My Year in Film 2020
There’s all these other kinds of ways of being sentient, ways of being aware, ways of being conscious. One interesting example that there’s actually some studies of is to think about when you’re completely absorbed in a really interesting movie. You’re kind of gone. Your self is gone. You’re not deciding what to pay attention to in the movie. The movie is just completely captivating. (The brain’s) frontal areas are very involved and very engaged. When you look at the brain of someone really absorbed in a great movie, neither the default mode or the goal-directed pathway, what they sometimes call task dependent activity, are really active. And instead, other parts of the brain are more active. And that brain, the brain of the person who’s absorbed in the movie, looks more like the child’s brain.
— Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at UC-Berkeley
My Film of the Year — First Cow
I was introduced to Kelly Reichardt in 2006 through Old Joy, a movie that hit me like a ton of bricks. Reichardt’s movies are consciously small in scope. Each one is a mini-meditation, a deep dive into the lives of seemingly unremarkable people, focused on small episodes that often don’t have obvious major implications, even from the characters’ perspective.
First Cow, like Old Joy, is about friendship between two men. Reichardt’s films have some of the most nuanced female characters of contemporary cinema. Are these my two favorites of her films because I am a dude? I actually think yes. Reichardt understands human relationships so well that, while each of her films is a wonderful experience, the more directly you can connect with the characters, the more you realize how authentically and precisely she captures them. Certain Women and Meek’s Cutoff helped me better understand women. First Cow helps me better understand myself. Reichardt shows us that everyone is remarkable and that often the subtlest experiences illuminate best who we are and who we could be. As the last beautiful moments of this movie unfolded, I was overcome with sympathy for our heroes, Cookie and King-Lu, and overwhelmed by the realization that my child brain was in the hands of one of cinema’s great masters.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
Collective
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Soul
Tommaso
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, the “movie about a day in a dive bar,” is a bittersweet homage to the importance of weak connections: how strangers, acquaintances, and spontaneous, temporary friends make our lives more complete.
From Matt Zoller Seitz’s rave on rogerebert.com:
The movie keeps finding a moment — small, big, happy, horrible — and staying in it until it feels like it’s time to move on. The filmmaking and performances are operating on the same wavelength. Performers and crew agreed to try something, then went to a bar and did it and filmed it. This commitment to a vision — not just a filmmaking vision, but a vision of life — gives the project a philosophical spine. The range of thoughts and emotions released by that vision is the reason the movie exists. … Bursting with humanity, grounded in humility, and in love with the poetry of faces, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a classic indie film that will irritate or mystify some viewers while inspiring evangelical fervor in others.
Familiar but absurd, whimsical but deep, utterly unpredictable: Charlie Kaufman’s movies have always taken inspiration from dreams. Indeed, he said that a goal of his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, was to “remove the line between (the protagonist)’s reality and his dreams.” His next film Anomalisa depicted a world where the protagonist’s dreams and mental illness were indistinguishable.. I’m Thinking of Ending Things takes the next (logical?) step. The characters’ dreams and private thoughts fall into one another’s experiences.
These are not necessarily dreams and thoughts you would want in your own head. There is a strong element of David Lynch at his darkest in this movie. Between wild swings in tone and plot, the base feeling of this movie is escalating menace. The most cerebral film of our most cerebral filmmaker, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a story of life overanalyzed and bursting at its seams with raw longing.
Critic Adam Nayman describes I’m Thinking of Ending Things as “a pure auteur work — addictive catnip for Kaufman devotees and inaccessible for anybody else.” He is probably right, but if there is a way to access this movie, it is through Jessie Buckley, who gives my Favorite Lead Performance of the year as the Young Woman. She simultaneously grounds the movie while being the most difficult aspect of it to pin down. According to Buckley, she was given a one-word note describing her character before she auditioned: molecular. “I was like, ‘That’s amazing, I don’t know what that means’…[but] when you get something so off the cuff like that, that word can be whatever it needs to be to you. For me, it was a shattering of particles. There’s no ground. We’re all pieces of things that are collected and changed and transformed and transgressed. With that note, you’ve got to let yourself float in the wind and not try and control. Let yourself be whatever you are in that moment.”
