Finished Panegyric: Volumes 1 & 2 by Guy Debord

One Battle After Another (2025), in VistaVision 35 mm. Scene report from 11:00 PM showing: projection went black two times early on, but the projectionist fully recovered! 🎞️ I was surprised by how similar VV felt to IMAX 70 mm, with its squarish frame and incredible quality

I had this question about VistaVision several years ago, and now that the format is back, I was wondering ... When Vertigo was in its original theatrical run, did the great majority of people just see it projected in standard 35? How many theaters could show a VistaVision print?

Finished Joseph Conrad's "Youth" & The End of the Tether. Tether is a stark depiction of what money is like with no assets to your name: you gamble what little you have on yourself, and a life of labor is rewarded only by the terror of making money in old age to fund your old age

MacGruber (2010), DCP. Famously a favorite of DGA president Christopher Nolan. (I didn't like it, but I did love the recurring gag where MacGruber takes his stereo/tape deck with him every time he gets out of his car, mainly because I'm old enough to get it)

Cat People (1982), in 35 mm. I love how it succeeds as a monster film, a horror film, a supernatural film, an erotic art film. Will ignore the MoMA audience's full-blown laughter 🫥

Hot Pepper (1973), DCP. As always, Les Blank distills so much wisdom and audiovisual poetry and life into < 60 min

Finished A Smile of Fortune by Joseph Conrad, from the 1910s like "The Secret Sharer" and The Shadow-Line, and written with the same melancholy (beautiful) voice. He casually starts sentences like: "But, living in a world more or less homicidal and desperately mercantile ..."

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), in 35 mm. I continue to collect these Fassbinder compositions!

Belle of the Nineties (1934), DCP. Who else could deliver "His mother should've thrown him away and kept the stork" but Mae West? Also, was looking at what I've seen in McCarey's filmography. A great reminder of the range!

Man Ray: When Objects Dream, @metmuseum.org

Histoires d'Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989), DCP. For the opening weekend of their complete Akerman series, MoMA got Sonia Wieder-Atherton to play a few cello pieces at the top of the program, and she cross-faded the last one into the opening titles of the film 👌

Finished Balzac's The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Bold to spend the 1st 20% on a detailed outline of the class system! "Almost all these men are shriveled in the furnace of affairs. And a man who lets himself be caught in the gears of these immense machines can never become great"

Dunkirk (2017), fifth time in any 70 mm, third in 5/70 mm. This rewatch was really moving and bumped the film to Nolan's top tier for me. His braided chronologies, at different speeds, are both his structural showmanship and a thematic emphasis of his characters' fated crossings

Silver Bears (1977), in 35 mm. A crash course in money, banking, the stock market, capital, and capitalism. I don't even think anything had to be exaggerated—that's just ... actually how it works

Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleeker [sic] St in New York City on 14th day of February for Woody Guthrie 🥹

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), in 35 mm. The multi-story cross-sectional set is one of the coolest things Wes Anderson has created. And when he tracks Murray and Wilson through it as they ascend to the deck ... 👌

Finished Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky (tr. P&V). In the first section, I thought that this would be a book that only moody teenagers would enjoy now. It was partially redeemed by all the moments in Part II where I was like Ahhhhh shit he just like me fr

Apocalypse Now (1979), in 35 mm, 2001 Redux cut. I didn't know that they made IB Technicolor prints this late in the game—apparently the final years for the process! My first watch of any version. With whatever expectations (cautious?), still awestruck, phew

Clueless (1995), fourth time, second in 35 mm. Heckerling and Silverstone created such a fully formed character that, where other high school movies (like 10 Things or Easy A—both good films!) end up leaning on stylized, self-consciously clever dialogue,

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), third time, second in 35 mm Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), fourth time, third in 35 mm - The print of Vol. 1 that's playing at Film Forum is missing almost all of its subtitles! 😱 - My favorite Tarantino. All-timers for me. Just pure joy in every chapter

I never knew this building in the West Village was a branch of NYPL: the Jefferson Market Library. I was looking for a branch open on Sundays (and closer to me than the flagship locations in Midtown) Like Anthology, the building used to be a courthouse and has a spiral staircase

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), DCP. First Bollywood film I've ever seen!

Finished Erik Baker's Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. As someone who's been on a capitalistic career ladder for most of my life, this book revealed a little TOO much about the Kool-Aid I drink every day to feel like everything's fine 😬

Finished The Bear, season 4. "The businesses in the world that give the most amount of joy—try to, anyway, right ... Unfortunately they're all just shitty-ass businesses"

Husbands (1970), 2nd time in 35 mm. Hard to talk about this film without going long, but as someone who's pretty close to JC's age when he made this, I think he truly gets the deficiencies of American masculinity and the behavioral rituals we adopt as (weak) counterbalance (1/3)

Miami Blues (1990), in 35 mm. Actually felt like Something Wild in its mix of tones, with comedy and real menace sharing the screen. (I think I would've felt this even without being primed by Demme's and Fujimoto's credits.) And this era of Fred Ward, '80s into '90s, was glorious

