cinema

Don't you go to the movies?""Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.

It__ hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul.

Filmmaking isn__ if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it__ about. It__ not just about getting a performance. It__ also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the "art of the cinema". One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein--it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art.

Moving provides meaning for our humble (if still vicious) life of four-dimensional existence. Four-dimensional existence makes the frightening fox hunt into an entertainment, or war into a pastime or a sport. Even when evil is dull and monotonous, there tends to be a lot of movement, action and entertainment involved. Maybe movies are evil.

__BretEastonEllis 31 MarAfter watching the delirious Room 237 I realized that the worst thing happening to movies was the empowerment of the viewer via technology.

We didn't need sex. We had Tyrone Power.

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn")

The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film's emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune.

In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.

Her first really great role, the one that cemented the __ean Arthur character,_ was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra__ Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra__ rendition of Kaufman and Hart__ You Can__ Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). __ean Arthur is my favorite actress,_ said Capra, who had successfully worked with Stanwyck, Colbert and Hepburn. _. . . push that neurotic girl . . . in front of the camera . . . and that whining mop would magically blossom into a warm, lovely, poised and confident actress._ Capra obviously recognized that Jean was often frustrated in her career choice.

For the casual viewer, Kurosawa__ films can be an exercise in endurance.

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It__ so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn__ dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They__ all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn__ even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend _ movies can__ show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.

Hollywood's Studio Era was part of a Golden Age because it didn't need profanity (unlike reality-television today)