At this point, Abel Ferrara’s late career renaissance can no longer be described as a resurgence. This is his prime. Ferrara’s almost entirely unacknowledged blossoming continues with Tommaso, which, like Ending Things, rejects a binary distinction between dreams and reality. Willem Dafoe, another artist hitting his prime in his 60s, stars as Tommaso, a version of Ferrara, as he struggles to make a film called Siberia. Ferrara did, in fact, release Siberia later in 2020 (both Siberia and Ferrara’s lost masterpiece, Welcome to New York, are currently unavailable in the US…talk about unacknowledged). The meta-narrative deepens as Ferrara’s real-life wife and daughter co-star as Dafoe’s family. One could posit that this is a ploy for press attention (they eat stuff like that up),, but I believe it is a commitment to make the most complete character possible. Ferrara took his life and handed it to one of the best living actors, who happens to be his best friend, to add his own experiences. The result is one of the most honest portraits of an artist you are likely to see on film.
If you have kids, I suspect the ad targeting algorithms alerted you to the release of Soul. Otherwise, there was not much fanfare. Pixar’s annual feature film has become kind of rote. We all know how Pixar movies will make us feel: happy, thoughtful, empowered, empathetic, and moved. They make that look easy, which I am sure it is not. We all like and respect Pixar; we acknowledge their excellence, but this thematic repetitiveness has frankly become a little boring. I suspect that most people without young children haven’t seen a new Pixar movie since Inside Out in 2015 or even Up in 2009. But you need to see Soul. Like the jazz that it revolves around, Soul is a testament to how much new ground can be broken within a motif. It brings us a new type of hero, a strikingly original story, investigations of maxims rarely addressed in pop culture, and a world of imagery unlike anything I had seen before. The eccentric visual beauty of this movie isn’t captured in still images. It is a Pixar classic and much more.
Collective is the favorite for Best Documentary at the Oscars tonight, and it was my Favorite Documentary as well. It is about the aftermath of a fire in Romania that killed 67 people. It is brutal subject matter, and I have to admit that I hesitated to watch it myself until two of my most trusted movie friends raved. But what a movie. It has twists and turns that keep you on the edge of your seat. It “fly on the wall” captures the inner workings of a newsroom investigation and of a government agency. It is through its characters, though, that Collective transcends its genre, even its art form. The heroes are steadfast in their quest for truth, justice, and change, and the supporting characters — those most impacted by the tragedy — inspire us with their dignity. Watch this movie, and I challenge you to tell me that good and evil don’t definitively lurk in the world today. It is black and white, and it is reality.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Borat: Subsequent Movie Film
Dick Johnson is Dead
The Killing of Two Lovers
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Palm Springs
Small Axe: Lover’s Rock
Some Kind of Heaven
Sound of Metal
Time
Kirsten Johnson’s cinematography résumé is long and consistent. She has over 50 credits; all news-focused documentaries: political stories, issue films, exposes on international crises. They are quality films that, by and large, closely hew to the protocols of the genre. Who would have guessed then that once Johnson began directing, she would be one of the most artistically ambitious documentarians we’ve ever seen? Her first film as sole director, Cameraperson, is a collage of outtakes from her previous work, distilling and personalizing 25 years of extraordinary and intense experiences. It is a bio-doc in which the central character is rarely seen, heard, or even commented upon. I thought it was one of the five best movies of the last decade. Her second feature Dick Johnson is Dead is equally experimental yet different in every possible way. It is a comedic documentary about death (not many of those!), and the Dick Johnson in question, Kirsten’s father, is not actually dead. He is aging, though, and forgetting things. The end is at least relatively near, and the movie contemplates the myriad ways that Dick might die, most of them ridiculous, and how Kristen and Dick’s other loved ones might react to the inevitable when it comes. It is a strange and satisfying film.
If you only know Riz Ahmed from his performances in 2016’s The Night Of and this past year’s Sound of Metal, you might think that he is the greatest actor of his generation. I say this as someone who only knows Riz Ahmed from his performances in 2016’s The Night Of and this past year’s Sound of Metal. My God is he good. The less his characters are able to express themselves in words, the better we understand them.
