(First and foremost, hope everyone had a lovely Good Friday.)
To remark on Edward Yang’s proneness to create “distance” in his work requires a clarification, a sort of sifting through this word’s many connotations. When he made his films distant, he was not making them a cold, unsympathetic experience (the way you’d tell a person “you’re being distant”). He also never approached his films in a vague manner, removed and “distant” as a connecting attribute rather than severing (“he’s a…
David Foster Wallace, acclaimed writer. David Lipsky, unnoticed journalist. But also a writer. Also an intelligent one, too. The gap between them is bridged during Lipsky’s interview for the Rolling Stone at the conclusion of Wallace’s tour for a magnificently written (and maybe life-changing) book he wrote called Infinite Jest.
Everyone knows of Wallace’s brilliant intellect and way with words. Lipsky is more than just honored to be on the offensive position of a conversation with his generation’s Hemingway or…
Of the many ideas that sprout from Gretta and Dan’s escapades in Begin Again, a major one is that the universality of rejection, betrayal, and failure can have the potential to numb people’s individual experiences with them. Any kind of familiarity with a struggle can be rerouted from solidarity right to cynicism, a fallacious dismissal that doesn’t help people out of said struggle. It’s surprising just how much there is to learn from these characters, who run into rough patches…
This review may contain light spoilers. But it's not for that good a movie.
We all think we know how we’ll handle the inevitable unknown. We all think that the past or the physically present, by our own biased judgment, can perfectly forecast how we’ll react to a situation we’ve never experienced in any remote way. Do we predict our relationship with a person we’ve never gotten to know, or have even met yet? Usually not accurately, if we do…
There’s a trial to it all, an unspoken but excessively acted agreement to how and why to prod the mind and beg for answers where they can’t be found. What’s the crime? What isn’t the crime? Everything is labyrinthine to hide the senselessness, but it instead reveals it. But the absurdity is a vehicle transferring our awareness to the truth, the truth that is revealed in the absurdity but incongruent with it as well. The image being reflected isn’t quite as…
Si'r and his peers are in formative years, where some of the most crucial changes they'll ever experience are occurring... all one wants, all one needs in this time is some form of stability. Some form of constancy, be it as a benchmark against which to measure change or a haven to which to retreat or even a reminder that the world isn't so insane.
How could such a reminder exist? Si'r is surrounded by hatred and suffocated by fear.…
