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“Mother always had to say
the truth, sometimes to the point of embarrassment. The phone would ring, and she would pick up. We all
trembled — because maybe it was somebody we didn't want to talk to —whisper, whisper — so you would say 'can you call later, leave a message
she is not here.' Mother couldn’t even lie to do this — not the tinest white lie. It
was always 'don't make her answer the phone, don’t make her do anything because she always told the truth'. ‘My daughter does not want to talk to you..’ And yet
she would do this with a naivety, an innocence, that she had. I always felt
like my mother was partly my daughter too; I'm much stronger than her; so I was
very protective of her. She was so shy, so painfully shy, more a New Yorker than American.”
— Isabella Rossellini on her mother, who would have turned 100 today, from an interview I conducted in 2010
'Freeman
is that undefeatable quarry: the merry philistine. Cultural tastes being the
last refuge for the snobberies and attendant anxieties that used to attached
themselves to class in Britain, there is great value in a genuine passion that
horrifies the room for a writer as punchy and vivacious as Freeman. And decades
don’t come much more horrifying than the eighties. The sixties always knew they
were cool. The seventies have received
their revisionist due. But the go-getting, greed-is-good, need-for-speed eighties,
when producer John Peters, “the man who once permed Yentl’s hair commanded the kind
of respect once accorded to Robert Altman”? There’s one lovely moment near the
start of her book when Freeman phones up Peter Biskind, the king of seventies
revisionism and all things Altmanesque, for advice. “You should really writer
about Salvador,” he tells her.
“That’s a fascinating film.” She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that by
“eighties cinema” she doesn’t mean Oliver Stone’s piercing disquisition on
American foreign policy in Latin America, but Three Men and Baby. “I
love the silliness of eighties movies, their sweetness, the stirring music, “
she writes, “I adore montages and anyone who doesn't thrill to a power ballad
is lying to themselves” — from my review of Hadley Freeman's Life Moves Pretty Fast for the New Statesman
'The rules of the apartment were simple: never go out, except when supervised by Oscar. Never talk to strangers. And never go into the rooms which shared adjacent walls with neighbors — the living room and the one the boys called the ‘attic’— without permission. “Movies were our window to the outside,” says Narayana, the second eldest. Like all his brothers he is exceedingly polite, with a placid, thoughtful demeanor that bespeaks a childhood spent largely in his own head, but with a wilder performative side that first manifested itself in lavish at-home re-enactments of all their favorite movies — Reservoir Dogs, Lord of the Rings, the Dark Knight — complete with astonishingly detailed home-made costumes and props fashioned from cereal boxes and yoga mats. “Sometimes I think of a lot of our childhood as the Shawshank Redemption, where he says that there is that one place where they can't build walls around, one place that has no cages or cells, one part in you they could never touch. That's hope. And that's one place they can never get to. In our head, we could go wherever we wanted.” This is how they all speak, I realize when I meet the brothers for breakfast one morning for breakfast outside a cafe in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, not far from the family apartment: Describing their inner lives they can often sound like they are pitching a movie. They are lovely lot on all number of counts, not least the seemingly decisive answer they seem to give to the oft-asked question “what happens to the human psyche on an uninterrupted diet of Quentin Tarantino movies, heavy metal and pizza?” The answer is rather more hopeful than you might think. By turns fascinating and fascinated, shy, smart, garrulous, charming, and thoughtful, the Angulo brothers give feral a good name.' — from my interview with the Wolfpack in The Daily Telegraph
'The actress Greta Gerwig has
had same liberating effect for Noah Baumbach what Diane Keaton had for Woody
Allen: she has opened him up, lending his films a giddy sense of release. Like
Allen, Bambauch’s tendencies are eeyoreish: his characters, in films such as Greenberg and Margot at the Wedding, hyper-articulate injustice collectors who play their nerves
like violins. But Frances
Ha, Baumbach’s first film with Gerwig in 2012, about a young woman trying
to find her footing in Manhattan, inhaled deeply of the French nouvelle vague — with it’s black
and white cinematography, Georges Delerue on the soundtrack — and outlined in sketch form, a new type of screen heroine, a sort of Annie
Hall for millenials: absent-minded, free-spirited and a little dizzy, half in
love with her own failures, lolloping from one humiliation to the next as if
they confirmed her refusal to join the adult world. The new film fills out the
sketch, and adds a spirit of screwball farce — Howard Hawks for the sexting
set. There’s a still a hint of menace at
the edges, but Gerwig’s loopy spirit has been allowed to fashion a whole world
for her heroine, and the result is more of a piece — it hums and fizzes with
the fitful energies of twentysomethings pushing excitedly forward into the
world and holding back lest it take a bite out of them. Gerwig gives us a ditz in the manner of Carole Lombard
and Judy Holliday but viewed with a touch more sad-sack pitilessness. Dressed
in clothes that resemble a child’s raid on her aunts closet, Brooke seems
permanently stuck at 21, too busy taking mental selfies of herself having eureka!
