On the essays shelf:
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
A couple things.
The following is Hitchens’ review of the German film The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), which obviously was right in Hitchens’ wheelhouse. He called it one of the best films of the year. It portrayed the cultish and manic properties of the terrorist group operating in West Germany known as the Red Army Faction, or, more commonly, the Baader Meinhof Group/Gang. It is a completely insular look at how that group thought, and the word “belljar” doesn’t even begin to cover it. The film is phenomenal, and really captures the whole thing in a way that is stressful and enraging. People got “caught up” in it, and at a certain point (and there’s the rub, because when is that point?) they turned off their critical thinking skills, their moral compasses, and submitted to the group. There’s a reason why this political organization is now known in psychological circles as the Baader Meinhof Phenomenon, or Complex.
I knew that a couple of people had recommended the movie to me in a comments section here but I couldn’t remember when or why so I did a search and found the post. Not surprisingly, it was a post I wrote about Patty Hearst’s abduction and indoctrination into the Symbionese Liberation Army (as Joan Didion so devastatingly summed them up: “one ex-convict and five children of the middle class.”) Brainwashing and cults have always held a fascination for me, since I was a kid, really, as strange as that may seem. Not to get too woo-woo about it, but I wonder if I knew somewhere that something was wrong with my brain, even when I was a kid. I mean, I remember clearly some pretty intense moments of dissociation as early as 8 years old. I don’t know. So how the brain works, its strengths and also its ultimate fragility – the fact that it can be changed, molded, up-ended – fascinated me and terrified me. Where was I susceptible? I FELT like I was Me, and that nobody could change that, but all the reading I did about cults made me question that (as well it should). There’s a reason why I have devoted time and energy to trying to infiltrate a certain cult, going to meetings, and taking private tours, and talking to people, and it’s all been quite elaborate and I finally had to stop doing it. Mainly because the cult began to implode before my very eyes. I couldn’t believe it. People were getting out AND they were talking about it. But whatever the reason, I wanted to see how “they” would try to brainwash me. I wanted to experience it for myself.
Life on the Wild Side, by Sheila O’Malley.
Anyway, Todd and Dan both recommended that I watch The Baader Meinhof Complex, because it dovetailed with what I was talking about in regards to Patty Hearst. I took them up on it, and was totally wowed by the film.
I highly recommend it.
Hitchens reviews the film, but, in typical Hitchens style, he also talks about the background of that time, the landscape from which groups like the Red Army Faction and, also, the Red Brigade in Italy (so memorably portrayed in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers
It reminds me of Running on Empty, obviously inspired by the Weather Underground. Both parents (Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti) have gone underground to escape the FBI. They are Wanted for blowing up a chem lab on a college campus and blinding a janitor who, as Lahti says to her stern father (Steven Hill), “He wasn’t supposed to be there.” They have two young sons who are raised on the run, having to dye their hair and change their names from town to town. The glorious days of the 60s and early 70s are over, and now the radical parents have to satisfy themselves with activism like organizing protests against waste dumps and nuclear reactors. When one of their old “colleagues” (played, chillingly, and perfectly, by L.M. Kit Carson) shows up one day, with a trunk full of guns, wanting to pull off a bank robbery just like the good old days … it highlights the schism in the group, as it was, but also highlights the hypocrisy of everyone involved. Kit Carson sneers at Lahti and Hirsch – “You think you’re better than me?” They aren’t. Lahti knows it more than Hirsch. And all of this is complicated by the fact that they are now parents. And how do they teach their sons right from wrong if they are living such horrendous lies on a casual everyday basis. There’s a lot in that film about the mindset of radical groups and how disoriented everyone must have been when “things” calmed down and there wasn’t a clear enemy anymore, like Nixon, or the Vietnam War.
More than Running on Empty, The Baader Meinhof Complex is about the MINDSET (“complex” being in the title), and it’s a completely destabilizing and fascinating experience, the film.
Here’s the trailer.
And, of course because I went down the rabbit hole after I first saw the film, here’s a 1969 interview with Ulrike Meinhof before she went underground.
Now I am no psychologist. But she sounds like she’s reciting a well-rehearsed script. It’s classic cult behavior. Flat affect. Monotone. Like Patty Hearst’s first telephone message during her abduction.
