Greg’s wonderful piece on the downsides (and up-) of online film writing – One, I wouldn’t want to not converse with the online community of film lovers and friends I’ve discovered in this time and two, I’ve never learned more about the movies than I have in the last five years. Before that, it was all isolated knowledge that seemed pretty impressive in a room of people who didn’t spend every waking moment thinking about, reading about and talking about cinema. But once I got online, I realized I was a novice. Hell, I realized we all were and if we didn’t learn from each other, no one else was ever going to fill us in on the 99 percent of film history ignored by the film history books.
David Thomson: How old Cary Grant? – The comparison of young and old, the stretching over 50 years, is one of the most touching things in Michael Haneke’s film Amour. If you’re 18 and uneducated about movies, the film will still affect you. But if, say, you’re 70, it has an extra resonance. It’s the story of an elderly couple, still married, still in love, granted the minor irritations that come with habit and endurance and being old. One of them falls ill. That’s the whole story.
