films

Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre.

In feature films the director is God in documentary films God is the director.

I think after all I found a feature which is incredible and kind of mein or let's say it something which is part of my childhood in the Jack Ketchum Novels and films.

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.

It was not boring, said Majnoun, but it was strange. The people were always looking away to where you couldn't see. The whole time, I thought there was something coming. Then at the end, it was death that came.

We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won__ be Joan__ [Joan Crawford's] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33...but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes__o the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children.

That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.

The comic book is not the book. the graphic novel is not the novel. The same, of course, is true of films and television. When we move a story from one medium to another, no matter how faithful we attempt to be, some changes are inevitable. Each medium has its own demands, own restrictions, its own way of telling a story.

If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more.

People who LIKE movies have a favorite. People who LOVE movies couldn't possibly choose.

Social Note: I have sought escape in the Prytania on more than one occasion, pulled by the attractions of some technicolored horrors, filmed abortions that were offenses against any criteria of taste and decency, reels and reels of perversion and blasphemy that stunned my disbelieving eyes, the shocked my virginal mind, and sealed my valve.

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.

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.

Watching a movie for the first time is a flirt. Rewatching it, is a date.

An actor is just a part of a movie, but director - he is the movie.

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief_. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l__riginalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

I don't like zombie movies, they're just plain silly.

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)