There’s a lot more out there about the group, tons of footage, and it’s riveting. There are still new developments coming out. It now appears that the cop who shot the guy at the protest, the protest that really got the whole thing started, was a provocateur, an informer for the legendary Stasi. He was also a member of the East German Communist Party. So, it certainly adds color and strangeness to an already strange story. Not that the whole thing was orchestrated somehow, although I suppose you could see it that way too. It’s a very paranoid topic. Also, a couple of the members of the group who survived eventually went full-on Neo-Nazi, ranting and raving professional anti-Semites. Just to complete the Circle of Madness.
When I was in Belfast, I was talking once to the guy I was staying with, who had been in the IRA. Older than me. So he had been around since the 60s and 70s. Talk about your paranoid atmosphere. I have never been anywhere as paranoid as Belfast. (I called my friend from the train station and asked her for directions. Here is part of what she said. It is, hands-down, the best Direction ever given to me, and the Irish are notorious for their awesome directions. Welcome to Belfast.) My friend’s husband, the man I mentioned above, had been in prison for almost 20 years, knew Bobby Sands (we all visited his grave together – INTENSE), was on the blanket protest. And strange coincidence, I was in Ireland with my family in the early 80s, when my Dad took us all out of school and moved us there for his sabbatical. We were there while the blanket protest was going on. So it was just weird, to be talking with this man, knowing that while I was bitching and moaning about having to visit another graveyard or Abbey, he was in prison up North. Moving on. I was staying with the family where they lived, on the Falls Road no less, so you can imagine the atmosphere. The neighborhood where people paint enormous guns on the sides of their houses. Anyway, he and his wife went through a pretty serious break with the new IRA, because they both dared to criticize the group’s tactics as well as the group’s world-famous leader (my friends have both been in international news recently and it’s been extremely tense watching it all go down). And he said to me, in his thick Belfast accent, “Some of these kids joining up now … They’ve got nothing else going on in their lives. I think they just like blowing shit up. They have no politics. They have no brains. They’re thugs who like explosives.”
Anyway, take that for what it’s worth. If there’s one thing I learned in Belfast, it’s that shit runs deep, and people’s memories go back for generations, and there’s a clusterfuck atmosphere of shared trauma that is unlike anything else I have ever experienced. I worry about my friends in the thick of it, but both of them have made careers out of being loud-mouthed truth tellers. And their “apostasy” from the IRA mindset (for that was how it was treated) was seen as the ultimate betrayal, when really, it was just that they could think for themselves still.
The whole concept of Groups, and how they behave, is one of endless fascination to me, and The Baader Meinhof Complex is an awesome portrayal of what that looks/feels like from the paranoid inside.
Edited to add: My cousin Liam just posted this image on his Facebook page, tagging me. I can’t stop laughing.
Here’s an excerpt from Hitchens’ review.
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
It doesn’t take long for the sinister ramifications of the “complex” to become plain. Consumerism is equated with Fascism so that the firebombing of department stores can be justified. Ecstatic violence and “action” become ends in themselves. One can perhaps picture Ulrike Meinhof as a “Red” resister of Nazism in the 1930s, but if the analogy to that decade is allowed, then it is very much easier to envisage her brutally handsome pal Andreas Baader as an enthusiastic member of the Brownshirts. (The gang bought its first consignment of weapons from a member of Germany’s neo-Nazi underworld: no need to be choosy when you are so obviously in the right.) There is, as with all such movements, an uneasy relationship between sexuality and cruelty, and between casual or cynical attitudes to both. As if curtain-raising a drama of brutality that has long since eclipsed their own, the young but hedonistic West German toughs take themselves off to the Middle East in search of the real thing and the real training camps, and discover to their dismay that their Arab hosts are somewhat … puritanical.
This in turn raises another question, with its own therapeutic implications. Did it have to be the most extreme Palestinians to whom the Baader Meinhof gangsters gave their closest allegiance? Yes, it did, because the queasy postwar West German state had little choice but to be ostentatiously friendly with the new state of Israel, at whatever cost in hypocrisy, and this exposed a weakness on which any really cruel person could very easily play. You want to really, really taunt the grown-ups? Then say, when you have finished calling them Nazis, that their little Israeli friends are really Nazis, too. This always guarantees a hurt reaction and a lot of press.
