Much consternation at the Nitrate Picture Show for choosing Veit Harlan’s The Journey to Tilset as the blind screening. I think this was a bold and brilliant decision, for reasons I hope I can elaborate on elsewhere.

They should make the jalapeños spicy again IMO

Another IFFR in the books. 8 days, 31 screenings, and about as many glasses of white wine and hours of sleep. Best film I saw was this avant-garde masterpiece. boxd.it/l0la

Londoners…if you’re cool and free this evening, HMU! I’m in town, one night only.

We need a list of the top eccentric dudes in Bob Dylan songs. The Dancing Child in a Chinese Suit, the Diplomat Who Carried On His Shoulder a Siamese Cat, The Hysterical Bride in the Penny Arcade—These folks had very little representation in popular music before Dylan.

RIP to Garth Hudson, who was the last living member of The Band. Always loved what he did for Like A Rolling Stone on both the ‘66 and ‘74 tours. Here he is on the latter. open.spotify.com/track/68qKGz...

Apparently this makes me something of a rube among the intellectual commentariat but I actually don’t think that combining things an actor did in different takes or moving them around a scene is the same as making it sound like an actor does something they don’t actually do.

I think TP:TR being 18 hours has made people overlook this, but: Lynch spent most of the 21st c. unable to get funding. At a certain point he seemed to give up entirely on getting a feature funded. Lynch! The best US filmmaker of the last 50 years! What is the industry good for?

David Lynch was probably the greatest, most inventive Hollywood(ish) filmmaker since the Golden Age. His films were infused with an enormous belief in the unique emotional truths sound & image could access but a keen awareness of the dark side of all forms of escapism. RIP, king.

It's unfathomable how bad the IFFR website is. If the description "a kaleidoscopic all-archival exploration of the work of intrepid mid-century utopian neuroscientist John C. Lilly" doesn't compel you to click, you wouldn't know it's Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens!

One of the funniest things to ever happen

The fires show that some widely inhabited parts of the country are simply not safe to inhabit. We can’t rebuild there and need to relocate people to safer parts of the country. That this is getting buried beneath other fights doesn’t bode well for how we deal with/prevent future climate disasters.

Incendiary live cut of Dylan’s best Born-Again song. You’d have to be Blind Willie McTell to be a better guitar player than Mike Bloomfield! open.spotify.com/track/2MsI60...

Folks are not appreciating A Complete Unknown enough. For the first time, men everywhere can talk to their girlfriends about Dylan without watching their eyes glaze over. This is Chalamet’s doing. In a month or two, when the world has moved on, you’ll realize how good you had it.

I’ve always supported congestion pricing because it will cause fewer people to drive in Manhattan and will raise some money for the MTA, but it never occurred to me that it would also give us the privilege of watching the tri-state’s biggest narcissists have meltdowns.

🎶Man to woman Or woman to man? Man to woman🎶

For those attending IFFR 2025 (hi!), here’s what’s screening on film. Cinema Regained: The Red Badge of Courage La Nott’e’l giorno Focus: Through Cinema...: Ballad of the Cart Short/Mid-Length: Am Telefon Milena Fina A Patriot of These Woods 2020 Unearthed The Individual Skeyesee Razorhead

People who booed Dylan for going electric are always mocked for their myopia but I think if you listen to popular guitar music from before July 1965 and then listen to what Mike Bloomfield does on “Maggie’s Farm” at Newport it’s actually easy to see why it broke so many brains.

My mother-in-law keeps talking about parents who have someone dressed up as The Grinch enter the house during their gift exchange and start taking away the presents from children and she doesn’t understand why I think this is hilarious.

Quite the year I had

Just hearing about the death of the great Shyam Benegal. Ankur: The Seedling is a remarkable film, and Mandi (Market Place) is not far behind. R.I.P. to a still-underrecognized great.

Watched Juror #2 yesterday. Really good script (albeit a bit on-the-nose at times). Visually undistinguished (some will no doubt exalt it as “classical”). Good anyway! Once upon a time we got 100 Hollywood movies a year as good as this one but now we get 3, so it seems special.

