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How lucky I am to see everything with fresh eyes! I'm halfway through Season 2 and am enjoying it immensely I've been told that around here is where it jumps ship, depending on what kind of a Lynch fan you are. The thing is the fans I knew undersold just how damn funny it is. So far, it's damn good coffee! But you most likely don't need me to tell you that. My favorites have been noir host Eddie Muller talking about the importance of the fedora in old movies and which stars he thought knew how to get the most of a hat, a serious look at the history of blackface in movies, and a tribute to one of those familiar faces you see in everything, a character actor named Edward Brophy.
To feel connected to other people who love to think about movies, their meaning and their history and the people who make them, from the smallest details and the supporting characters to the touchstones that reveal major cultural shifts, that is nourishing, in this strange, sad, isolated time, and reassuring, too.
I find that in the current deep-seclusion mode, the most comforting mode of movie-watching is to binge on the work of a single director. In a time of chaos, there are comforts to be found within the intricacies of a singular vision. Personally, I decided upon the great master of Indian cinema, the late Satyajit Ray.
I'm eight films in—and reeling in astonishment. So far, my favorite is " The Hero " , available to stream on Criterion Channel. It is as light on its feet as it is piercing in its depiction of the inevitable dissatisfaction with the shape of one's life. As the great Pauline Kael said of Ray in "His films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness Available on the Criterion Channel.
Here she plays Elena, a wealthy socialite whose comfortable family life is disrupted by Mia a ferocious Kerry Washington , a mysterious new inhabitant in her affluent town. Director Nzingha Stewart elicits phenomenal work from AnnaSophia Robb and Tiffany Boone, who uncannily channel Witherspoon and Washington as their respective younger selves.
Each hour is an acting masterclass and I cannot wait to see what happens next. Available on Hulu. I raged, I cried, and I learned a thing or two. Paul Henreid and Curt Bois have died recently, and that means all of the major characters onscreen in " Casablanca " are dead, and the movie floats free of individual lifetimes. It no longer has any reference to real people we might meet at a gas station or the Academy Awards.
It is finally all fiction. I look at silent movies sometimes, and do not feel I am looking at old films, I feel I am looking at a Now that has been captured. Time in a bottle. When I first looked at silent films, the performers seemed quaint and dated. Now they seem more contemporary than the people in s films. The main thing wrong with a movie that is ten years old is that it isn't 30 years old.
After the hair styles and the costumes stop being dated and start being history, we can tell if the movie itself is timeless. What kinds of movies do I like the best? If I had to make a generalization, I would say that many of my favorite movies are about Good People. It doesn't matter if the ending is happy or sad. It doesn't matter if the characters win or lose. The only true ending is death. Any other movie ending is arbitrary. If a movie ends with a kiss, we're supposed to be happy.
But then if a piano falls on the kissing couple, or a taxi mows them down, we're supposed to be sad. What difference does it make? The best movies aren't about what happens to the characters. They're about the example that they set. The secret of "Silence of the Lambs" is buried so deeply that you may have to give this a lot of thought, but its secret is that Hannibal Lecter is a Good Person. He is the helpless victim of his unspeakable depravities, yes, but to the limited degree that he can act independently of them, he tries to do the right thing.
Not all good movies are about Good People. I also like movies about bad people who have a sense of humor. Orson Welles , who does not play either of the good people in "The Third Man," has such a winning way, such witty dialog, that for a scene or two we almost forgive him his crimes. Henry Hill, the hero of " GoodFellas ," is not a good fella, but he has the ability to be honest with us about why he enjoyed being bad.
He is not a hypocrite. The heroine of " The Marriage of Maria Braun " does some terrible things, but because we know some of the forces that shaped her, we understand them, and can at least admire her resourcefulness.
Of the other movies I love, some are simply about the joy of physical movement. When Gene Kelly splashes through " Singin' in the Rain ," when Judy Garland follows the yellow brick road, when Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling, when John Wayne puts the reins in his teeth and gallops across the mountain meadow, there is a purity and joy that cannot be resisted. In "Equinox Flower," a Japanese film by the old master Yasujiro Ozu , there is this sequence of shots: A room with a red teapot in the foreground.
Another view of the room. The mother folding clothes. A shot down a corridor with a mother crossing it at an angle, and then a daughter crossing at the back. A reverse shot in a hallway as the arriving father is greeted by the mother and daughter. A shot as the father leaves the frame, then the mother, then the daughter. A shot as the mother and father enter the room, as in the background the daughter picks up the red pot and leaves the frame.
This sequence of timed movement and cutting is as perfect as any music ever written, any dance, any poem. I also enjoy being frightened in the movies, but I am bored by the most common way the movies frighten us, which is by having someone jump unexpectedly into the frame.
The trick is so old a director has to be shameless to use it. Alfred Hitchcock said that if a bunch of guys were playing cards and there was a bomb under the table and it exploded, that was terror, but he'd rather do a scene where there was a bomb under the table and we kept waiting for it to explode but it didn't. That was suspense. It's the kind of suspense I enjoy. I'm not so sure. I don't much care for movies that get all serious about their love affairs, because I think the actors tend to take it too seriously, and end up silly.
I like it better when love simply makes the characters very, very happy, as when Doris Day first falls for Frank Sinatra in "Young at Heart," or when Lili Taylor thinks River Phoenix really likes her in " Dogfight. Most of the greatest directors in the history of the movies were already well known when I started as a critic in There was once a time when young people made it their business to catch up on the best works by the best directors, but the death of film societies and repertory theaters has put an end to that, and for today's younger filmgoers, these are not well-known names: Bunuel, Fellini, Bergman, Ford, Kurosawa, Ray, Renoir, Lean, Bresson, Wilder, Welles.
Most people still know who Hitchcock was, I guess. Of the directors who started making films since I came on the job, the best is Martin Scorsese. His camera is active, not passive. It doesn't regard events, it participates in them.
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