Researching this in the late 1970s in Germany, I became convinced that the Baader Meinhof phenomenon actually was a form of psychosis. One of the main recruiting grounds for the gang was an institution at the University of Heidelberg called the Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv, or Socialist Patients Collective, an outfit that sought to persuade the pitifully insane that they needed no treatment save social revolution. (Such a reading of the work of R. D. Laing and others was one of the major “disorders” of the 1960s.) Among the star pupils of this cuckoo’s nest was Ralf Reinders, who was arrested after reveal violent “actions” and who had once planned to destroy the Jewish House in Berlin – a restoration of the one gutted by the Brownshirts – “in order to get rid of this thing about the Jews that we’ve all had to have since the Nazi time.” Yes, “had to have” is very good. Perhaps such a liberating act, had he brought it off, would have made some of the noises in his head go away.
The Baader Meinhof Complex, like the excellent book by Stefan Aust on which it is based, is highly acute in its portrayal of the way in which mania feeds upon itself and becomes hysterical. More arrests mean that more hostages must be taken, often in concert with international hijackers, so that ever more exorbitant “demands” can be made. This requires money, which in turn demands more robbery and extortion. If there are doubts or disagreements within the organization, these can always be attributed to betrayal or cowardice, resulting in mini-purges and micro-lynchings within the gang itself. (The bleakest sequence of the film shows Ulrike Meinhof and her once seductive comrade Gudrun Ensslin raving hatefully at each other in the women’s maximum-security wing.) And lurking behind all this neurotic energy, and not always very far behind at that, is the wish for death and extinction. The last desperate act of the gang – a Götterdämmerung of splatter action, including a botched plane hijacking by sympathetic Palestinians and the murder of a senior German hostage – was the staging of a collective suicide in a Stuttgart jail, with a crude and malicious attempt (echoed by some crude and malicious intellectuals) to make it look as if the German authorities had killed the prisoners. In these sequences, the film is completely unsparing, just as it was in focusing the camera on official brutality in the opening scenes of more than ten years before.
Glad you liked it! Did you ever watch Carlos? Great companion piece to The Baader Meinhof Complex , with more of an emphasis on how one (amoral maybe sociopathic) individual develops a cult of personality rather than the group dynamics shown in BMC.
I haven’t seen it although I have been a tiny bit in love with Edgar Ramirez ever since Zero Dark Thirty. Another one for the list. It got great reviews as I recall.
Amoral? Sociopath? Cult of personality? Count me in.
Ooh! It’s streaming on Netflix right now!
Cool. There are several chopped down versions floating around, but for complete immersion I would recommend the full min-series.
Dan – my cousin Liam read this post and shared an image with me. I’ve added it to the post. I can’t stop laughing. It’s so surreal.
//You want to really, really taunt the grown-ups? Then say, when you have finished calling them Nazis, that their little Israeli friends are really Nazis, too. This always guarantees a hurt reaction and a lot of press.//
Way back in college I had a friend who was very much of the left, his father was a Communist Party member. I’d talk to him and, in order to understand something more of his mindset, at his recommendation I got a subscription to The Nation. I eventually became bored with it, since the magazine seemed at that point (early ’80’s, just as CH joined them) to have only articles about whether Zionism was Racism. Issue after issue. So Hitch had a long exposure to that sort of thing.
Yes, he talks a lot about that in his memoir!
That’s kind of a specific demographic to go after. “I really enjoy reading romance novels set in 1970’s left wing revolutionary violence. Kind of like Regency romances, only with bad hair and AKs.”
Isn’t that so bizarre?
// “I really enjoy reading romance novels set in 1970′s left wing revolutionary violence.” //
hahahaha
Watched Carlos yesterday – the almost 3-hour version. Fascinating. Edgar Ramirez is so so good! It was very interesting how the character didn’t change at all – if anything, he just got more domineering as the thing went on. And there was a loop-in with the Baader Meinhof Group – those Germans he worked with were from that same world! That crazy German woman who shot up the Swiss border guards! Nuts. I went on a Google frenzy afterwards, looking up all those people. And the Entebbe raid – what a crazy crazy time. I can’t even believe he busted up an OPEC meeting in the way he did. That was his moment of glory – and yet, of course, it all went wrong. But he didn’t see it that way.
I found it fascinating that the money seemed to start to be what he was fighting for. But he was so slippery morally that he was able to justify it. He would work for who paid him. That crazy German woman, Nada, screaming at him that she wasn’t a “bandit”, she was a “revolutionary” – I mean, she was out of her mind, and a murderer, but she had a point.
