Alfonso had an idea that he wanted the shots to be incredibly long, and I said, ‘How long?’ And he said he wanted the first shot to be really long. And I said, ‘You mean, 40 seconds?’ ‘No, 17 minutes.’ So it ends up the film only has 156 shots in the entire two-hour movie, many of them six, eight, 10 minutes long.
Apropos of no one
Here’s the thing about name-dropping: There’s an art to it. (There’s an art to most everything. Even shitting, there’s an art to.) When people do it in a lazy and obvious way—to chase a contact high, glom status, rub noses, whatever—they cheapen the whole enterprise.
But here’s the really real thing about name-dropping—and, I suppose, about poorly disguised bragging in general: There’s this infrared implication that the awesome thing you’re doing and the awesome people you’re doing it with—they aren’t enough. You can’t really feel satisfied or whole or validated until you have an audience.
We’ve all felt that tug at one time or another, that incompleteness or not-enoughness—in some cities, in some lines of work, in some groups of friends more than others. But the next time you see someone doing it or feel yourself wanting to do it, maybe ask yourself why first.
Buried inside the second act of Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the galactic handbook for conflict resolution.
I tried to do that cool cigarette-behind-the-ear thing once in college but it was really hot outside and I was perspiring immoderately and the cigarette became damp and disintegrated.
Remember when Samantha stopped being a Blanche?
My crowded iPhone status bar is beginning to resemble the Arecibo message.
I lightly smacked his belly, and in that moment I realized we didn’t have the kind of friendship or even acquaintanceship where playful gestures existed, and so my hand lay there, leaden, like a cartoon anvil.
Carbon footprints.
