Otis Wheeler

The bonsai-trimming episode in Safdie's remake of The Smashing Machine is a highlight but the way it pales next to its wordless counterpart from Hyams' original speaks to the dangers of transposing work from a minor to a major key

I love this song (and first heard it, last year, through your blog)

This Clint bio is readable as summary, worthless as judgment. Why aren’t biographies written by critics, instead of hacks? We need more bios by people like Tag Gallagher, Bernard Eisenschitz, and Dan Nadel, less by journalists who purport to have taste and lack imagination

I didn’t know him personally but his writing of late felt like the only honest thing on the internet. What a loss.

If Sergio Leone were alive today, he’d still only be a year older than Clint Eastwood

Please everyone stop befouling this good news with frames from Don’t Look Up

Make sure to stay for the credits. They’ve been playing In the Mood for Love 2001 at the end, a great short film that was unavailable for 20+ years

I haven’t seen these two but I like Frears and Chabrol. Night Moves is terrific, Hackman’s Long Goodbye of a sort

Does anyone have a better hit rate than Leigh Brackett? It helps that Hawks basically made Rio Bravo thrice (and Carpenter once, if you count Assault on Precinct 13, which she should almost get a credit on). The Big Sleep AND The Long Goodbye? Hard to beat.

At any given moment I am thinking about these photos of Sally Eilers filming Walls of Gold in 1933.

“If I face a film that just delivers the message without leaving me the freedom to form my own perspective, I stay outside.”

The Tracking Shot in Kapo but it’s just about Mike Figgis making Megadoc

Hands have long become increasingly popular

Same. By high school I could admit it but still she was the only pop star I could cop to liking for awhile

The change that p0ptimism brought about, as I see it, was to afford a modicum of respect to feminine-coded music. For a young person, that can be the difference between liking something in secret & shame—dismissing your own passions as guilty pleasures—and finding the courage to be yourself. /3

But listening to pop music was a way of expressing something feminine or androgynous about myself that I didn't quite understand. It was vital but it alienated me from my peers; as a first-year at Hampshire College, other students would ask if my Britney Spears shirt was performance art. /2

This past week's p0ptimism discourse has been thoughtful and these posts from Frank are especially articulate. One angle I haven't seen this round is, what did p0ptimism mean to you?

As a teen in the 90s, I didn't know I was nb, queer or neurodivergent. /1

Really enjoyed the Generation Taylor ep of Switched on Pop for giving me vocab to talk about Swift's songwriting: minimal (stepwise) melodies w/perfect prosody, T Drops (a minor 2nd into a descending 5th etc). And for talking about Maisie Peters out loud. That's a first. What next, Claire Rosinkranz

the p0ptimism equivalent for movies was vulg@r auteurism, which didn’t rate MCU at all ofc. sadly the rockists won that battle, probably bc they didn’t have a name, which made them harder to insult

Forget whether or not critics are mean enough anymore, what about Borges via Pierre Menard:

“Censure and praise are sentimental operations which have nothing to do literary criticism.”

hi mark! same to you :)

A favorite of mine, one of the rare times they showed poor people on tv. Iconic Goodman perf in s01, so many great character actors, and Bourdain writing some restaurants story bits

JEM Cohen (Little, Big & Far, 2024)

New Jen Cohen is rich, discursive, a lovely bummer. What a gift it is that old friends like Michael Stipe, Patti Smith and Guy Picciotti are in a position to help him get pictures like this* made.

*as if anyone is making pictures like this, as if Robert Kramer had grown up with Dischord and lived

Such a terrific confluence of Hartley's stock company, Simon grown into himself, Henry the devil he always was, Bill Sage burlesquing dirtbag alky, the return of Martin Donovan, Posey comfortable & funny, and a perfect role for Plaza. I had a friend just like Henry so I'll always love these movies

I think we can all agree James Gray was better before he went prestige but returning to his roots to make a story about brothers tangling with Russian Mafia in Queens–w/Driver, Teller & ScarJo–is the most excited I’ve been for one of his movies in a minute

Unpopular (?) opinion(s): Fay Grim is the great Parker Posey movie. Dutch angles are funny

“My entire creative life […] has in one way or another sought to be a kind of resistance to complacent jargon, the dumbing down of complex realities into opinionated sound bites.” – Hal Hartley

“The notion that all we do must amount to something else,” says the main character, “that, in fact, it should accumulate capital, […] this is to think of oneself and one's work as tradable material goods. But a lot of us suspect we are more than material. That we are in fact ephemeral, passing.”

Blu-ray of the forthcoming Hal Hartley movie, Where to Land

Hartley comes home, to an apartment full of stock company, and makes a last film, his usual tools used to gentler ends, a film of ideas as always & a farce ofc. A movie for right now, about a director who wants to do something “useful & perennial. […] service that is constantly & forever required.”