Thanks, Dan. It was really good.
So glad you saw this one! One of my favorite movies that I have seen in the past few years. I too am fascinated by this kind of story. Must see Carlos next.
Ever see “Z” Sheila?
Todd – thank you for the rec. It was so good.
I have not seen Z. Tell me about it.
Hi Sheila,
Z is one of my favorite movies. In that recent post on the Best Movies of the ’60s I ranked it second after Battle of Algiers (which I also highly recommend).
Released in 1969 and directed by Costa-Gavras, the movie is based on the real life 1963 political assassination in Greece of a deputy of the opposition party. The murder was made to look like an accident and was ultimately exposed in a massive government cover-up. The movie plays like a thriller, sort of like a Day of the Jackal mixed with All the President’s Men if you want an idea of the “feel” of the movie, and shows an entire society imploding. It’s a big, sweeping, exciting and deeply memorable film.
Baeder-Meinhoff reminded me of Z for several reasons, but particularly the way “group” behavior works, and how the actions of a group somehow take on a life of their own, and the group can do things together that no one member would be capable of bringing him or herself to do alone. I love that dynamic on both a societal level (Z, Battle of Algiers), and personal level (Bully, Alpha Dog). Baeder-Meinoff combined the best of both.
I also love the way movies can show the chain reaction of events, how decisions made now can have repercussions years or even decades later. I love the moment early in Baeder-Meinhoff when Ulrike Meinhoff jumps through the window after helping the RAF members escape incarceration, literally jumping into her own destiny. A decision that impacts both the rest of her life and the society at large. Z has some of that too.
Z won 2 Oscars (Best Editing, Best Foreign Language Film) and was nominated for 3 others (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay-adapted) at the 1970 Academy Awards.
The movie Z is still banned in Greece, so as with Baeder the story goes on today.
Ebert’s review has many spoilers but as usual is perfect in explaining the movies’ impact and craft.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/z-1969
This is one of those movies that I always champion because it seems like it is somewhat forgotten. Nobody needs me to tell them about Raiders of the Lost Ark or Pulp Fiction, but I LOVE being able to hopefully spread the word a little about a movie like Z.
It sounds kind of like the infamous murder of Kirov in the Soviet Union in 1934 – the leader of the CP in St. Petersberg, a popular Party bigwig, assassinated by some loser – who was just a hired hand – but it is now pretty much understood that the whole thing was engineered by Stalin as an excuse to start The Terror. 20 million died because of the murder of Kirov.
I don’t remember Ebert’s review – but I put Z on my queue and will read it after I see it.
Sounds right up my alley.
Amazing that it is still banned in Greece! Wow.
Thanks, Todd!
Love your example! Hell, World War I may not have started but for a wrong turn. Yeah, if you liked Baeder-Meinhoff, Z is a no-brainer.
from Wikipedia (almost 100 years ago exactly! Boy a LOT has happened since then!):
On 28 June 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. A group of six assassins (Cvjetko Popović, Gavrilo Princip, Muhamed Mehmedbašić, Nedeljko Čabrinović, Trifko Grabež, Vaso Čubrilović) from the nationalist group Mlada Bosna, supplied by the Black Hand, had gathered on the street where the Archduke’s motorcade would pass. Čabrinović threw a grenade at the car, but missed. It injured some people nearby, and Franz Ferdinand’s convoy could carry on. The other assassins failed to act as the cars drove past them quickly. About an hour later, when Franz Ferdinand was returning from a visit at the Sarajevo Hospital, the convoy took a wrong turn into a street where, by coincidence, Princip stood. With a pistol, Princip shot and killed Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.
Yes! And it was all just an EXCUSE really – for saber-rattling nations. Amazing!
Rebecca West’s description of the event are bone-chilling:
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=68819
And I really appreciate these recommendations, Todd. It’s sometimes disheartening to know how much I have “missed,” you know? And how many movies there are out there that I really need to see – but will I get to see them all?? Bah!
It’s my pleasure! You have been a wonderful resource for pointing me towards great films I have missed, especially for the classics, so if I can point out some foreign gems you may have missed it’s the least I can do. But yeah, we will never see everything, there are too many good ones, and more coming every week, and never enough time…I have learned to live with it!
