Midsommar

january :P

december……

Watching Pen15 and seeing them as little girls, even though they’re played by these grown women, had me bawling my eyes out. Watching the popular girls be racist to Maya and then her mimicking them and not knowing what it meant until her brother said something. Then when Anna realized she was part of the problem and she should’ve spoke up and she apologized. The show is so wholesome, and sad.

Anna going through her parents divorce and how it’s affecting her life, the relationship with her father once he’s moved out. Her feeling like she has to step up and take care of him, while also being told not to, and being met with no appreciation. It’s just so much like what 13 was for me with my parents splitting that it breaks my heart for her.

This show makes you cry and laugh, and sometimes Maya’s outbursts are almost hard to watch, but they’re just little girls.

East of Eden is a tale that is remarkably Stoic.

So far, I think this book is a masterwork. Just thinking about it makes me weep. It's a contemporary Stoicism story with a sprinkle of everything else tossed in for good measure: Nihilism, Absurdism, Existentialism, and so on. John Steinbeck has just become one of my favourite authors. At one point in the book, one of the characters fondly flips through Meditations. Some quotes: “You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hunger and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?” “The Hebrew word, the word timshel - 'Thou mayest' - that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open... Why does that make a man great... He can choose his course and fight it through and win... I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.”

Buster Keaton and Boris Karloff at the all-star Mt. Sinai benefit baseball game.

Film Analyses/Reviews

The Sacraments of Genre: Coppola, DePalma, Scorsese

Operatic Style and Structure in Coppola's "Godfather Trilogy" (Pt. I) (Pt. II)

The Tragedy of Michael Corleone in "The Godfather: Part III"

Animated Nature: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Empathy in Miyazaki Hayao's Ecophilosophy

The Precarious Politics of Precious: A Close Reading of a Cinematic Text (X)

As I Lay Dying: Violence and Subjectivity in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (X)

Shifting Gears and Paradigms at the Movies: Masculinity, Automobility, and the Rhetorical Dimensions of "Mad Max: Fury Road"

Review: Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola

Two Thousand Light Years from Home: Scorsese's Big CASINO (X)

TIME PIECES: WONG KAR-WAI AND THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY (X)

Matter out of Place: Carnival, Containment, and Cultural Recovery in Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" (X)

Disney's Moana, the Colonial Screenplay, and Indigenous Labor Extraction in Hollywood Fantasy Films

Viewing Sinophone Cinema Through a French Theoretical Lens: Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood For Love" and 2046 and Deleuze's "Cinema" (X)

The Parallelism of the Fantastic and the Real: Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth/El Laberinto del fauno and Neomagical Realism (X)

"Back to the Future": Oedipus as Time Traveller ("Retour vers le futur": Oedipe, voyageur du temps)

Beyond the Male Romance: Repetition as Failure and Success in Apocalypse Now

Beautiful Friendship: Masculinity and Nationalism in "Casablanca"

GIRL POWER: BACK TO THE FUTURE OF FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION WITH INTO THE FOREST AND ARRIVAL

"Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli." How Machiavelli's The Prince Exemplifies the Gangster in The Godfather and A Bronx Tale

Film as Literature: TWO SCREENPLAYS (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas)

Where Did the Goodfellas Learn How to Cook? Gender, Labor, and the Italian American Experience

Goodfellas Review (1991)

Where is the Bawdy? Falstaffian Politics in Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho" (X)

The Filmmaker as DJ: Martin Scorsese’s Compiled Score for Casino (1995)

EAST Meets WEST: "Casablanca vs. The Seven Samurai"

The Power of Adaptation in "Apocalypse Now"

Animalizing "Jurassic Park's" Dinosaurs: Blockbuster Schemata and Cross-Cultural Cognition in the Threat Scene

Review: American Psycho

The Feminine Hero of The Silence of the Lambs (X)

"Fight Club'"s Queer Representations (X)

Tiny Life: Technology and Masculinity in the Films of David Fincher (X)

Complex Design in "The Empire Strikes Back" (X)

SAVAGE PLACES REVISITED: CONRAD'S "HEART OF DARKNESS" AND COPPOLA'S "APOCALYPSE NOW"