Does anyone I know ride for Jacques Audiard? Retrospectives in NY and LA, now another at the Santa Barbara FF. To me he’s the guy who made a movie I liked in high school (A Prophet) and then some festival garbage whose acclaim befuddles me (Rust & Bone, Dheepan, Emilia Perez).

The WNBA is fumbling Caitlin Clark like it’s one of her teammates trying to catch her passes.

Is the best needle drop of the year (non-“Evergreen” division) “Dirty Boots” in Last Summer?

Probably gonna delete this but if we actually think prison sentences are too long, too many people go to prison, etc. we need to be honest about what that means. An awful corrupt judge already under home confinement due to age getting off after 13 years instead of 17 is fine.

So how exactly did a new consensus emerge around 1999 as the “best movie year” over, say, 1974 or 1960 or (yes) 1939?

Jotted down some thoughts on Dersu Uzala and they came out sounding a bit more negative than I feel about the film, but regardless: letterboxd.com/forrestc/fil...

I am also available for 15 years at the price of $765M.

I think I inadvertently sparked a Discourse yesterday, so I feel the need to clarify that I actually do kind of like Nosferatu, and I admire a lot about Eggers as a director. His films are still a bit self-conscious and underbaked to me, but he'll make a great movie one day (more than one, in fact).

Dave Eggers's Nosferatu, like Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things before it, poses the question, "what is the point of shooting on 35mm if you're just going to make it look like that in the DI?"

lol

The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” should have a verse at the end from the guy’s point of view

This got a lot more engagement on Twitter, including from Brody and JRo; it’s gonna take a lot to convince me this site has the juice.

So since everyone is taking stock at the halfway mark, it's been a pretty weak decade for cinema so far, right?

Can’t believe I spent half a month in one of the coldest inhabited parts of the earth and now that I’m back in New York it’s even colder.

7 Women is a miracle; one of Ford’s greatest. Its continued unavailability in good quality is a blight on film culture. Print had focus issues (maybe just projection?), was a bit scratchy, and a brightness issue on reel 2, but was by no means bad.

@cadenmgardner.bsky.social @willowcatelyn.bsky.social Spotted in the Helsinki Central Library!

There is absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing, even berating, the prose of a 6000 word reported Vanity Fair feature. Doesn’t matter how old the writer is or if they’ve published before. It has gone through many checks. Presitigious publications ought to be judged on merit!

Blessed to be in Helsinki on the day they are screening this

Did not expect that Dechen Roder’s follow-up to Honeygiver Among the Dogs would have a Bhutanese language cover of Tom Waits’s Sixteen Shells From a Thirty-Ought Six, but that’s why we love the cinema.

Eagle-eyed Tarkovsky heads will recognize this passageway as the entrance to The Zone

Everyone around me is yappin I just wanna watch movies

It’s getting cold, and you know what that means: time to stuff my hands into my coat pockets and pull out receipts and tickets for all the cool stuff I did last year.

Since all the cool kids are doing it…favorite movie of each year I’ve been alive

all the dumb things in The Substance, of which there are many, the dumbest—by far—is the billboard advertising the New Year’s Eve Show that says “tomorrow” on it.

My most sincere belief is that unless you are a Yankee fan you should always root against them. If you are a CHC or STL fan you should root for the other against the Yanks. Giants and Dodgers fans should support the other against the Yanks.

Extremely happy to present the first Catalyst and Witness 2024 festival dispatch for the 62nd New York Film Festival, the first ever one in person, featuring a roundtable of myself, @fcardamenis.bsky.social, and @jacksoncity.bsky.social! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

@filipefurtado.bsky.social How is this film? Worth watching on 35mm later this afternoon? boxd.it/Lzw

Checking in on Bluesky for the first time in a while to share some of my best writing, please indulge me. I wrote about old movies, traveling around the world to watch them, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, and necrophilia. mubi.com/en/notebook/...