Haunting, apocalyptic, bold. You can see the line from this to First Reformed and Jane Schoenbrun alike. (I kept thinking that the TV Glow parallels are very strong, even if I can’t fully articulate them.) Vitti in this is giving one of the great film performances, up there with Rowlands in Woman Under The Influence and Pacino in Godfather II. What a movie.
In repertory. "Monica Vitti: La Modernista," Film at Lincoln Center. Walter Reade Theater, New York City. Digital.
Only the second Antonioni I watched, after The enger. This one gave me a similar response to Andrei Rublev, in that I felt like I was looking at a great painting whose mystery seemed just out of reach. The final five minutes or so are particularly striking. There's just something about the way Italy looked in the 1960s in black and white that knocks me out. I'm excited to go back and fill in some of the gaps of this…
If LA LA LAND is for the dreamers, this one is for the sickos. Chazelle applies the skepticism and ambivalence he brought to FIRST MAN and WHIPLASH to a three hour epic about the early days of movies. The question here is, always, “was it worth it?” By the end of it, you’ll look back at the last three hours and think “…yeah, but..” Which, I think, is the intended answer. But on that journey, Chazelle directs the most movie…
years ago, over a decade now, the band future islands played the letterman show and blew the roof off in the kind of surprising, magical, elevating performance you sometimes get on late night tv. At the end of the clip, Dave goes “I’ll take all of that you got!,” a kind of exhale, exhilaration, exhortation of praise.
At the perfect cut to credits end of CHALLENGERS, I wanted to stand up and yell, with laughter and delight in my voice. “I’ll take all of that you got!”
It’s that kind of completely pleasurable adrenaline rush of a movie.
