The Lone Sleeper

of Santa Fe

[robertfrenay]

[robertfrenay]

legendary

[robertfrenay]

theme song

[xombiedirge]

Donnie Darko by Brett Weldele

[robertfrenay]

Brett Weldele, artist for Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga

[johncassavetes]

1950s, John and Gena playing chess, photographer unknown (?) – the same picture, in the form of a painting, would later appear in Faces (1968), Opening Night (1977) and Love Streams (1984).

[robertfrenay]

holy shit

[robertfrenay]

[William] James said that every vision that ever came to anyone is prefaced by a sense of dissolution of the self. It’s the fragmentation of ego that allowed what he called the oceanic sense to flow in. I find that when I’m merely thinking about a scene I’m in an egoist state, which is the opposite of the state of being where you suppress the ego and go out in spirit to the characters. What writing should be is a going out in spirit. And my idea of storytelling is—I wouldn’t say it’s religious but I would say it’s spiritual. You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he couldn’t do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and they said, ‘Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.’ And he said, ‘Visions come to prepared spirits.’ The way Billy Wilder put it was ‘The muse has to know where to find you.’

David Milch, “The Misfit”

[robertfrenay]

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

[robertfrenay]

Twin Peaks 222 - Beyond Life and Death

[robertfrenay]

Great Movies 2016

Here’s a list of all the capital-G Great movies I saw for the first time in 2016. These are the films that seriously moved me or excited me or got my cinema juices flowing, stuff that’s entering my own personal canon of classics. I omitted anything released in 2016 for completely arbitrary reasons. Listed in chronological order of release since ranking these would be foolish:

Grand Hotel (1932 - Edmund Goulding):

Day of Wrath (1943 - Carl Th. Dreyer):

Laura (1944 - Otto Preminger):

Phantom Lady (1944 - Robert Siodmark):

The Manchurian Candidate (1962 - John Frankenheimer):

Carnival of Souls (1962 - Herk Harvey):

Il Sorpasso (1962 - Dino Stasi):

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965 - Otto Preminger):

In Cold Blood (1967 - Richard Brooks):

Titicut Follies (1967 - Frederick Wiseman):

Law and Order (1969 - Frederick Wiseman):

Klute (1971 - Alan J. Pakula):

The New Land (1972 - Jan Troell):

The Devil (1972 - Andrzej Zulawski):

Belladonna of Sadness (1973 - Eiichi Yamamoto):

The Parallax View (1974 - Alan J. Pakula):

Welfare (1975 - Frederick Wiseman):

Possession (1981 - Andrzej Zulawski):

Le Pont Du Nord (1981 - Jacques Rivette):

The Thing (1982 - John Carpenter):

Burden of Dreams (1982 - Les Blank):

Big Trouble in Little China (1986 - John Carpenter):

Dekalog (1988 - Krzysztof Kieslowski):

Akira (1988 - Katsuhiro Otomo):

A Brighter Summer Day (1991 - Edward Yang):

La Belle Noiseuse (1991 - Jacques Rivette):

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991 - James Cameron):

Life, and Nothing More… (1992 - Abbas Kiarostami):

Secret Défense (1998 - Jacques Rivette):

[robertfrenay]

Indeed, the creation of fiction awes [Stanley Kubrick]. 'It is one of the most phenomenal human achievements,' he says. 'And I have never done it.'

“Kubrick’s Greatest Gamble,” TIME Magazine, 1975

[robertfrenay]

Twin Peaks 207 - Lonely Souls

[robertfrenay]

Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears. And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of "World Book" and "Childcraft." Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

[robertfrenay]

10/15/16 - 10/22/16, ranked

[oldfilmsflicker]

We were on location in the cemetery one gloomy, biting, raw day. Carol stood staring down a long alley of trees that flanked a perfectly straight, endless road whose perspective took it to a tiny point, finishing with grey sky. He simply announced: “Now we’ll shoot the ending.”

When the camera was ready, it was pointing its eye directly at that distant apex. Then Carol shouted, as loudly as he could, “Action!” From far, far away, Valli started her walk up that lane toward the camera.

The hero, smoking a cigarette, was standing in the foreground waiting for her. Like the audience, he was confident that she would join him, and they would stroll away happily together, arm in arm. Valli walked on and on, closer and closer, until at last she was a life-sized figure in the foreground with the hero. And then, without turning her head, or even glancing in his direction, she continued her steady pace, out of the shot, and into limbo.

I remained there, as directed, still smoking the cigarette. My eyes followed Valli out of the shot and, anticipating Carol’s shout of “Cut,” I almost strolled back to my chair to wait for the assistant to announce “Once more, please,” or for Carol to say, “Print.”

Nobody uttered a word. The camera kept rolling. The special effects men from their high perches continued to drop toasted autumn leaves from above. I continued to puff on my cigarette, and began to get quite panic-stricken. Was there more to the scene? Had I gone blank? What was Carol waiting for me to do? I took one more puff, then in exasperation threw the cigarette to the ground, at which point Carol shouted through his laugher the word I had been waiting desperately to hear — “Cut.”

- Joseph Cotten, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere

[robertfrenay]

10/07/16 - 10/14/16, ranked

[robertfrenay]

9/30/16 - 10/06/16, ranked

[robertfrenay]

Name ONE other director who wrote and performed the title song to their own film and also starred in the music video for said song. John Carpenter: the Ultimate Auteur