Arts My John Cassavetes Kick, Years Late
I’ve been on a John Cassavetes kick in the last week, and I have to say, he’s good. (Hi everyone, I’m Christopher, sorry I’m late to the party.) I rented Faces and watched it at my neighbor’s apartment while my neighbor had a passive-aggressive conversation in the hallway with his on-again off-again girlfriend; appropriately enough, Faces alternates between passive-aggressive marital meltdown and out-and-out shrieking, and ends with an extended shot of a dissatisfied couple smoking on the stairs of their suburban L.A. house. (I am a tool of the tobacco industry, an enemy of the smoking banners — I like watching people smoke in movies.) The next night I watched Shadows, which is a tense tone poem about a bunch of awkward young musicians and one particularly manipulative beautiful girl, and just about every shot is absolutely necessary. (The whole thing is blissfully about 80 minutes long.) And then a couple days ago in San Francisco a friend invited me to a Cassavetes film festival, which was just him and a few friends watching a Cassavetes DVDs on a laptop. On the night I joined, the movie was A Woman Under the Influence, which, again, I realize is very famous and has been seen by all, but I’d never seen it. Gena Rowlands loses her shit for 2 and a half hours. It’s unbelievably great. If you’ve never seen any of Cassavetes’s movies, that’s where I’d start. (Although I have many more to go. Next up: Husbands.)
The first week of my discovery of Cassavetes ended yesterday, in one of those uncanny synchronicities, with the Sunday New York Times Book Review piece about the filmmaker’s first “genuine biography.”
Try to dig up The Tempest from 1982. One of my favorite movies, if only as a rememberance of a prepubescent love for Molly Ringwald (in her film debut.) Also a nice performance by Raul Julia as Caliban.