Z should be coming to me this week – I’ll comment back here once I’ve seen it. Excited!
Yay!
Todd – Just saw “Z”. Holy hell.
I love this entire thread – because you and Dan, once again, have pointed me in the way of two incredible movies, right up my alley, with politics and sociopaths and revolution.
Please PLEASE continue.
I still can barely speak after seeing Z.
So glad you saw this one Sheila! It’s an amazing movie with an equally amazing history and legacy. Read Ebert’s review if you haven’t already. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Z, and I’m flattered that you are taking my recs! Z is a movie I could talk about all day….even just the structure of the film is unique and worthy of it’s own essay (changing protagonists and viewpoints, etc.).
My next rec for you would be The Battle of Algiers, which is a must for you if you haven’t seen it, and was the only movie of the 60s I ranked higher than Z in that recent post.
Here is my 60s list:
1. Battle of Algiers
2. Z
3. Seconds
4. Jules and Jim
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey
6. Dr. Strangelove
7. Lawrence of Arabia
8. Playtime
9. The Great Escape
10. Fail Safe
Oh yes, Battle of Algiers is awesome – I wrote up a little thing about it somewhere on my site. Just a paragraph or two. It’s amazing that that movie even EXISTS.
I read Ebert’s review – really good! The opening of the film AND that ending – wow.
I love the final sequence with the generals being ushered out one by one, and each one tries to go out the wrong door. Costa-Gavras is an ironical genius. Horrifying situation – and yet spinning them as buffoons – the ridiculous medals, and all that.
It was amazing. And devastating. Irene Papas was great, and so was “the magistrate” – love that Costa-Gavras was basically like, “Let’s put you in dark glasses” – because it puts a mask on. He seems neutral. And yet … you can’t be sure.
The Criterion version was awesome. The interview with the cinematographer (loved it) was produced by the same woman who produced my little “spot” for Love Streams! So, you know, I felt super important for like 2.3 seconds. :)
And loved the interview with Costa-Gavras – especially how it opened – he says he wants to engage people’s feelings – but he never forgets that people come to the movies looking for a “show.”
YES.
Thanks again. I have been thinking about it all day.
I wanted to go on a Costa Gavras tear – but unfortunately The Confession isn’t on Netflix. You know me and Stalinists. I’ve seen that one – will have to look around to see if I can see it again elsewhere.
The ending of Z is probably my favorite end to a movie ever. Devastating. And yes there is some sly humor in Z, basically by subverting the idea that Men in Power also have smarts.
Jean-Louis Trintignant as the magistrate was great. He was in “Red” in the 3 Colors trilogy by the way. Pappas was great too as you say, Ebert’s description of her reaction near the end is perfect.
This is one of those movies which to me should be regarded as an all-time classic but for some reason seems kind of forgotten. It certainly got attention when it was released, it was actually the first movie to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreugn Picture.
Really glad you saw this one, and also Battle of Algiers. Not just great movies, but important ones.
Important, but not self-important! They just POW off the screen with an urgency that is totally thrilling and visceral.
The mob out the window painting the Z on the street.
That protestor scene with the cops and the big space in the middle. Such a scary space.
And the opening! Not the credits – but the first scene – talking about mildew and infestations – and then turning it into a chilling ideological metaphor, with all of those grotesque closeups of people’s eyes and lips and nostrils.
Amazing. Just amazing.
Ooooh, you’re making me want to see it again!
Great point about not being self-important, a problem much lesser films sometimes have when trying to say something important or make a point, the tepid “Ides of March” comes to mind.
Ugh. Did not like that movie. Don’t try to be smart. You’ll hurt yourself.
Movies like Z – or Battle of Algiers – feel like they were made during the actual events in question. I’m trying to think of a contemporary example.
Agree! This synchs a bit with what I wrote you recently, about United 93 and Captain Philips, I think Greengrass is the only director I can think of today who can make a film with that immediacy.
Captain Phillips is a great contemporary corollary – yes. It felt like that was the actual event that was going down in actual time. Amazing.
Saw Z again recently and I came back to this thread today, which I loved re-reading. Been thinking a LOT about “group-think” lately for some reason!
You know, it’s funny you say this Todd because just recently I felt a hankering to see Z and it wasn’t streaming anywhere – but I just checked and now it’s on Amazon. I really need to buy an actual physical copy because this kind of thing drives me crazy about online streaming.
