Manly Footwear: It’s so easy to make fun of this movie, and so tempting, even while watching it, that it’s even easier to forget how really successful it is. I almost wrote, “how great it is,” but that would require considerable redefinition of the word “great” in the context of the other movies on this … Read more
Manly Footwear: Comfortina asked if this movie, like so many we’ve already watched, was about a descent into madness. I said I couldn’t remember, I wasn’t even sure I’ve ever seen the whole thing, but probably—we then checked the list, and of the films we recognized, MANY were about people descending into madness. We talked … Read more
Manly Footwear: This is the first of several movies on the list that I have seen so many times, and is such a part of the motion picture ecosystem, I worried I would not be able to see it clearly. And I was right, it is all but impossible to separate all the other times … Read more
Manly Footwear: We went to see Amanda Palmer perform in Toronto the weekend that we watched this film, and I wondered if some of the points she made—about the absence of female songwriting icons in the 1980s, for example—would be part of the way I viewed A Woman Under the Influence now, since I have already seen it … Read more
Manly Footwear: my complaint about Blowup’s main character being an asshole and thus ruining the movie watching experience for me might need a bit of refining, since I love Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and the main character is an insane, murderous colonizer who soothes himself with visions of the incestuous empire he will found with his daughter. But … Read more
Manly Footwear: This was the first film on our list that I have seen multiple times, and I can’t say quite why, since I have never sought it out until now. Directed by Michael Antonioni in 1966, Blowup features a parade of 60’s mod cons, stylish camera work, a darting narrative that MacGuffins everything in … Read more
Manly: Chris Marker built this movie from other films, and from his own 16mm clips taken on travels to Japan and Guinea-Bisseau, as well as some from Iceland, San Francisco, Cape Verde, Ireland, and France. A voice-over, letters from an imaginary traveler named Sandor Kressna (read by Alexandra Stewart), weaves in and out and around … Read more
I started this blog so I could listen to all the CDs I own, one at a time, and write about them, after my wife asked me why I had so many of the damn things. I got up to 888, and then I packed them all away because we thought we might move again. … Read more
I started clearing away brush and piles of dead leaves so I could move our compost bins yesterday. That this is what concerns me now seems odd, or at least not the kind of activity I would have predicted for myself twenty years ago. I was not raised on a farm, or even in a … Read more
Good lord, my previous post to this blog was last year, in October. I have been elsewhere, apparently. I was here: Medium, the Operating System, thanks to the kind invitation of Jared Schickling. And I was here: Rockvale Review, and I was many other places, but too often I was working on other people’s projects … Read more