Brianland

The PTA Movie We’ve Been Waiting For Since Boogie Nights . . Fifteen minutes into Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another I jotted the note — “The movie we’ve been waiting for since Boogie Nights!”  Sumpthin else I wrote down a couple of times (and thought many more) – “Great cinematic storytelling!”  Words like […]

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  I recently stumbled on a Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) interview about Boogie Nights from 1997 and began revisiting of his work. I’ve now seen all of his nine written-&-directed films, most more than once, and he’s certainly up there with the greatest of the active mid-career contemporary filmmakers. Since Boogie Nights he’s been compared […]

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. One thing I learned during my lockdown Film Studies deepdive is just how subjective movies are.  I know all art is subjective, but maybe film is the most because of how it’s every art form blended together and being experienced at once. Something I picked up from a Tarantino interview — that a book […]

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21st Century Beatniks versus Hieroglyphic Caricatures . There’s long been a debate about the word “beatnik” — originally coined by a sensationalist San Francisco gossip columnist in 1958, playing on the Yiddish suffix “nik” and the first Russian satellite launched in September ’57, colloquially known as “Sputnik.”  Jack and Allen & company hated the word […]

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