big day today! my film YAANGNA PLAYS ITSELF is up and available to stream on
@criterionchannl
. it’s part of
@storebrandbrown
’s epic
@prismaticground
program and in good company there with many other works by artists i’ve long admired.
undeniably the hardest move ever pulled at the Oscars and one of the few that had a measurable impact in the real world. the mental image of 6 security guards restraining john wayne is also great.
the only detail i remember from all of the birthday parties i attended as a kid was when on of my best friends turned 9. his mom took us to the Planet Hollywood in Phoenix and we were seated at a table underneath this suspended, body double prop of Stallone from DEMOLITION MAN.
i’ve not known peace since learning about the time a children’s choir went on French tv in full Serge Gainsbourg drag and sang a moving rendition of “suis venu te dire que je m'en vais,” moving Gainsbourg himself to tears
this is the face of a man who gets it between the eyes and bleeds out into the gutter of the streets of Marseille at the end of a Jean-Paul Belmondo-Lino Ventura 70’s gritty French cop picture called LE PISTOLET EST À MOI, LA BALLE EST À VOUS
#Argentina
just elected a new President -- who says he met his 1st dog while he was a gladiator in
#Rome
2,000yrs ago & that he now communicates with his 5 cloned dogs though a mystic.
Oh, and he also wants to legalize the organ trade, amongst lots of perfectly sane ideas.
normalize letting POC filmmakers do art for arts sake over expecting them to correct or address issues within their own communities as part of the creative output
we're years away from an American Pie legacy sequel teaser with Blink-182's Dammit slowed down and echoing in the hallways of an eastern bloc apartment building, a young man knocking on a rusty door, asking the mysterious woman behind it: "Are you Nadia?... I'm looking for Jim."
haven’t fully recovered since hearing someone deliver a land acknowledgment at Cannes to the Oxybii, the Celto-Ligurian tribe from the area who were colonized by Rome
Scorsese used his clout to cash his biggest check and make a jeremiad work on America’s founding sin and the bottomless pit of human sin.
Joe Russo used his success to frame a shot from inside Tom Holland’s anus
Does America have a national epic? Examples:
Ancient Greece - Iliad, Odyssey
Ancient Rome - Aeneid
India - Mahabharata
Germany - Nibelungenlied, Faust
Spain - Don Quixote
England - Beowulf? Dare I say Tolkien?
Ireland - Ulysses?
Scotland - Ossian?
Scandinavia - Edda/Volsunga
tired: Oscar Isaac is one of the great actors of our generation who doesn’t get decent roles
wired: Oscar Isaac was a Christian straight-edge punk musician growing up in Florida and played in the Warped Tour with his ska band The Worms
i’m late to the UNCUT GEMS game, but pretty floored how the Safdies quadrupled down (in varying degrees of intensity) on the “this is how i win” instinct forged in communities who’ve survived genocide into one film: Jews, Armenians, African Americans and Native Americans
in awe that they chose the image of when Travis Bickle is zoning out in the porno theater as the legacy image to put over the stand where you get napkins, straws and extra butter at this movie theater
a traveling freak show visited my tribe in 1893. there was some sort of large child or an adult with a child-like appearance as part of the ensemble of which was so striking that he made it into our traditional calendar system and that year was forever known as “Big Boy Summer.”
great moment from seeing THE FABELMANS this weekend: a couple sat next to me and the guy said to his date: "it's so weird to see a movie with me in it." they make out throughout the screening until the clique of antisemitic jocks show up whereupon he points and says: "that's me!"
i miss being in a theater so much that i would probably tear up sitting sit through AMC’s 30+ mins of trailers and a Coca-cola student short at this point
William Belleau is unsung. there've always been natives willing to sell out their own to white folks, but the historical specificity he taps into as Henry Roan, the shame he tries to bury and the impossible situation it makes, is haunting. it's like hearing the echoes of a ghost.
pretty incredible moment of breaking the 4th wall in Buster Keaton’s ONE WEEK, superbly executed, oddly natural, and unexpected even 103 yrs on. a fascinating watch, not just for how fun it is, but also how much playful experimentation is going on. another fw for me.
Scorsese does such a solid job on weddings in his films. they're culturally/regionally specific, imbuing a feel like an intimate party, and it's always downhill from there on out.
my grandfather joined the French Resistance at 16, smuggled ammunition in bread loaves, derailed Nazi trains, assisted in the execution of at least 2 collaborators and all he wrote in this baby souvenir book for me before i was born was that his favorite actor was Depardieu
Sergei Eisenstein: “The hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of a rather suspect dramatic or psychological past.”
also Sergei Eisenstein:
found out last night that Winona Ryder has been a longtime supporter and fundraiser of the American Indian College Fund, meaning i probably had part of my education paid for by her 🖤
california tribes: we’ve taken care of this land for millennia and practiced preventative, controlled burning so that this place doesn’t turn regularly turn into a global smokestack. can you give it back?
california:
i was half-joking earlier last week when i was asking if *anyone* (re: the criterion discourse) wanted a list of my own personal indigenous cinema canon, but then the problem was that i actually started thinking about it and wrote it out. here it is, in nor particular order:
how many love letters to cinema were there this year? feels unusually high. something like the death rattle of a type of studio film in an era that's still unfolding.
a lot of bozo takes on KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON here. i know this platform encourages immediate reaction to everything and anything, but extremely goofy to do that with something as dense as that work, one that demands to be digested at its own pace and reverberation.
remembering how unhinged the special edition dvd of MEMENTO was wherein the menu made you jump through hoops and solve puzzles, like the screenshots below, just to watch the very movie you purchased. a UX designed by sadists that's still unmatched.
Last night, I found this Ben Affleck silicone, pull-over mask on a makeup effects site. I later dreamt that I put it on and it wouldn’t come off. I woke up in a cold sweat.