Scenes of the Year
> The opening sequence of Collective. How should one approach subject matter this emotionally raw? Footage exists of the club fire that resulted in 64 people losing their lives. Collective, in two short sequences before its opening credits, manages to capture — as much as any movie could — the pain of this incident while being entirely respectful to everyone involved. The lyrics of the final song performed before the fire ignites implausibly foreshadow the rest of the film. It is fucking haunting.
> Silly Games sung a cappella in Small Axe: Lover’s Rock
> The last shot of Sound of Metal. A very specific story was leading us toward the universal the whole time.
> The bookends of First Cow. Everything is ephemeral; everything is forever.
> My favorite Scene of the Year:
Never Rarely Sometimes Always is the story of 17-year old Autumn and her cousin Skylar navigating a series of systems that they don’t understand, filled with obstacles designed to make their path more difficult. They face their challenges stoically, boosted by their friendship and the resilience of youth. The movie is fundamentally a procedural. For much of its runtime, I admired the movie more than I loved it. I respected director Eliza Hitman’s choices — it feels weird to call them “choices”; the movie feels completely organic — but it felt kind of dry to me. Then the “never, rarely, sometimes, always” scene comes, and every scene before and after it is filled with greater consequence. Autumn’s resilience is all the more striking; her stoicism is all the more melancholy. It reveals everything else you need to know about Autumn and everything you need to know about the righteous fury that seethes below this film’s placid surface.
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Black Bear
The Painter and the Thief
Possessor
Rewind
⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Assistant
Bacarau
The Invisible Man
Mank
My Octopus Teacher
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Trial of the Chicago 7
Vitalina Varela
If “one of Goya’s Black Paintings come to life” sounds like a movie you want to see, find a big TV, turn out the lights, close the shades, and watch Vitalina Varela.
The Assistant is about Harvey Weinstein. Watching it, I kept thinking about how much more powerful it would have been — both as art and as activism — if it had come out six years earlier. We cannot say “too little” when it comes to Hollywood’s response to #metoo, but we sure can say “too late.” As director Kitty Green and star Julia Garner attended all the glamorous award shows this year, I wonder if they were thinking, “how many of you in this room knew all along?”
Nomadland, the runaway favorite to win the Oscar tonight, is the latest entry in a rich microgenre we can call “Malick-esque.” That is, they are in the style of Terrence Malick’s films, defined by their poetic soul, unhurried pace, dispassionate inspection of social class, and, most of all, their cinematography. In film geek circles, Malick’s imagery has become a cliché: cameras in motion, natural lighting, usually in the “golden hour”, evocative of a spiritual awe of nature. Nomadland is among the most nakedly imitative of these movies. That doesn’t make it bad. Malick’s recipe makes for delicious and nourishing consumption. Hopefully people see Nomadland and go back to Malick’s classics, Badlands and Days of Heaven, and his newer, more narratively experimental films. For that matter, I hope they watch Nomadland director Chloe Zhao’s The Rider.
The Rider does not have a single professional actor in its cast, while Nomadland places Frances McDormand and David Straithairn among non-professional actors. Although McDormand may very well win her third Oscar tonight, her performance, contrasted with the non-professionals on screen, does not work. Her “naturalism” is studied. Whether it is because of her training or in spite of it, she cannot become her character the way all the supporting players are their characters. She stands out. At the end of Nomadland, I wished I had spent more time with the real people.
Random Raves
Favorite Supporting Performance — Michael Martin, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. It’s a coincidence that this shout-out comes immediately after the above paragraph, but watch the two performances in question, and you’ll get it.
Favorite Cinematography — Some Kind of Heaven. I saw this movie last night, so I didn’t have time to write about it. Actually, it hasn’t even all sunk in. It’s something new. It has a shiny exterior that complements and contrasts its depth in curious ways. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about it over time.
Villain of the year — The Party of Social Democracy in Romania, Collective
Soundtrack of the year Lover’s Rock. You’re welcome :)
Sound of the Year (Editing and Mixing) Sound of Metal. How often do you see a movie that really does something original with sound? Something that is noticeable but is core to the movie rather than a flashy distraction? It seems crazy and perhaps inappropriate to say you feel like you are inside the character’s head when the character is going deaf. You know you don’t know what it is really like, but you feel like you do. That’s what movies are for, though, isn’t it? Reading this interview with sound designer Nicolas Becker and editor Mikkel Nielsen, I gained an entirely new appreciation for the art of sound in cinema. These men are storytellers.
