One of the pleasures of watching a movie for me is taking leave of time. By that I simply mean not wearing a watch. And making sure to always switch off (off!) my mobile phone. It means that when you're watching the film, you have to feel how much time has passed and how much time remains. When attempting to make that calculation is too easy, and when you're right about it, you know you have a bad movie. I genuinely believe that a key barometer of quality filmmaking is when, temporally speaking, you don't know where you are. I think it might relate to that cliché when people talk about "losing yourself" in a movie. Anyway, I was watching…

“Do you believe that love is a continuous stream?

Cassavetes is above all else a cinema of flesh, of an overwhelming need of embracing the material world. Love Streams could've been one type of proposition - she loves too much, he withholds everything - but end up been a very different one, less based on easy oppositions: a post-apocalyptic world of feelings whose Adam and Eve just happens to be brother and sister, one less given to carnal thoughts as much a constant emotional need. It is his most beautiful sustained film and along with Chinese Bookie the most imaginative, every cut bringing a total mystery (although the early fatalistic film tend to contracts its world while Love Streams embrace…

This may actually be a terrible movie. For the first time I saw the possibility of how people could be perplexed, or completely disengaged by this. More than any other Cassavetes movie too, this thing is enigmatic, bordering nonsensical, and has an overwhelming sincerity masked by performative excess, that leans into its schizophrenic quality (intentionally). It's honestly barely a movie; there's no plot, things just sort of happen, it builds up to a wildly obtuse and out of left field third act, and has some really counter-intuitive characterizations/performances/performers, alongside the trademarked half-sentences, constant laughter, shitty editing, and overall amateurish charisma. All these things just make me love it more. This is an artist, knowingly going to die, just laying it…

Seeing this in a theater was an interesting experience that I’m not sure I’d repeat. I may be too precious with this movie simply because it means so much to me, but it was difficult to hear people laugh through parts that I consider devastating. Perhaps I missed some of the humor watching the movie in intimate settings in the past, but I feel like Cassavetes backs each line with such defined levels of truth that anything that feels awkward or funny hits me with equal parts vulnerability. Don’t get me wrong, I love levity and this film has it in spades, but it simultaneously deeply understands the purpose levity serves in our lives. If I’m truly connecting with Cassavetes…

it was the ending that got me. the main character telling his sister that he loved her and would take care of her and begging her not to go before she disappeared into the rain. except i think that was also john cassavetes telling gena rowlands, six months after a fatal diagnosis, how he couldn't have done this without her and that the love would always be there, regardless if their films lived on or melted into a jukebox and blurry colors as it poured outside. he said goodbye in the final frame by waving at us. gena maybe never encapsulated her legacy so neatly. like the film, she strode in like a hurricane, told us that love was all…