Hi everyone. I wanted to pop in to say that I know it’s been a while since I’ve written anything, which of course always makes me extremely nervous that the site will have turned into a deserted wasteland in my absence. Happily that hasn’t happened yet, but I still think I owe you an explanation, which is that it’s the end of semester here at UW-Madison, and this particular end of the semester is proving to be a lot more brutal than they have in the past. Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon to offer reviews of the new releases and movies I missed the first time they were out, from my ruthlessly curated list of movies that I still want to check out before I feel like I can commit to summing up the 2018 movie year. And since ruthless curation got me down to 71 titles, I’ll be trying to get through a lot in the next three weeks.
Meanwhile, if you simply cannot bear the thought of having no new writing from me, I would offer this glimpse into my other life as a grad student, where I sometimes write programming notes for the UW Cinematheque, and have just completed a dive into the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder:
-On The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)
-On Lola (1981)
-On Veronika Voss (1982)
And if you moreover cannot deal with me being ruthlessly positive about the movies I see, I’ll end with a note of pessmism: boy, if those SAG nominees are a harbinger of things to come, this is going to be the shittiest Oscar season in years.