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@Morning Jazz Radio and @ihatejulio , thank you for putting me on to Kelly Reichardt. I watched most of her movies in chronological order and they were all solid, only 1-2 i havent got my hands on yet.
Night Moves is so intense but maybe the most fleshed out and storylike, certain women is maybe the least sad and easiest watch. Thank you both for the recommendation.
@botefdunn
Hey, super glad and happy you checked out her stuff! It honestly feels really great and rewarding when you recommend something to someone and they follow up on it and enjoy it.
Night Moves is a fantastic flick, Jesse Eisenberg was a great casting choice for the lead role and played it to perfection. Certain Women is another great flick and introduced me to Lily Gladstone who I am very excited to see in future roles. She absolutely crushed it and her depiction of loneliness and desperation for a connection with others was so resonant and incredibly heart breaking.
Which 1/2 of her movies do you have left? Also would love to hear your thoughts about how Reichardt ends each of her movies - some people hate it and some don’t. Again I’m seriously stoked you checked them out!
I'm missing the bookends, River of Grass and The Cow. I don't stream movies so I have to find copies, which gives something to look forward to.
I haven't read any critiques of her work though I did watch the criterion edition of Old Joy which had great bonus materials, interviews etc. Makes sense that her endings would be a big topic, in a word I think they are perfect in their ambition. There's a tendency to try to make a hard left at the end of a story which she avoids totally, which no doubt frustrates many viewers conditioned expectations. To me the standout feature of her movies (especially oregon trilogy) is the existential mood of the worlds she creates: anything and nothing seem as likely to happen and usually do. My fav ending is by probably Old Joy, because the viewer's feelings go back and forth between the two characters, almost like you have to pick who is more righteous, and the Will Oldham character kind of seems like a bit of a fool at moments, so its nice that it ends on a humanizing moment wherein you see him as asympathetic, complete person albeit alone.
Wendy and Lucy has the least story but was so familiar to me, which is always high praise, when art imitates life so successfully. I spent a lot of time in that traveler world and am still in it to some extent, it's hard to depict and as a result seldom represented in film or art and I think it's fascinating to wwitness the secret worlds that intersect beneath cultural surfaces. Ending was a total non-ending which is what that world is about I think, the rejection of standard definitions and imposed social meaninng: no outside morality comes to interfere with a story that remains till the very end, about the relationship between a person and a dog.
Meek's Cutoff is a wondeful period piece, I mostly enjoyed it for the illusion of pre technological landscapes. It has a more actively political or moralizing tone which is less interesting to me and which I'm not sure was completely balanced against the background of a story about pride and perseverance. Still, I would call it a very good movie. Maybe the weakest ending, in so far as it ended with dialogue which is always harder to remember and less widely evocative imo.