“You know I think that movies are a conspiracy? I mean it. I mean it. They are actually a conspiracy. Because they set you up. They set you up from the time you’re a little kid. They set you up to believe in everything. They set you up to believe in ideals and strength and good guys and romance and, of course, love. Love. So you believe it, right? You go out, you start looking. It doesn’t happen, you keep looking. You get a job and you spend a lot of time fixing up things. Your apartment and jazz and you learn how to be feminine. You know, quotes, ‘feminine’. You learn how to cook. There’s no Charles Boyer in…

1. Early on in Minnie and Moskowitz, Minnie (Gena Rowlands) drunkenly admits her romantic frustrations to a museum co-worker of hers, and as Rowlands delivers her speech, it's an affecting scene, especially when she curses the movies for selling to people like herself what she by now considers unrealistic fantasies of love and romance. But writer/director John Cassavetes doesn't just leave this bit of character-building to that monologue alone; he subsequently proceeds to give us a sense of how she got to this emotionally numb state in the first place—not through flashbacks and clunky expository dialogue, but simply through observation of behavior. The taxi driver who eyes her amusedly as he takes her home in her intoxicated state; her abusive…

Have you found that you form your most romantic thoughts when you're alone? Somewhere between boredom and desperation. Maybe the romance isn't even directed at a person but an idea or a collection of words or images that have no place. Feeling alone in a crowd, on a date. Isolation within our own relationship. The older I get, the more alone I feel. The more aware I am of the distance between myself and others. And that distance seems to expand with every passing day. Your worries become your closest companions, in a way that feels eternal and a part of us. We catch glimpses of ourselves in a parallel reality, and the feelings we process are more productive than…

That John Cassavetes made a screwball film may seem odd, but I think it's a logical extension of his whole oeuvre. His characters are always so naked and vivid that they skirt self-parody, at least by the buttoned-up standards we hold characters to as a sign of "realism." For all the talk of Cassavetes' own realism, his characters more often resemble Old Hollywood types thrown into the real world and forced to fend for themselves, not someone you'd just see on the street.

Which, of course, makes them feel that much more alive and knowable. The mania that fuels screwball comedies here just seems like a byproduct of human multitudes, evident from the early chat between Seymour and Morgan Morgan,…