moments to follow-through on any one of them. An interior designer who also
dabbles in Soul-Cycle classes, she nurses plans for a Williamsburg restaurant
called Moms, where she would also cut hair and teach cookery. Oh and it would
also function as a community centre for like-minded lost souls. All this is
delivered in a breathless tumble, with lots of waving as if she forgotten she
had hands or where she last put them. "I'm gonna shorten that, punch it up, and turn it into a tweet",’ she
says, crossing the street, but even a
tweet sounds beyond her — requiring too much follow-through.' — from my review for Intelligent Life
1. The Wolfpack
2. Mistress America
3. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
4. Listen To Me Marlon
5. Inside Out
6. The Look of Silence
7. Mad Max: Fury Road
8. While We're Young
9. Ex Machina
10. It Follows
'The suspicion that the rest of mankind is lying to you is a keen insight in an actor and, at the same time, a recipe for great personal unhappiness. “The most mistrustful man I’ve ever met and the most watchful,” said the screenwriter Stewart Stern of Marlon Brando, a man who raised screen acting to new levels of truthfulness but recoiled from offers of love or friendship as if they were a lie. It’s not that he was gifted but troubled. The gifts were the trouble. Brando saw through everything. “The face can hide many things,” he says in a new documentary, “Listen to Me Marlon”, directed by Stevan Riley and drawing on 300 hours of personal tapes found in the actor’s Beverly Hills home, in which Brando ruminates on his fame, his talent, his failings as a father, voicing regret for a life he feels to have been largely wasted. “I searched but never found what I was looking for,” he confides in that familiar, plummy rasp, like King Lear with a head cold. “Mine was a glamorous life but completely unfulfilling.” The tapes are a performance, too, of course, maybe one of Brando’s best—by turns bawdy, wounded, sentimental, self-pitying, bewildered—much of it teetering on the edge of pseudo-philosophical profundity, like Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now”. “All of you are actors, and good actors, because you’re all liars,” he says at one point. “You lie for peace, you lie for tranquility, you lie for love.” Newly arrived in New York with holes in his socks, Brando would position himself on Manhattan street corners, collecting faces as they passed, trying to divine their hidden thoughts and feelings. Faces were masks for Brando, and the film turns his into one too, using a series of Cyberware scans he had made of his face before his death to re-animate him into a floating head. We first see it, rotating and fritzing like a radio signal from beyond the grave, reciting the “sound and fury signifying nothing” soliloquy from “Macbeth”. The effect is spooky, shamanistic—powerful enough to give you goose bumps.' — From my review for Intelligent Life
'There’s been
a demob-happy, end-of-school looseness to Jon Stewart as he counts down the
days to his final show on Thursday night. For one thing he has been counting, with
undisguised glee, blowing kisses to Donald Trump not just for being a gift from
the gods — “comedy entrapment” as he put it — but for helping push
him across the finishing line. The restlessness he gave as a reason for leaving
the show has started to show itself, and the raggedness has only further fuelled
his candor. Doing a bit on Mike Huckabee’s characterization of Obama’s Iran
deal as marching Israel “to the door of the ovens,” Stewart bypassed words
altogether, miming slack-jawed amazement, eye-popping incredulity and
Scooby-doo befuddlement (“Urrgh?”) in what amounted to a small masterclass
of silent clowning. The idea for the bit seemed to come from Stewart’s dismay
at having to write another eye-rolling
commentary for another burst of
Republican crazy-talk, depletion forcing further invention from him. Exhausted,
he still riffs, in part because exhaustion is the correct response to a country
in which a deal aimed at limiting the spread of nuclear weapons is compared the
holocaust. American pop-culture success is dependent on
doing two things extremely well: a very complicated thing and a very simple
thing. The complicated thing that Stewart did well has been the subject of the
many tributes comparing him to Edward R Murrow and A J Libeling. Stewart combed the broadcast pronouncements
of America’s public figures, painstakingly researching their inconsistencies
and teasing out their humbug in video montages that made their hypocrisy seem
almost self-evident, then sat in frank, eye-rolling amazement at the
low-hanging fruit with which he seemed to have been presented. By the end, so
primed were the audience for his mugging that he shaved it down to the most
minimal of expressions: a cocked eyebrow, a look of deadpan despair, a jowly
double take. Like Sloppy in Dickens Our Mutual Friend, he could “do the
police in different voices” tending to
a small barnyard of favorite impressions, reducing Dick Cheney to a
single quack, Bush to a Mutley-esque laugh (“heh-heh-heh”), and Trump to de
Niro-esque New Joisey thug.' — from my farewell to Jon Stewart for The Economist
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