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Adventures in cinema: Kelly Reno's face

The Black Stallion (1979, dir. Carroll Ballard)
watched, this time, for a class
One of my favorite juvenile performances, and O how the light finds his face.

Nevermind

the Horrocks
Road (1987, dir. Alan Clarke)

Balkan Santa? Sure, why not.

One of the movies I watched in 2020 was Goodbye, 20th Century (1998).

Girls of the Golden West

A few Mondays ago, I had occasion to hear a Q&A with Sofia Coppola at the Harvard Film Archive, about which I may write more later. Or not. Most of what was said about her film The Beguiled that evening had been said before elsewhere, as a cursory tour of other Q&As on YouTube dating back to the film's Cannes debut can confirm. You can't expect a director's answers to why she did x or y to change, but fresh questions might lead in fresh directions or at least offer a filmmaker the gift of surprise and more of an opportunity for her sly sense of humor to shine through.

Coppola has long embraced the word "girlie" to describe her aesthetic, but she was also once what I'd term "x-Girlie," as these three episodes of her 1990s Comedy Central show—a riff on which can be seen on the Criterion Beastie Boys disc—with Zoe Cassavetes make clear. Or the wonderful moment where she tries to sell an infant Jon Stewart her trashed GTO in this painfully awkward clip below.

Stewart: "What do you watch?"

Cassavetes: "O.J."

It's all eyeliner and baby tees.

Jon Stewart

Hi Octane 1

Hi Octane 2

Hi Octane 3

The Vicious Circle

An image from the cassette era. I still have the promo postcards some guy I met at the cinema during a trip to London in 1995 later sent me.

Reading this Film Comment interview with Alan Rudolph while listening to cassettes on a wee boombox I dug up in this house. The radio is mono, sports an antenna, does not have autoreverse, and belonged to my late father-in-law. It's making me uncommonly happy.

AR: Music to me is like the hub of the wheel. It’s visible, it works in your senses and emotions, and that seems to be where I reside. To me, music and emotional responses are twins, and if you want to establish emotional tone in a film then music is the number one way to do it.

FC: I read one of your early interviews where you said that you were more influenced by John Coltrane than by John Ford.

AR: Some glib asshole said that, I guess it was me. It’s true. I mean, look, I’m not going to deny John Ford, but for me personally that’s all I’ve ever been able to talk about when it comes to American filmmaking. I taught myself how to write screenplays just because the box I was in was too confining as an assistant director in the old Hollywood system. If you wanted to make a little film then you went to Roger Corman, I guess. I didn’t know where he was and I didn’t care. I just didn’t make those kinds of movies. So I started writing. I’d write a screenplay in three or four days just to learn how to do it. At the time you’d go to the Xerox machine with three dollars and you had a movie. But I always listened to music. This was before mobile technology, so when the first Walkman came out—I think it was the size of a Kleenex box—it changed my life forever. I started to tape pieces of music that I liked and I’d make little cassettes without putting labels on them. I used to prowl record stores after work every Friday night and I’d buy albums to tape them. I must have had a hundred tapes without knowing what was coming up next. It was a primitive version of shuffle. I’d walk around Manhattan and watch a movie unfold on the sidewalks listening to how it was scored in my head. But it’s funny, the number-one album was always Kind of Blue. Without that album, I’m not sure I would have been able to make films. Kind of Blue was my film school.

Late to the party: Max Fischer & Nicholas Angel

So, yeah, basically I just realized the opening to Hot Fuzz is essentially the Rushmore yearbook montage. 

(Just yesterday, I saw the "...Baby One More Time" video for the first time ever. What else have I missed?)

Marker Tarkovsky

Close reading Tarkovsky, Chris Marker style.

Hey, there dirty girls

Why don't you watch this? [via]

Happy Monday

L'shana tovah.

I have seen the future

And it's murder.