— Slate’s Dana Stevens writes a gorgeous piece about Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which I cannot WAIT to see. What Linklater is attempting has never been attempted before, not in this particular way, and I can’t wait to check it out.
— My friend Matt Seitz’s review of Life Itself, the documentary about Roger Ebert, brought tears to my eyes.
— Stephanie Zacharek in the Village Voice writes an extraordinary piece on the current re-release of A Hard Day’s Night. It’s not just a review. It’s a philosophical contemplation. (It’s a two-pager.) Here it is. The “white rabbit” girl kills me too. In her, is all of us.
— Godfrey Cheshire’s review of Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain. One quote:
At which point, roughly halfway through the film (inevitable spoiler alert here), Panahi himself walks into the frame, and we see that, in addition to baring the windows, the removal of the curtains also reveals Italian and French posters for some of his earlier films. This startling moment recalls a similar one in the middle of Panahi’s “The Mirror” when the little girl playing the film’s main character suddenly declares she’s not acting any more and runs away from the film location, to be followed by other cameras. That “coup de cinema,” though, took us from fiction to something closer to documentary, whereas this one transitions to a kind of subjective surrealism—call it a documentary about the inside of Panahi’s head in recent years.
Even just hearing a description of that moment … of him pulling down the curtains …fills my heart with despair and RAGE for him. I haven’t seen it yet. Perhaps this weekend. Wrote about Panahi just yesterday.
