INTERVIEWER
Are there any shows that you particularly love?

ECO
The police series. Starsky and Hutch, for instance. 

INTERVIEWER
That show doesn’t exist anymore. It’s from the seventies. 

ECO
I know, but I was told that the complete series was just released on DVD, so I am thinking of acquiring it.

Umberto Eco interviewed in the Paris Review.

•  28 October 2010

Love this dude. Timothy Carey as Pvt Maurice Ferol in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. IMDB: “Timothy Carey had one of the most unusual careers of all Hollywood character actors, obtaining full cult status for his portrayals of the doomed, the psychotic and the plain crazy.”

•  28 October 2010  •  2 notes

“Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors. Follow the old road, and as you walk, think of them and of the old England. They climbed Chillingbourne Hill, just as you. They sweated and paused for breath just as you did today. And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, and the broom and the heather, you’re only seeing what their eyes saw. You ford the same rivers. The same birds are singing. When you lie flat on your back and rest, and watch the clouds sailing, as I often do, you’re so close to those other people, that you can hear the thrumming of the hoofs of their horses, and the sound of the wheels on the road, and their laughter and talk, and the music of the instruments they carried. And when I turn the bend in the road, where they too saw the towers of Canterbury, I feel I’ve only to turn my head, to see them on the road behind me.”

— Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale

•  26 October 2010

Notes Toward a Scary Movie, a 60-second short film I made this summer. Music by Sophie Trudeau. First screened at Montreal’s M60 film festival.

Best viewed full-screen in a dark room. (But isn’t everything?)

•  15 October 2010  •  1 note

My original judgment, from a Toronto film fest roundup, of Let the Right One In remake Let Me In:

“…it was perfectly well-made, tasteful, good and everything, if a little pointless.”

The ad I saw this week:

(Incidentally, my full-length review of the film—which says more or less the same thing—can be found here.)

•  30 September 2010  •  18 notes

•  30 September 2010

Rest in peace, eyelashes.

•  30 September 2010

With the exception of maybe one scene (that takes place on another continent and is sort of filmed in a style of its own), I don’t think the colour blue appears in The Social Network unless it’s on a Facebook page or logo.

•  29 September 2010

The show’s over, but here’s my account of the first half or so of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Cracked ribs, movie stars and more.

•  20 September 2010

I am going to the Toronto International Film Festival tomorrow, for the whateverth time, to spend a week and a half seeing a billion movies, biking like crazy around the city to get to interviews, having panic attacks, copping free drinks when I can. Are any of you going? What are you going to see? What do you want me to see and report back on?

•  7 September 2010