Griffith's "The Country Doctor", a candidate for the most perfect film ever made.

He is SO hot in Red River.

Monty Clift sucking poison out of Joanna Dru's shoulder, anyone?

There's multiple moments in every one of his films that are sort of down-tempo from their actions, where he's just taking stock of the how much the world befuddles him and holding the frame, that feels as mysterious as anything in cinema to me.

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Buster Keaton, not just in the stunts and set pieces, is one of the most underrated visual stylist there's ever been. The same stuff there -- space, the weight of reality, the gravity of an instant -- powers everything else.

A sure sign of quality if this is your first frame.

I feel like he's probably thought about making a million films like this (perhaps in the spirit of Fellini, Bergman, or even the more dialed down films of a Minnelli or Cukor) and just never did, always pulled toward or faith or history or his brutal masculinist Americana.

Starring Steve Buscemi as...Young Hot Artist Guy?

Watched Life Lessons for Marty's bday, which I'd never seen...kind of fascinates me in feeling like an entire other career -- domestic/relationship focused, overtly personal and present-tense, less "historical fresco" -- in one 40 minute package? Made nothing else quite like it.

The interesting irony being it happening in her real life/career outside of the films, these roles are perceived as standard ingenue fare dependent on her beauty (with less “real skill”). Daisy Miller is such a great film for being sort of overtly about this from Bog’s vantage.

And like, yah Mean Street portrays the experience of people his age in the 60s in this environment, but Raging Bull would be the time of his actual childhood — postwar, pre-counterculture, very backwards, etc

I like Raging Bull less over the years, or maybe it’s less important to me (it was definitely a favorite movie as a teenager), but it quietly feels like the most any film he made is about the milieu he grew up in, even than Mean Streets (bc of its portrait of family/patriarchy)

Also any “Keitel’s accent means it’s a bad performance” takes are so so so so so so so wrong.

Need a full piece about Cybill in the Bogdanovich films (Daisy Miller too and Texasville, which is almost a reflection on others), Taxi Driver, and The Heartbreak Kid…so hyper-aware of how she is seen, it’s power and its judgment, suffering all this expectancy, burying it down.

How about underrated ones (not sure Pesci in Irishman counts, one of the best on recent times) — both Raging Bull supports feel so lived in (wish Pesci was Just a Guy more often), Keitel is wonderful, and Cybill, per usual in the era, masters complicating her own objectification.

Too much to explain what I mean here about them but just, it’s such an organic, constantly evolving thing, that relationship, and what I feel hard on them about in what I don’t like makes the triumphs of their sensibility hit that much harder for capturing it despite the former.

I recently discovered I’m probably more mixed on the Coens than I ever realized, but also feel like I understand what I love about their films I love in entirely new ways despite seeing their films for 20 years now so many times. Those conclusions build off one another too.