It’s been a year since I started out on Letterboxd, so I thought I’d mark my anniversary by posting a review of my favourite film. It’s a long review, and personal at times, and contains some spoilers, so there you go - a few excuses for you not to read it! But thanks if any of you other Wings of Desire diehards do wade through it to the end.
I recently had the pleasure of chatting about Wings with Dubthrone on…
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is an open-ended film that allows people to interpret it in different ways that are personal to them. What I saw when I watched it this time was music. Not in a synaesthesia sense of seeing when hearing, but in a structural and thematic sense, as if it were a symphony composed for film. Kubrick was one of the best directors when it came to using music, he seemed to understand it better than…
A step up in craft for Éric Rohmer after his previous efforts, Bérénice and The Kreutzer Sonata.
Véronique is an impatient tutor brought in to help a young boy with his schoolwork. After a quick lesson in reciprocal numbers that leaves him confused, she explains that maths was invented just to torture him. But he has some head-scratchers for her too.
In other words:
If Véronique > Dunce
And Dunce > Véronique
Then no wonder Rohmer turned his mind to making romances.
A tale of sexual passions denied by manners, Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence reveals the resulting cracks in decorum and the social violence that floods in. The opening credits set the scene with the wanton sexuality of time-lapsed flowers revealing themselves to the world, and then within moments we’re swooping down on the arias of a grand opera house above an audience in their finest dress, and their sharpest judgments. Newland Archer (Daniel Day Lewis), is a young gentleman of…
When I was a teenager I used to delight in playing my LPs backwards and listening out for all those Satanic messages. I bet that if you played Tenet backwards you’d hear the devil mutter something palindromic like “what the fuck the what?”
Now I’m not one to say this film made no sense at all, in fact when the music shut up for long enough that I was able to hear what the characters were actually saying, well, there…
We are all connected by an infinite network of improbabilities. When you consider the countless choices we’ve made, or had made for us, and the near misses we’ve survived, and the way our neural networks have formed and fused following an impossible number of cognitive processes, then it’s pretty remarkable we exist at all, let alone function. Magnolia is concerned with this, and with the forces of chance, and particularly with how our emotional lives are the product of these…
