Letterboxd — Your life in film

everything about it screams film adaptation but it works in a way because locations that we hear about seem unattainable. deep love for steve zahn’s little outfit change at the end

elite stuff!!! at times you may ask, “is this too much?”, but it never loses what is precious & carefully observed. and never forgets what makes it so perfect (beautiful shots of mandy patinkin)

middle school is about shrines & spells and praying to something elusive, and never really losing faith in your own fantasy, no matter how many times it fails you.

laura dern can do it all. makes an explosive character feel both unsettling and lovable.

kept watching it through the lens of all that jazz, which i think (somehow) made it more bleak. and yet at the end, all i wondered is why no one has tried to do a biopic like this again

love how patient it is. waiting for the music, a letter, a feeling. we are quite forgiving of time because it's unseeable and uncontrollable. and maybe because waiting periods are where all feelings bloom.

an array of responses to routine, and all the forms of love we find in-between

accessing parts of one’s self becomes a game of hide and seek; not impossible but there’s a lot of searching & unlocking… confronting. everyone seems to be calculating their awareness. it can help you win the game but it can also break your heart in the process.

for a movie so ruthless it has a pretty generous definition of “middle aged”

hong sang-soo makes life feel so small & circular. streets are empty minus faces you know, or faces that know you, and locations become something one tethers to. maybe in an attempt to feel settled, when settled is the last thing we feel inside. there’s always a little reaching from who we are to who we want to be. it almost feels like cheating when someone else identifies that disconnect, but maybe it’s the closest we get.

my instincts kept screaming about how fragile everything is but along the way i kept learning to trust that everything would be held & cushioned. lots of letting go, lots of holding on. lots of conflict resolved swiftly with love. happy for the vase that escaped & gets to be filled.

every time my love wavered a little bit, ellen burstyn roasted her son and made me fall back in. also diane ladd & jodie foster… phew