Favorite Production Design I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ images are sharp, beautiful, precise, and eclectic. I could see this script working as a play on a virtually empty stage or like this, with its busy, varying, and claustrophobic palette. There is no room for moderation in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Political(ly- Adjacent) Docs
Boys State
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Feels Good, Man
Planet of the Humans
TFW NO GF
The Forum
In the first several months of 2020, I saw a run of five very good political documentaries, and then one that made me very angry. It occurred to me that, in aggregate, this diverse group of films painted a close-to-comprehensive picture of the most important issues in the world today.
While there is no formal connection between them, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is something of a sequel to Inside Job, the 2012 Oscar Documentary Winner. Each one breaks down very complex topics in understandable and engaging terms (the 2018 financial crisis in Inside Job, and the hyperbolic rise of income inequality in Capital). Based on the French economist Thomas Piketty’s eponymous tome from 2013 (the best-selling book on economics since the 1890s*), Capital does what it sets out to do. It establishes a foundation based on historical analysis, shows convincingly how things have changed in recent decades, and makes dire predictions about where this is all heading. The pleasant surprise of Capital is that it does more than point fingers. It offers specific policy recommendations. Based on the book’s reputation, I was quite surprised that these solutions (wealth taxes and massive punitive taxes on countries that offer tax havens), while admitted well beyond anything being formally proposed, are wholly within the context of a capitalist system. If we were able to build the political will, they just might work.
The Forum documents the World Economic Forum, also known as “Davos,” over the course of two forums and the year between them. It follows Davos founder Klaus Schwab and, to a lesser but very important extent, Jennifer Morgan, the Executive Director of Greenpeace. Unscripted cameos range from captains of industry (Tim Cook of Apple, Helge Lund of British Petroleum); to activists (Greta Thunberg, Al Gore); to heads of state (Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, the Devil Himself, Jair Bolsonaro). This is just a tiny sample of the people who attend this event. Davos is the largest concentration of power in the world.
Davos is notoriously secretive, but Schwab opens the doors widely for German Director Marcus Vetter and his crew. Watching the film, one can speculate why Schwab has provided this extraordinary look into his most elite world. Is it a way to create a legacy for his lifetime of work conducted behind closed doors? Is he responding to the criticism that the Forum has received as the elite take an ever-more dominant share of the economic pie? Is he trying to counter conspiracy theories? Whatever the case, this film is a gift for anyone who is specifically interested in Davos or more generally interested in how power works. Let me put a finer point on it: this film documents banality. If you get your dopamine from watching Q-Anon videos, this movie is your kryptonite.
Schwab comes across, frankly, exactly as you would hope. He is quite likely the single most connected human being in the world. As he negotiates with problematic (i.e. murderous) figures like Aung San Suu Kyi, you can just barely see the pain infringing on his cool demeanor. Above all, he comes across as someone who is deeply concerned about human beings, and one who knows that his own impact is limited but real. There is a Shakespearian element in this character. He is a man who, more than any other human being, oversaw both the “end of history” and its tragic resurrection. Klaus’s story seems to be far less dramatic than hubris or vengeance. His story, this microcosm of the last 50 years, is a failure of pragmatism.
Far on the other end of the spectrum of prestige and power are the subjects of Alex Lee Moyer’s TFW NO GF. According to urbandictionary.com, TFW NO GF is “a statement of sorrow, of utter companionlessness. These exceptionally powerful and pungent 7 letters describe one of the worst feels to mankind; that feeling when you have no girlfriend.” Moyers follows five lonely young men who find community on 4Chan, 8Chan, Reddit, and other “dark corners of the Internet.” Their online communities spew misogyny and violent rhetoric, and more than once, mass, indiscriminate violence has come out of those communities. TFW NO GF does what, one gets the impression, few people have ever done for any of its five subjects. It tries to understand them.
“You can say whatever you want about them being white men or that they have this implicit privilege,” Moyer told Rolling Stone, “But at the end of the day that doesn’t change anything in their reality. So now what you’ve got is an entire demographic of people who have basically opted out of society because they don’t see any possible path forward.”
