Yesterday I went to see Gena Rowlands talk about her late man John Cassavetes. She’s 81 and looks fantastic. She talked for a long time in a long-gravel-road voice. There’s a Cassavetes retrospective on at the Lightbox here, that’s why all of this happened. Anyway. The host asked what drew her to John. She said “first of all, he was beautiful.” Then she said she liked the way he thought about life, and about work, and about life.
To hear her talk about him, and then to see them as one on screen, you think well maybe they were naturals at love.
Still from Faces via toutlecine.com
So then I went to see Terence Malick’s Tree of Life with my brother, the only person I know who understands religion like I do, for obvious reasons. We saw it at the Lightbox, a sort of corporate arthouse cinema with proper seats and thick velvet curtains. It’s the respectful thing to do. Malick has made five films in thirty-eight years and this is the fifth, which you probably knew.
I won’t tell you what happened, in case you haven’t seen it, and you will see it, if not soon, then inevitably, because this film is our 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is that painfully epic and overreaching and beautiful. So fucking legit beautiful. Each blade of grass dazzles like the Hope Diamond. Each second is a symphony. It’s just that Malick takes every shot as though it’s his last. Ever. I left the theatre sobbing in a rush and my brother left laughing like he was stoned, and also feeling like he should have been, but we agreed on that. Could be the last film ever made. Could be Malick thinks he’s God.
Later I said I needed to watch it again on some kind of drug so I could understand it, but the frightening thing is I understood it perfectly. It’s more like needing to do shrooms or something just to deal with it.
a beautifully written explanation of why I like TVS so much by Paul Clemens, penpal to Jeffrey Eugenides, from the Official Virgin Suicides Zine
Okay, NEW BEST THING ON THE INTERNET, everybody. Have a good weekend. xo
Reblogged from slow motion crawl.
If you love or hate or have even one single feeling about fashion and you haven’t seen Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear, more nasally known as Pret-a-Porter, get to it NOW. It was made in 1994, which—for reasons pertaining to clothes, music, riot grrls and my having been nine and clueless at the time—is my Favourite Year Ever. The movie is just like the most insanely fierce (before fierce was “fierce”) fashion satire and it’s even truer today than it was then. Umm, the dog fashion show? While I rewatched this last weekend, there was an actual dogwalk going down across town, at some thing known as Woofstock (WHY?). And days later I saw Gaultier in the flesh looking exactly as Gaultier, and talking the exact same way about beauty and shit, as he did in this film. Plus c’est la meme chose, etc.
The love story of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge, L’Amour Fou, is fiiiinally in theatres. Allons-you! I saw it way back at TIFF and wrote this Eye Weekly print piece on the doc, the 70s as height of his Yvesness, Marc Jacobs re-interpreting those Yves-y 70s, and then I think there’s more stuff about fashion and repetition but you might know how I feel about re-reading my own words, which is not great. Anyway… read and/or see. C’est tout.
On Friday the 13th, nothing happened except I found out that it was Daphne du Maurier’s birthday, and I guess that felt eerie because I’ve been thinking about her lots. Mostly I’ve been thinking her pop gothicism in relation to gothic pop (Austra, Anna Calvi, Tasseomancy) of late. Also, I love du Maurier; have loved her in a very pure way since I was in the tenth grade and stole Rebeccca off a teacher’s shelf and read it without anyone telling me to read it or what to think of it. Pure love of things never happens now, you know, that I live in media. I never found out until just recently, I mean in the past year-ish, how many other people love her too. Anyway.
It was also Sofia Coppola’s birthday, which means that May 13th is basically my own personal Christmas.
I’d never seen Don’t Look Now, the watery, deathful film based on du Maurier’s story by that name, but Roger Ebert loves it and so does some smart girl on Twitter named Emily, so I went to Film Buff to rent it in the rain. That felt exactly right. I watched it in bed and took these “stills” on my phone. LAYERS OF MEANING. No, I’m kidding, but the film is incredible, even among the many incredible psychodramatic life-is-but-a-dream films of the 1970s, and you should really watch it if only to be deliciously creeped out.
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"FASHION IS THE ARMOUR TO SURVIVE THE REALITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE."
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Bill Cunningham in Bill Cunningham New York.
He’s such a rare man: ascetic, a true aesthete; a poet, not pious; a martyr, not a slave, to fashion. He will make you feel good about the industry or even the world again, but very bad about yourself (or, at least, me/myself). The movie is very nearly good enough for him. I guess you’ve seen it if you live there, but if you live here in Toronto, or in Vancouver, it’s just opening today. Read my quick-take at Vitamin Daily. Or just go.
Photo via.
I first heard of The Eyes of Laura Mars from Bruce LaBruce, when I went to interview him at a softcore Gareth Pugh shoot he was doing for Purple. It’s a fashion murder mystery starring Faye Dunaway, at the height of her significant powers, and Tommy Lee Jones. It’s a glampy, Guy Bourdin-ish, super-high-70s thrill.
If you like, and if you live in Toronto, you can come watch it with me at The Drake Hotel this Sunday around 7 p.m. They have a monthly movie night, and this one, the fashion-y one, of course, is mine to host.
I mean it, come. xo
When, while away, I got an email about Sandrine Bonnaire and the Lightbox’s new retrospective, it was the first I’d heard of her. I know! She is (was) exactly the sort of teen actor I like: the tough, uncanny, bravura, turned-on/dropped-out kinda girl. More like little woman than girl, actually. Like 90s Winona Ryder, or Natalie Portman in The Professional. Or Mia Wasikowska on In Treatment.
Here is a video of Bonnaire’s first-ever casting, the one that made her the star and animating force of A Nos Amours (1983). It seems a cautionary tale—a hundred and one reasons why not to have sex, especially if you’re fifteen—but then again, it’s French, so there’s no moral and everything is styled right, at least. Bonnaire is both entirely revealed and a total “revelation,” as they say. Next she acted in films by Varda, Chabrol, Lang. It almost seems made-up. Only too bad she wasn’t younger in the time of Breillat…
If you’re in Toronto, go see A Nos Amours tomorrow at nine p.m., s.v.p. You could also see one of the other Bonnaire films on other days, but I don’t know about those, because I can only watch so many screeners. #whitegirlproblems
The hardest thing for a Hollywood actress is not to play crazy/beautiful/anorexic/perfect/obsessed. Isn’t that just called “Monday?” The showier, the more dazzling the role, the less difficult it is for the starlet, who is already so many degrees removed from real life, to make Oscar-worthy. When you, you being the audience, can’t relate, what can you do but believe? You’d know if the acting is bad, but how can you know if it’s good or great? Have you ever been a psychotic twenty-five-pound ballerina who may or may not be turning into a motherfucking swan? Yeah, that’s right.
No, the hardest thing, as you know if you’ve ever tried, is to just act normal. To be a regular person who worries about bills and does her own makeup, or would, if she had time. To be so real that the audience won’t have to believe, cause they know someone just like this character, and they know if the character feels like a character for even one half-beat of a heart.
That’s why Natalie Portman shouldn’t win the Oscar, and Michelle Williams, absolutely, should.
