} My mother’s sisters and my father’s sisters and my grandmother all watched over us. If they hadn’t, I don’t know what would have become of us, in that sad house, where nothing ever changed, where life had… Read More ›
The Third Man
At the end of the movie The Third Man—which some polls have elected the greatest movie of all time—there is a sequence that is so blatant in its symbolism as to be corny. Soldiers, police, good guys and bad guys… Read More ›
Comparing The Lady Vanishes not all that favorably to La grande bellezza
Re-posting in honor of La grande bellezza‘s well deserved recognition by “the Academy” as the best foreign feature film of 2013. Bravo! Felicitazioni! {Click for pdf} One Friday evening I saw Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (“The Great Beauty”),… Read More ›
Going Nowhere? (A fresh look at the movies)
ESSAY FROM SEQUENCE 2, WITH NEW INTRO As revised September 2013 [click for pdf] The following essay was drafted before I read Stanley Cavell’s essay on Frank Capra’s comedy It Happened One Night. It was drafted before, as a result… Read More ›
