At LAFCA in 2019, Michael Barker took me by the hand and led me through a crowded hotel auditorium, past J Lo and Bong Joon-ho, shouting “Pedro! Pedro!” so I could meet his longtime collaborator, Pedro Almodovar. I felt like a kid exiting a stadium with his father, except we’d somehow gotten onto the field and were passing hall of famers. Noah Bambauch looked especially upset by this. Anyway, Michael (understandably) assumed I was a big fan of Pedro’s, who…
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Detour 1945
Watching Tom Neal accidentally kill two people in a way that seems written to relieve him of any real wrongdoing feels silly at first. Like noirish bad luck approaching parody. That's until you learn that, in real life, Neal would go on to kill his actual wife and provide an equally absurd defense that denied any real culpability.
A part of that defense included painting his deceased wife as a cruel, Ann Savage-like woman, who he had to kill in…
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The Show About the Show 2017
Self-immolation that may occasionally burn those closest to Caveh’s flame, but for the rest of us watching from a safer distance, the show looks more like a noble hearth, one that's warmed me again and again. Altruistic suicide.
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Caged 1950
Angrily abolitionist and startlingly fatalistic, Caged! might be the most savage film to ever come out of Old Hollywood.
Former L.A. Times reporter turned screenwriter, Virginia Kellogg, got herself locked up on made-up embezzlement charges so she could go undercover as an inmate to research the film. What she witnessed so horrified her that she churned out a screenplay bleaker than the most cynical noirs, without any of the hallmark campiness that tends to define 'women in prison' films.
In…
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Red Rocket 2021
As an audience member, this tapped feelings I hadn't felt in a while—nostalgia for a place I've never been, empathy in corners usually mined for rage cheerleading. As a filmmaker, it feels like a loving dare—what can happen when you push past digestible characters with moralizing arcs and, instead, get closer to something bawdy and uncomfortable and sordid and foul and tender all at once.
Watched at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Shot on 16 w/ custom lenses made for Soderbergh that he never ended up using. :)
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