You know those lightning-in-a-bottle moments that happen every so often when you're watching a film? The feeling that you've witnessed something so rare, so special, that it takes you to a transcendental plane of consciousness? Well, Stop Making Sense is that, non-stop for 88 minutes, and stays that way every time I watch it.
I guess my favourite band is The Beatles (boring, I know), but Talking Heads is the answer I'm more likely to give if you ask me…
I work at a cinema. I love King Hu movies. I often feel extremely lonely. Enter Goodbye, Dragon Inn and thus, Tsai Ming-liang enters my all-time favourites.
I first went to the movies alone about two and a half years ago, and started going by myself fairly regularly a year or so after that. I like the feeling of going to the cinema on my own, not having to worry about my friends' reactions, not having to be embarrassed about…
The way this man uses imagery is unparalleled...even when he's simply just talking, his images burn themselves onto your brain, reaching the same dark part of your consciousness where all your nightmares come from. One of the best artists of them all.
"My father says everyone has a story and it's our duty to tell it."
Cinema of heroes becomes cinema of nobodies becomes cinema of heroes. Watching this, more often than not I was tearing my hair out trying to determine what to make of Eastwood's decisions, given that there seem to be layers upon layers here; the earnestness and pride belying a more damning indictment of the failure of America's institutions, and whether or not the unblinking valorisation and self-mythologizing…
Almost completely incomprehensible; things just happen with absolutely no explanation or decipherable reason (people complaining about Nolan falling back on exposition again in this...did we watch the same film? The exposition here is so sparse and half-arsed that they might as well not have bothered), we are immediately dropped into the deep end and it doesn't get any easier after that, and there's something to be said for the fact that the 90+ minute discussion with my friend afterwards was…
Please get over yourself.
My feelings may change, and it's been a hot minute since I've seen any Kaufman so I may be in a weird place with him, but a lot of this was insufferable and crushingly disappointing. Synecdoche, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine are three films I adore, and here I just feel none of the humanity or creativity that makes those films so special. Sure, there's discomfort and moments of deeply upsetting psychological horror - as a cinematic…
