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Visionary director Terry Gilliam’s career has been as labyrinthine, strange, and unexpected as many of his movies.  

Most peg Gilliam’s highpoint and masterpiece as the 1985 dystopian sci-fi satire comedy Brazil. And then, common wisdom goes, after the difficulties and underperformance of 1988’s fantastical fairy tale (and masterpiece) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam more or less had to become a director for hire. 

Olivia Wilde’s 2019 Booksmart stars Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein as high school seniors and best friends Amy and Molly. It’s the night before graduation and they’ve played by the rules, overachieved, gotten into great colleges, only to discover many others did too. . .yet still had fun.  To make up for lost time, they work to pack an entire missed teenage wildlife into one night. 

Last Thursday, we screened the 1959 French new wave classic Hiroshima, Mon Amour written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Alain Resnais. 

For anyone who has never seen this gut punch masterclass in editing, non-linear storytelling, stream of consciousness moviemaking, Hiroshima, Mon Amour tells the story of two lovers-a French actress and a Japanese architect-across the two days or so of their brief affair in Hiroshima, Japan.

Hitchcock, shockingly, has been one of the few directors to work in America in all its history that seemed to fully grasp the cinematic tool of casting with hidden purpose.

Hitchcock would often cast a Cary Grant, a Jimmy Stewart, a Grace Kelly, even a Sean Connery in roles that would explicitly take their star personas and subvert them in some interesting way that would add a whole cinematic layer to the proceedings.

It had been years since I had seen Clerks. Decades even. But curious to see how it held up, I plopped down in my favorite corner seat in the side of the theater and watched.Next Saturday, April 8, 2023, we return to our year long The Master: Alfred Hitchcock series with two of his clever investigations into the mysteries of matrimony veiled as mass entertainments: 1941’s Suspicion and 1964’s Marnie.  And from there, you’ll be getting a Hitchcock double, at the very least, monthly through the end of the year.

It had been years since I had seen Clerks. Decades even. But curious to see how it held up, I plopped down in my favorite corner seat in the side of the theater and watched.

It was as good. . .maybe even better. . .as the first time I saw the movie as a revelation as a junior in high school way back in the innocent bygone Americana days of the early 1990’s.

Last week we screened Brett Morgen’s incredible 2022 David Bowie life experience movie Moonage Daydream. You’ve probably heard it all already but Morgen was granted access to never before seen film and audio footage of David Bowie throughout his life by the Bowie estate. And he decided to take a page from Bowie and create something unique, new, boundary pushing that would embody Bowie’s essence rather than regurgitate talking heads bullet points on life facts we all knew.

My son keeps asking me about the differences between a hurricane, a tornado, and a whirlpool. And he seems to think they’re basically the same thing.

So in the nature of this week-long interrogation, I’m offering a (mild? benign?) hurricane, tornado, and/or whirlpool of thoughts about movies with special lights from the catwalks on their relationship to the Academy Awards.

Some movies get recognized for being important and visionary but never seem to completely break into the mass consciousness like other movies.

Such a movie is Claudia Weill’s 1978 Girlfriends. A movie that maybe was twenty to thirty years ahead of its time.  A movie that predates and predicts filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, Richard Linklater, Andrew Bujalski.

Last week, we did a 35mm double bill of Orson Welles’ 1947 The Lady From Shanghai and Nicholas Ray’s 1950 In A Lonely Place. Both are stone cold classics.

What struck this programmer was how In A Lonely Place was the more disturbing of the two, even though Lady From Shanghai traffics in many more murders in much more byzantine ways.

The Subjective POV Shot

Maybe no other technique is so crucial to the Hitchcock style as his use of the subjective POV shot. In its simplest form, the technique works like this.