Twixt

[Lottery]

Hmm, that's kinda saddening, I guess it must feel odd to know that your best work was 30-40 years ago.  But seriously, Coppola from 1970 to 1980 was a god.

[ElPandaRoyal]

Yes he was. And both The Godfather Part III and Dracula are much better than what people give them credit or. And I remember The Rainmaker being a pretty decent thriller.

[Pubrick]

i know this is from a while back but how the hell can he say this:

Rumpus: How do you feel about adaptations?

Coppola: I don't feel that books should become movies. I feel that movies should be written fresh and new. They should also never make remakes. With all the money and effort you should at least try to give something to the world that's uniquely for cinema and not adapted from a book.

and not mention Youth Without Youth??

And The Godfather?

that's why i said this:

i'm not even picking at the statement because his best movies were born out of adaptations,

i did sound like GT in that sentence so maybe i wasn't clear enough. what i meant was that applying that comment to his early films is irrelevant because for the past ten years he's been espousing this new approach to making his personal movies, and yet his comeback in this new phase was an adaptation of a book. and not a very good one at that. i think alexandro nailed it. i'ma requote what he said for the new page..

It seems Coppola never forgave himself for being so successful with a bunch of projects he never wanted to do, so although not openly, from time to time he will say stuff like this, which is basically a putdown on his most successful output. He doesn't seem to love The godfather or Apocalypse now as much as The Conversation...but then he does all he can to protect those movies because he knows those are his masterpieces. I think he is basically a very confused man.

[Ghostboy]

I haven't seen Tetro, but with this and YWY it seems obvious that he's one of those people who actually needs to be somewhat controlled.

I haven't seen it since it opened, but my memory of TETRO is that it is actually quite good, with a truly great performance from Gallo at its center. Also, yes, intensely personal.

[Alexandro]

Tetro was mostly awesome. Gallo gave, I think, one of his best performances ever. And it was beautiful, really majestic black & white cinematography. But it also loses it's way, and power, during the last quarter or something. It becomes shockingly contrived. A big Almodóvar influence on that film.

[03]

i did a mural in 2008 that spanned about a city block.
it was probaly the most work ive ever put into a painting.
now, i am much better at painting, and murals, and overall painting process. it definitely wasn't my best work.
if i did the exact same thing it will never be as cool.

thats how i'm looking at everything post the outsiders from ffc.

[samsong]

i happen to love youth without youth.  for me, it's the closest cinema has come to a borges story.

i really enjoy how intensely personal and batshit crazy coppola-gone-digital is.  b-movie schlock and a harkening to his days with roger corman are a gleeful pretense for what feels like a confessional of the creative process.  and i do genuinely feel this is the best movie about writing i've seen after barton fink.  keith uhlich offers an articulate reading:

Twixt is a character study that takes place mostly in Hall Baltimore's (Val Kilmer) mind. The dream space with Poe (Ben Chaplin) and Pastor Floyd (Anthony Fusco) is one level. The town of Swann Valley (I like to think a not-so-veiled reference to Proust) with its vaguely Twin Peaks-ian denizens, base-grammatical signs and wonders (i.e. a motel is a "MOTEL"; the killer is "GUILTY"; a ghost communicates, one letter at a time, via Ouija board) and the mischievously Virgil-like Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern) is the other. It's basically a tale about the creative subconscious in which the end result for Hall is another of his hack horror novels that barely makes a blip with the zeitgeist, even though he digs damagingly deep inside himself to beget it. (Once he really looks upon his muse—the heart of the story, so close to his own—she devours him.)

Few movies even adequately manage to convey the writer's process—the pain, the loneliness, the loss of time (a clock with seven variable faces), the search for just the right words and tone (subject of my favorite exchange between Hall and Poe), the trance-like move between levels of awareness, the addict's desire to get to that ephemerally elating point of having written (which is what I think the last, fleeting scene between Kilmer and David Paymer is about). And finally, the understanding that for all the work you've done, any rewards outside that brief, epiphanic sense of self are never guaranteed. So you're compelled to return to that space, again and again, until "time changes you," inevitably, into ashes and dust—a distant memory defined only by the toil you manage to leave behind for those who are willing to engage.

[Ghostboy]

Just finished this. I embrace its naiveté, out of which any deep reading can be legitimately raised or dismissed, as per the viewer's wont. It's charming. But it's also sorta rough going. It's sorta like Southland Tales (although exponentially more modest) in that it's sincere and out-there enough to be admirable without actually being any good.