He's a hero of mine, a hero, and you know I don't use this word lightly.
And indeed, sometimes you only need *one film*.
Mr. De Sica would be very proud of his disciple.

I was thinking about him last week, I rewatched Alien the way I regularly do-- and the way he (with Giler) sets this perfect mechanism in motion, the sheer economy of means, the inevitability.
Truly an American master, cinema is lucky to have him.

What's truly astonishing is that not even Prince -- who was literally made of music, our Mozart -- managed to do what Bowie did, this constant rethinking, art as shapeshifting tool to interpret reality.

Make music for fifty years: constant evolution, constant exploration, and your final statement is a work that upends everything you've done up to that very moment.
Bowie ceases to be a sort of musical UFO once one stops considering him a musician -- look at him the way we look at, say, Picasso.

AD recently shot his personal home in Bel Air, an astonishing monument to his genius.
This old (Carter Era) Tyrnauer story in VF seems to me a fitting tribute to this American master:
www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009...

I still think about The Sweet Hereafter occasionally, and I've never rewatched it after it came out. It's the one that stayed with me. Holm, Polley, Greenwood -- pitch perfect performances. A tone poem, really.
He's a major director (the Russell Banks book is amazing as well)

Nominees for Best Director, 1969:

Carol Reed – Oliver!
Stanley Kubrick – 2001: A Space Odyssey
Gillo Pontecorvo – The Battle of Algiers
Anthony Harvey – The Lion in Winter
Franco Zeffirelli – Romeo and Juliet

Coldest take possible: amazing stuff that the Oscars came down to MOONLIGHT vs LA LA LAND that year. The contrast!

boxd.it/cfSrwn

Masterpiece; the script is this perfect machine, absolutely riveting watch even if by now I have it committed to memory; we're lucky because if we're going to make a list of this young century's greatest films we can actually choose between at least two Spielbergs, this is one--and to me the greater

It's kind of insane how cool the 70s were, just look at them

The precision, the way he made it look easy, natural. Pure class. I think in a way the enormous success of his first ten years as director obscured the enormous talent as actor that he still had in his old age. And thanks to Uncle Martin who rightly saw him as Max Belfort: immortal performance.

As flawless as comic relief in that movie as he was as a straight man in Spinal Tap.