Thread by @metaplexmovies

I’m home taking care of a sick girlfriend, come at me twitter

ngl.link/metaplex815

Mostly! Luckily it isn’t Covid, tested negative and no fever. Just a nasty cold. Lots of soup, Gatorade, etc. Hopefully she recovers in a few days.

I am the biggest Kurosawa guy, and and I have this gorgeous print of him (and Toshiro Mifune) from @studiotstella hanging in my apartment.

Too big a question for tweet, but Netflix and streaming trained audiences to be less inclined to go to the movies, from short theatrical windows to so much novel programming. Dumping so many movies on D+ / HBOMax was the final nail in the coffin. Things are recovering, but slowly

LOTR (Tolkien)
Blood Meridian (McCarthy)
Underworld (DeLillo)
Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami)
War and Peace (Tolstoy)
2666 (Bolaño)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Infinite Jest (DFW)
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Calvino)
Pale Fire (Nabokov)

Lots of book questions!

East of Eden (Steinbeck)
The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
The High Window (Chandler)
Gilead (Robinson)
The Temple of the Golden Pavillion (Mishima)
Fifty-Two Stories (Chekhov)
The Moonstone (Collins)
The Savage Detectives (Bolaño)

I’d say MIAMI VICE but I’d have to hand that off to @BilgeEbiri, but:

MINORITY REPORT
HEAT
PRINCESS MONONOKE
DUNKIRK
YI YI

Steven Spielberg. I know how this sounds, but I genuinely believe most of his work has been under-appraised and not treated too seriously as “art” worthy of rigorous study until relatively recently in his career. Movie to movie the strongest filmography of any guy to do it.

Do I always come off as cynical? Would love to hear from others in this. Most of my published writing and threads are on popular genre film, and if anything I think I’m easier to please than many critics / writers. 39% of my LB ratings are a 4/5 lol.

I don’t really have a single favorite, but here’s some I adore and my favorite of each

Gena Rowlands (favorite: A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE)

Maggie Cheung (favorite: IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE)

Ingrid Bergman (favorite: JOURNEY TO ITALY / CASABLANCA)

Cate Blanchett (TAR)

pushy! Sadly no pets, the apartment building doesn’t allow dogs, but here’s the last one I had: he was a very arrogant corgi named Bob. When he was being bad: simply “Robert.” But when he was being a Good Boy: King Robert, the first of his name.

I loved DECISION TO LEAVE. It made my top ten last year, including a screenshot of the excerpt in the tweet and link to the full piece here:

nextbestpicture.com/nbp-top-10s-of…

Here’s a bunch of filmmakers I love who don’t get enough attention, at least on twitter:

Robert Siodmak, King Hu, Costa-Gavras, Tsui Hark, Nicolas Roeg, Hideo Gosha, Fred Zinnemann, Seijun Suzuki, John Frankenheimer, David Mamet (the stuff he directed), Henri-Georges Clouzot

I get asked this more than any other question. My brutally honest take is this: as it stands, film criticism is a hobby that for lucky and/or talented people can supplement your income. For the vast majority, it is not, and never will be, a career. It’s sad, but it’s the truth.

Korean cinema has been a huge cultural import for 20 years. They make a lot of subversive, stylistically daring genre movies that deal with heavy and often universal themes, and more recently, class struggle. There’s an easy accessibility there not all international cinema has.