“I just wanted to create something,” she continued, “That was illuminating for everybody but do it in a way where I was presenting it as it is, and as I found it, and let the viewer make their own informed decisions about what they were seeing.” An old idea that feels radical.
Michael Moore needs a psychological examination. Occam’s Razor says he just wants attention, but watching him speak, my gut tells me that he believes in everything that he is doing. Planet of the Humans, produced by Moore and directed by his long-time producer Jeff Gibbs, lays out a case that our current environmental protections are woefully inadequate. This is, of course, completely accurate. The movie, though, goes on to lambast almost every major leader of the environmental movement. Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Richard Branson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and Michael Bloomberg are all traitors as far as they are concerned. Tear down capitalism is the starting point of Moore and Gibbs’ solutions; population control is the aspirational goal.
Moore has been called out so many times for his dishonesty, yet he keeps deliberately misleading his audience. Planet of the Humans goes to wild extremes. For example, it hammers Bill McKibben for supporting biofuels because this particular “renewable energy” is very often nothing more than the burning of trees. That would be a great point to make except McKibben has spoken out against biofuels many times. I mean, it must be crazy to be publicly blasted for encouraging the burning of trees to produce energy when you have a published article in a major magazine titled, “Burning Trees for Electricity Is a Bad Idea.” The movie shows an old solar energy field as evidence of useless decimation without mentioning that the field was replaced by one that is highly functional many years ago. The bad faith really goes on and on. Right wingers and the oil industry have praised this movie.
Moore has been horrible for our country’s discourse for many years. His dishonesty and “aw, shucks” condescension has fomented bitterness from the right, and — critically — he always loses the conflicts he throws himself into. Bowling for Columbine precipitated a major increase in support for the NRA; Bush actively used Fahrenheit 9/11 in his push for re-election. Now Moore appears to have given up on changing the broader discourse and is trying to divide people on the left. As a corny poster in an office once said: “Perfect is the enemy of good.” If Thomas Piketty recognizes the opportunity and, more importantly, the need to make changes that are workable without a revolution, environmentalists can as well. Go work on bringing down the system, Michael, but get out of the way of people who are already making a difference.
*No really. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty sold more copies than the Bible in the 1880s and 1890s. I had never heard of it either.
Perfectly Fine Docs
Assassins
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
Disclosure
Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren and Stimpy Story
Have a Good Trip
Any one of these movies is worth seeing if you’re interested in the subject matter.
> Assassins is about the insane story of Kim Jong Un assassinating his half-brother by means of two young women who thought they were making a YouTube prank video.
> David Attenborough is, in its own words, a “testament” from the 94 year old naturalist, filmmaker, and credit to the human species.
> Disclosure is about the history of transsexuality in movies and television.
> Happy Happy Joy Joy is about one of the funniest and most influential cartoons ever made, except its last 20 minutes, which are, necessarily, about Ren and Stimpy creator John K.’s sexual misconduct with much younger women. The shift in tone and subject matter is disorienting. The allegations — which he doesn’t deny — became public when the movie was 98% completed and it shows. Actually, rather than watching this movie, watch Space Madness.
> Have a Good Trip is basically a bunch of celebrities talking about their experiences with hallucinogens, with reenactments and cartoons thrown in for good fun.
⭐️⭐️
Da 5 Bloods
The Vast of Night
Spike Lee makes good documentaries. Give him a Hollywood script, and he’ll give you a solid movie, at least. But since Malcom X, “Spike Lee Joint” has meant a collage of loosely related set pieces, explicated rhetoric, stock video footage, extended musical sequences, and forgettable action scenes. Lee doesn’t seem to care about maintaining a tone that is consistent or that takes a navigable path from one scene to the next. He has interesting points to make and occasionally one of the wild swings he takes lands, providing us a powerhouse moment like the Kwame Ture speech in Blackkklansman. The slog to get to these infrequent moments just isn’t worth it. I mean, Da 5 Bloods is more than 2 ½ hours long. For many years, critics noticed and critiqued Lee’s unconstrained sloppiness (Girl 6, She Hate Me, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Red Hook Summer, Chi-raq), but they have stopped, and it’s not doing anyone any favors.