Bad Boys (1995), second time, first in 35 mm. It always amused me how Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz is so obsessed with Bad Boys *II* specifically. It made me misremember the original as scrappy and low-key when Michael Bay's camera was already frenetically swooping in his debut feature

Finished Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Just like in Jesus' Son and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Johnson mixes the earthy, indiscriminate brutality of life with the humor in it and, ultimately, with some form of transcendence. One of the masters of short fiction

Nashville (1975), 2nd time in 35 mm - The emotions spanned from Chaplin to Tomlin (and many in btwn) for "Since You've Gone" + "I'm Easy"—what a convergence of people and reactions, brilliantly orchestrated - Ronee Blakley's "Dues" is one of the best musical performances in film

Kundun (1997), in 35 mm. "I thought he would be some kind of monster, even with horns growing out of his head. But he is only a man, just an ordinary human being, like myself"

A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, Morgan Library. Highlights: - Manuscript pages of Lady Susan ("only complete fiction manuscript of Austen's to survive") - Manuscript pages of The Watsons (unfinished) - 1st ed. of Northanger Abbey + Persuasion, published together, posthumously

Saw Clipse at Terminal 5. Very cool to hear "Chains & Whips" (best song of the year so far?), and "The Birds Don't Sing" is quite an emotional experience live

Dying (1976), DCP. Some of the most intimate moments you could possibly capture of a person's life (Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and broadcast on public television, by the way‼️)

Nothing but a Man (1964), in 35 mm. Oh man, I slept on this for too long. What a wise, sad film. Essential viewing

Street Angel (1928), DCP. Did Gaynor and Farrell ever make a lighthearted romp together? Because after this and 7th Heaven, I just want them to be happy 😭 B&W cinematography in the final act is extraordinary. Thank you, MoMA [Preceded by a short, Ko-Ko's Hot Dog (1928)]

The Plot Against Harry (1969), in 35 mm. Gonna try to catch all of Michael Roemer's five features in this Anthology series—all new to me

To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), in 35 mm. The heights of Robby Müller's photography are matched only by the heights of William Petersen's cockiness, pitched to levels I'd never seen before. Even the way he just props his leg up on a chair made the theater laugh

Eureka (1983), in 35 mm. Weakest of the five Roeg features I've seen. The first 20 minutes led me to believe I could be in for a Bad Timing-level classic, but the awkward writing is too distracting and dominates over Roeg's signature jolts and juxtapositions

Dream of Light/The Quince Tree Sun (1992), in 35 mm. Reminded of how, for Winter Light, Sven Nykvist learned the sun's journey across the day inside a church—but here, vigilance over seasonal shifts adds a peaceful recognition of mortality. (Conrad: "the intensity of existence")

Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), DCP, preceded by Two Solutions for One Problem (1975). I like Memories as a document, but for the personal amidst history, I'd rather rewatch Hiroshima mon amour or (probably unfair, because they have different concerns) I Am Cuba

Offside (2006), in (DV to) 35 mm. Love how Panahi captures both the communal processing of a live event through the radio, audio only (I'm nostalgic for this limitation), as well as a breakout celebration in the streets—one of the best experiences you can have as a city dweller

Finished Typhoon by Joseph Conrad, along with "Falk," "Amy Foster," and a reread of "The Secret Sharer" After these and The Shadow-Line, Conrad is a new favorite. I'm too slow to be a completist, but I'll try to get to his "major phase" (e.g., Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes) soon!

Crimson Gold (2003), DCP. A felicitous pairing with Pain & Gain yesterday (!), in that a close encounter with a single person of obscene wealth, where you can fully and concretely process what the wealth disparity entails for your divergent lives, would indeed one-shot anybody

Pain & Gain (2013), in 35 mm - Only time I've ever liked the 🪨 - Wahlberg is Boogie Nights-adjacent and therefore good - Good Bay - The way Bay's camera permeates walls while circumambulating two adjoining rooms echoes a sequence in Bad Boys II, where it's even more ostentatious

Scarface (1983), in 35 mm. "Okay, now that's $800,000. With that kind of money, you can buy the Supreme Court" got a big chuckle from the theater 🫠

Caddyshack (1980), in 35 mm. Oof, none of this worked for me at all. Something major is not translating across generations

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), in 35 mm. Amused that a decent chunk of the movie is solving New York transit puzzles ("72nd St. to Wall St. during the daytime in < 30 min without the 2/3, noooo ...")

The Circle (2000), in 35 mm. I hadn't seen any of Panahi's work from before the 2010 ban. His long takes remind me a little bit of the approach in Code Unknown, same year, in the way that they can draw out power imbalances to the point of desperation. A genuinely courageous man

Rosa la rose, fille publique (1986). This is the second restoration of Vecchiali that I've seen; Anthology showed The Strangler in 2023, the year that he passed. Rosa la rose somehow manages to be matter-of-fact, warmly sympathetic, and coldly tragic all at the same time