PORTRAITS OF THE POSTMODERN PERSON IN TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, AND THE KING OF COMEDY

(Taxi Driver) (Raging Bull)

Homosexuality in "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975): Televisual Surfaces and a "Natural" Man (X)

Where Did All the Heroes Go? (Dog Day Afternoon)

Italian-Americans in Film: From Immigrants to Icons

God's Lonely Man: "Taxi Driver" in Script and Screen

A Slice of Delirium: Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" Revisited

Kafka on the Screen: Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" (X)

Stalking 'The Deer Hunter'

Gender, Genre, and Myth in "Thelma and Louise" (X)

Restaging the War: "The Deer Hunter" and the Primal Scene of Violence

"The Godfather, I and II": Patterns of Corruption (X)

Making the Milk into a Milkshake: Adapting Upton Sinclair's "Oil!" into P. T. Anderson's "There Will Be Blood"

Child of the Long Take: Alfonso Cuaron's Film Aesthetics in the Shadow of Globalization

THE SWOLLEN BOY: Paul Thomas Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS and Diggler Days

Love in Time: Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, and Richard Linklater's "Before" Films

Other

Al Pacino (X)

Lies and Loneliness: An Interview with Tony Leung Chiu Wai

Wong Kar-Wai (Interview)

Imagism and Martin Scorsese: Images Suspended and Extended

Docufictions: An Interview with Martin Scorsese on Documentary Film

Orson Welles: The Human Side of Genius

Eavesdropping On Female Voices: A WHO'S WHO OF CONTEMPORARY WOMEN FILMMAKERS (1987)

Disappearance of Elaine May

THE NON-DIEGETIC FALLACY: FILM, MUSIC, AND NARRATIVE SPACE

Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the "Real Realism" of John Cassavetes

THE WORK OF JOHN CASSAVETES: SCRIPT, PERFORMANCE STYLE, AND IMPROVISATION

The Adventure of Insecurity: The Films of John Cassavetes

Prospero's Muccs: The Meaning of Martin Scorsese's Italian American Dialect

Between Colorblind and Colorconscious: Contemporary Hollywood Films and Struggles Over Racial Representation

The Militarization of Marvel's Avengers

BEFORE AND AFTER "JAWS": CHANGING REPRESENTATIONS OF SHARK ATTACKS

Sound Doctrine: An Interview with Walter Murch

Made Men (Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Scorsese Interview)

Beautiful Resistance: The Early Films of Wong Kar-wai

Who Knew It Could Get Worse? When Nixon Haunted the New Hollywood

TV

Sticking Together, Falling Apart: "The Sopranos" and the American Moral Order

"Mad Men"'s Color Schemes: A Changing Palette of Working Women

ETHICAL UPLIFT, "NOT FOR NUTHIN" (Review: The Sopranos)

Writing

Story: Substance, Structure, Style by Robert Mckee

Dialogue - Robert McKee

THE WRITER’S JOURNEY Mythic Structure for Writers

The Art of Dramatic Writing

Anatomy of Story

Into the Woods

—-

(X) = corresponding tumblr post

PEN15 is such a brilliant show and the way that they were able to accurately depict a friendship between two preadolescent girls is so bizarre but also kind of sad because growing up i didn’t have that close of a relationship with any of the girls in my grade and i barely remember middle or high school and now I’m an adult wondering why i can’t foster a tight relationship with other women like did i do something wrong growing up? Time is scary, one day you’re sharing snacks during recess and then the next you’re finding out they got married through a week old Facebook post and you always thought that you’d be there for moments like that because you promised each other you would be when you were younger.

God, the Yuki episode of Pen15 is so good. It's like a brilliant short movie completely seperate from the show. Most of the time when a TV show does an episode concentrating on a side character it feels a bit like a filler, but this is the exact opposite. From the opening shot of Yuki at the merch stand, to the disability sign & her playacting the leg injury to the juxataposition of the breakfast and the dinner, it's all done with so much care. The Japanese dialogue was so Japanese, so "different" from the rest of the American dialogue that it really made it feel like watching a Japanese art house movie and drove the point home about how torn she felt - even if there hadnt been the heartfelt ending. Wow, what an exploration of culture clashes and aging and family in 30 minutes. In a "cringe humor" TV show.