Some directors, like Lee, make a few stone cold classics before degenerating into making an overstuffed, bombastic mess. Others hit the ground running. You can hardly find a review of Andrew Patterson’s debut The Vast of Night that doesn’t lead with its low budget and the use of cinematic devices, flashy techniques, and straight up stunts that the movie uses to compensate for that low budget. First of all, $700,000 before post-production is not that small of a budget. More importantly, are tricks in and of themselves a good thing? A much-celebrated tracking shot in Vast of Night was formulated, in Patterson’s words, “to wake the viewer up, by basically having people go, ‘Now wait a minute, how did they do that?’” Earlier in the same interview, Patterson appropriately comments, “We knew that the story we were telling had been done a thousand times over…” In other words, the plot isn’t that interesting, but we’re going to distract the audience with directorial flash.
Sometimes you’re right and the world is wrong. Never forget it.
⭐️
Tenet
True story: I saw Tenet with six other people, and not one of us knew who the good guys or the bad guys were in the climactic battle scene. I’m not saying we were confused because they looked similar to each other (although they did). I’m saying that this movie was so incoherent that we literally did not know why two groups of human beings were taking up arms against one another. There was a coming full circle aspect to it since the exact same thing was true about the opening scene. I remember walking out of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and thinking that over the prior 20 years, George Lucas had completely forgotten how to structure plot, character, or action. Nolan managed to do the same thing in just two years. Tip for filmmakers: if you’re going to make a movie so confusing that you expect your audience to see it five times to analyze some sense into it, don’t have characters with thick accents speaking through masks.
Movies Made by People I Know
Moop
Run This Town
Spree
We Are
I don’t comment in writing on movies if someone I know was involved in making them, but if you’ve seen any of these, you know they are movies worth talking about. Hit me up!
Movie Theaters ♥️
The quote that opens this essay shines light on something that I’ve long believed: sitting in a darkened theater with friends and strangers, turning off your phone, and giving yourself to someone else’s vision is a form of meditation.
Like my dear reader who actually made it to the end of this marathon post, I have had well over a hundred memorable experiences in movie theaters. The movies I hate provide me with vigor. The movies I love change the way I see the world.
The movie theater that has given the most to me is the tiff Bell Lightbox in Toronto. On the first sunny, temperate day of early spring last year, a three hour movie from 1975 that I had never heard of was playing at 1PM. I got off the streetcar at King and John, and I glanced to my right. Steamwhistle Brewery was just a few blocks away. The Toronto Islands ferry just another couple blocks past. How was I to spend this lovely afternoon? Chronicle of the Years of Fire was only playing one time, and….it was an Algerian film that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes? That’s weird. What’s this: it was shot in Cinemascope? Restored in digital 4K, you say?
I bought my ticket, and I was blown away. Chronicle of the Years of Fire is effectively a prequel of The Battle of Algiers made as a Charlton Heston style epic. It’s exciting, unpredictable, funny, it has killer set pieces, and it is fantastically beautiful.
Finally, as a take-no-prisoners denunciation of colonialism, it is a movie for today. According to Director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina: “I tried to recount, with dignity and nobility, this uprising that then became the Algerian Revolution, an uprising not only against the colonizer, but against a certain human condition.”
It’s astonishing to me that this movie disappeared for decades, and downright mystifying that is was entirely ignored by the film community after its restoration. But I saw it in the way it was meant to be seen, and there are people to be thanked. To the programmers of the tiff Bell Lightbox, your commitment to cinema as something that, yes, offers an escape, but also helps us dig deeper, question our assumptions, or open us up to new things. You have improved my life. To the Film Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna, L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratories, and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, thank you for bringing this epic back to life and for creating the World Cinema Project, which I look forward to spending much more time with.
Experiences like that spring day are not a given. The pandemic has only just started claiming its economic victims. Alamo Drafthouse, possibly the best thing to happen to American movie theaters in the past 20 years, has filed for bankruptcy. L.A.’s legendary Cinerama and Arclight are closed. Every theater is on the cusp. Art house and alternative theatres have been on the cusp for decades. I don’t know how many will make it.
Please consider donating to Hot Docs’ Independent Cinema Relief Plan or to your local non-profit theatre. Join their membership program. Invite friends to a movie. Give yourself to an artist for two hours. Indulge your child brain.