Did Criterion come out with this? It seems like it would be a no-brainer for them?
I have you to thank for the Baader Meinhof movie too – which was fantastic. I just re-watched Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst recently – bought an actual physical copy! and it’s just chilling how the indoctrination happened – but he also leaves it mysterious, like there’s a “click” that happens that can’t really be portrayed onscreen but you can see her gradually identifying with this group who had been abusing her.
And yeah, lotta group-think in our world right now.
always good to hear from you, Todd.
Hey Sheila, yes there is a Criterion of Z which I own and revisit often – as I mentioned earlier in the thread it’s on my all-time best lists. Some movies, to me, like Z and Network and Sweet Smell of Success and Battle of Algiers, seem not only perfectly “of their time “, but are movies ” for all time “, illuminating essential truths and realities of the human condition. My favorite kind of movie.
// seem not only perfectly “of their time “, but are movies ” for all time “, illuminating essential truths and realities of the human condition. //
so agree. Coincidentally I just rewatched Sweet Smell of Success this past month – I saw randomly that it was streaming on Amazon so I watched it. My God, it’s good. So so bitter. And so true. It’s how the world works, at its most rapacious and most unfair. Good old Clifford Odets! He started out so optimistic in the 30s. Hmmm, that definitely changed.
Lemme track down the Criterion Z – this is one I need to own.
thanks Todd!
I saw you saw Sweet Smell of Success which is why I mentioned it. That’s another of my favorite owned Criterion’s.
In addition to being an incredible print of an incredible movie, it’s probably my favorite batch of features on any of their titles, truly living up to the “film school in a box” that Criterion strives for.
The best of those features IMO is an amazing interview with Director James Mangold, who learned personally in film school from Alexander MacKendrick, the Director of Sweet Smell.
He describes how the 3 “Big Personalities ” involved, screenwriter Odets, Director MacKendrick, and Producer and Star Burt Lancaster knew that they were making a great movie, but fought like tigers over how the movie should end. All in pursuit of the perfect ending.
I believe that 17 (!) versions of the ending were written and 4 or 5 were filmed. They went through every permutation – sister jumps from balcony, sister kills Hunsacker, Falco kills Hunsacker etc. before finally settling on the perfect ending we see in the film.
It’s a wonderful look at the creative process and probably my single favorite DVD “extra ” ever. (I disqualify the Boogie Nights commentary track from PT Andersen as it’s so good it has its own Mt. Rushmore).
Todd –
// it’s probably my favorite batch of features on any of their titles, truly living up to the “film school in a box” that Criterion strives for. //
wow I gotta get on that!
Not sure if you have the collection of entertainment features from Vanity Fair – let me see if I can get the title – the first is a LENGTHY article about the filming of Sweet Smell of Success. Sounds like a shitshow – kind of the Wild West – but yes, they all were excited too.
Ebert’s Casablanca commentary track is one of my favorites – but yes PTA’s is wonderful too. I love him in general – his interviews are so great. I’m sure you’ve heard his interview with Mark Maron? If you haven’t I so recommend it! I think it was around the time of Inherent Vice – and since they both grew up in California so much of it is about being California boys, and how California so informs who they are. It’s really rich and deep.
Here’s the Vanity Fair book! You know how Vanity Fair does these really lengthy in-depth entertainment stories – basically investigative journalism – this is filled with those kinds of stories:
https://www.amazon.com/Vanity-Fairs-Tales-Hollywood-Graduates/dp/0143114719/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=vanity+fair+hollywood&qid=1591140785&sr=8-5
Oooh thanks!! Gonna eagerly read this.
Yes, Ive heard the Maron/PTA interview and it’s amazing. I always love listening to PTA, his love and passion for films is infectious.
It really is. I saw Phantom Thread at the DGA theatre here – and they all were there – Daniel Day Lewis, the whole cast, plus PTA. It was amazing – he’s so funny and down to earth but also … so smart. And he follows his obsessions – L Ron Hubbard for example – the porn industry in the Valley – the fashion industry in 1950s England – (I mean, what?? I LOVE his very specific obsessions) – and he just follows them to where they take him.
I cannot wait to see what he does next.
And Inherent Vice is now one of my favorite movies ever made.
Best part is: He’s so YOUNG. We have so much more to look forward to.