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Phantom Thread 2017
Broadly speaking, a very “beautiful” movie – but beautiful in quite a specific way, not just in the generic realms of simply looking nice; instead the beauty is holistic, as reflection of a regal sublimity immanent in the couture fabrics of the story and all its world – for once, beauty is not only skin-deep! I like that the film doesn’t concede to clichés: that Reynolds doesn’t have to let go of his craft or his obsessive capacity for creating…
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Sunset Boulevard 1950
Norma Desmond’s final scene, where she recedes back into the unreal reality of “acting” along the winding staircase of her tragically haunted mansion, is a moment of profound self-reflexivity—where the film’s acknowledgement of its own mirror reflection to the real world of Hollywood at once converges and diverges with the unreality of the medium’s artifice—of “Sunset Boulevard”, the containing vessel. The demise of Norma, a spectral avatar of Swanson’s own self, is congruently brought to life as phantasm with the…
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Licorice Pizza 2021
This central relationship between a couple drawn to elusive features of each other’s oppositeness reminded me surprisingly of The Master more than any of PTA’s other films, in this case the tantalising appeal of a twenty-something woman to a precocious teenager navigating an early adulthood, and the exciting, confident freedom of his youth that breaks the afflictions of aimlessness and disappearing opportunity for her. It’s a great dynamic, unsurprising coming from a director who’s devoted a career to dramatising messy,…
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me 1992
Absolutely nothing comes close. I’ve seen the film so many times and it’s still so deeply, mysteriously overawing. In every facet it has this kind of amorphous quality, one minute lightning fast and the next dreamy, dark slow - reshaping from the beginnings of a new “continuing story” back into the pre-told one of the TV pilot (this reconstructive aspect of revisiting Twin Peaks’ origins begins a process already veering towards the kind of refractive “unofficial version'' fugue expanded upon…
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Paris, Texas 1984
Oh wow, just finished rewatching Paris Texas and the first thing I read about afterwards is the passing of Harry Dean Stanton. :( How strange and sad. But he lived a great life! We were lucky to have him. I love Travis Henderson so, so much. I found such affinity and affection in every part he played, but never more than here in what he helped make one of the all time great American movies. The tenderness and fragility and pathos just oozed out of Harry Dean. He was a one in a million. A special actor, a special movie. Unrepeatable.
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me 1992
Aka the greatest horror film ever made
It's beyond heartbreaking how this was treated on release. I think primarily this just an example of Lynch being way ahead of the curve: this is a new kind of film—a synthesis of Blue Velvet's behind-closed-doors-suburbia dream story with a totally uninhibited subjective crux: the life and death of Laura Palmer, a girl whose suffering would be told and relived just the way it happened. For all Lynch's reverential abiding with the 50s'…
