I would eavesdrop the hell out of a conversation between Bob and Robert. They probably wouldn't say much. Robert because he's taciturn and Bob because he's stoned, but their silences would speak volumes. And would likely also cure that pesky Male Loneliness EpidemicTM.
Di Caprio's OBAA character might be a figure of absurdity, while Edgerton in TD is all quiet, ordinary tragedy, but still I see them as peculiarly similar in crucial ways, like they'd recognise each other if their eyes met across the intervening decades.
Also, I'm clearly ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER-pilled, but I couldn't help but see it and TD, despite vast differences in tone, as thematic bookends to... the promise of America, I guess? A promise TD imagines being born in violence, hope and grief and OBAA imagines ending in much the same manner.
Edgerton is wonderful and deserves the earth, but how great is William H. Macy in a role that must total like 10m of screentime yet is somehow present throughout? Didn't realise how much I've missed him. And I will never again hear Denis Johnson's prose in anything but Will Patton's voice.
Feel like I was stolen away and inhabited by Clint Bentley's TRAIN DREAMS, one of those films that crept into my chest in its opening moments and made itself a nest in there. Didn't expect to be so moved, to be scooped up, cradled and swept away by it.
I turned on actual terrestrial television for the first time in about six months and 4 out of the first 10 channels are covering Taylor Swift's album release.
Well yes but there's also the generation who will watch a tiktok of someone watching the video while doing their make up as excerpts from the original article appear as text on the screen.
The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video
If this is a subtweet about a certain TIFF breakout, chapeau. I liked the movie, but my god, that cue made me roll my eyes all the way around in my head. Any track used as unimprovably as it was in ARRIVAL should be off-limits for min. 50 years.
One of these days some septuagenarian Man of Letters is going come down broadly on the side of "wokeism" and I am going to die of shock. www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...
New Yorkers into delightful things: Go see DRY LEAF, playing NYFF Mon and Tue with a Q&A with director (and, more importantly, my Busan FF co-juror) Alexandre Koberidze.
Also also: I have now decided that EDDINGTON is (the second half of) OBAA for those who think that compassion is weakness. No questions on this, please, it makes sense in my head.
Also more contemplative than a lot of reactions led me to believe. Again a compliment to say there is slapstick and absurdist satire (esp in Penn's pitch-perfect exaggeration of character) but it never feels zany. Actually elegiac, even mournful, but ending on this moving little uptick of hope.
It's the job of the early reviewer to reach for comparison points, but I saw very little Tarantino or Coens here. It's the best compliment to say it only reminded me of itself with an occasional FRENCH CONNECTION mood swing. And one scene's staging feels like a homage/send-up of THERE WILL BE BLOOD.
