Alma: Coffee or tea?
Reynolds Woodcock: Do you have Lapsang? I’ll have a pot of Lapsang. please.
Enjoy.
Tag: cinema
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The Green Room is like a letter written by hand. If you write by hand it will not be perfect, the writing may perhaps be trembly, but it will be you, your writing. The typewriter is something different. I don’t mean any comparison running down actors, because there are Olivettis with marvelous type, Remingotons which have a lot of personality, and Japy portables. Myself, I adore typewriters!
– François Truffaut
Here Truffaut contends and concedes the beauty of both handwriting and typing. A decade or so before word processors appeared on the scene.
Originally captured in an interview by Daniele Heymann and Catherine Laporte, L’Express, March 13, 1978,
Truffaut, François. Truffaut by Truffaut. United States: Abrams, 1987. pg 160
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In case anyone else needed it. Documenting it here. The playlist from Japanese movie Perfect Days.
Couldn’t find the album, so I built it in Apple music track by track. Assist by Perplexity.
Fun exercise. Felt like the mix-tape 90s, plus writing down the track name and artist stitched a new world to my head.
- House of the Rising Sun – The Animals
- Pale Blue Eyes – The Velvet Underground
- Sittin’ On The Dock of the Bay – Otis Redding
- Redondo Beach – Patti Smith
- Walkin’ Thru the Sleepy City – The Rolling Stones
- Perfect Day (cover) – Patrick Watson
- Aoi sakana (Blue Fish) – Sachiko Kanenobu
- Perfect Day – Lou Reed
- Sunny Afternoon – The Kinks
- Brown Eyed Girl – Van Morrison
- Feeling Good – Nina Simone
- House of the Rising Sun (Japanese version – “Asahi‑rō”) – lyrics by Maki Asakawa,
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Learn to overcome your fears and shepherd your project to completion, no matter what. It’s the essential moments of struggle over the decades that I have learnt from and which have brought me to this point. When I think back to my earliest years in this business, I see I am nothing today but a product of my defeats. When I was burnt I learnt about heat, and when I was belittled I learnt about power structures. Instead of going to film school, for me it became a process of trial and error, and for the first few years it was mostly error.
Werner Herzog
Applicable everywhere. Building toward the new year.
Also, Merry Christmas.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pg244
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Cary Grant is the urban, sophisticated king of the screwball comedy.
Nancy Meyers -
He gave every young man in the world a goal. He created millions of non-slobs. Including me.
– Michael Caine -
Capra is the last survivor of that great quartet of American comedy; Leo McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges. An Italian, born in Palermo, he brought to Hollywood the secrets of the commedia dell’arte. He was a navigator who knew how to steer his characters into the deepest dimensions of desperate human situations (I have often wept during the tragic moments of Capra’s comedies) before he reestablished a balance and brought off the the miracle that let us leave the theater with a renewed confidence in life.
François Truffaut, 1974Truffaut describes the brilliance of Frank Capra with precision. When you finish watching a Frank Capra film, you absolutely feel a renewed confidence in life.
Truffaut, François. The films in my life. New York, Hachette Books, 1994.
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In this, Kurosawa-tenno was really something of an emperor among directors, seemingly born for the role. A single defining trait as a great film craftsman would be impossible to pinpoint — Kurosawa was one of the all-time greats at blocking, one of the all time greats at pulling powerful performances from actors. At shooting in color, at shooting in black and white; at vertical compositions in Academy ratio and at perfectly balanced framings in anamorphic widescreen. At quick cutting, at holding a long take, at movement, at stillness. At using score, at sourcing music, at choosing and mixing sound. At deeply researched period pieces, at portraits of modern life; at using complex sets, at finding stunning locations. At wrangling even the weather itself, his constant bane and frequent boon — his scenes are set by wind-whipping grass, muddy cloudbursts, volcanic steam and eldritch ice-mists, heatstruck streets and frostbitten hinterlands, lung-spasmingly brisk autumn air. What he couldn’t find, he made. What he couldn’t make, he waited for.
Not to mention he wrote or cowrote every one of his movie’s screenplays. The list of required skills for a director is endless, but Kurosawa is maybe the closest to filling every bubble.
Wilford, Lauren, and Stevenson, Ryan. The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs. United States, ABRAMS, 2018. pp26
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Roald Dahl has a rare talent to be able to just invent these stories that have details and ideas in them that stick in people’s minds for decades and decades – that they never forget.
– Wes AndersonThey need to no question, release this collection on Blu-Ray.
Floodlights and Goalposts 