Cinema Soul

There's a scene early on in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood   that perfectly captures a moment in time. Cliff Booth, the stuntman played by Brad Pitt, drives a convertible down an L.A. highway to his home in a trailer behind a drive in movie theater. The combination of the radio blaring 60s commercials and hits, the camera angles, the roaring engine, the peculiar acoustics of a parking lot full of drive-in movie speakers, creates an immersive experience. It's a wonderful moment, the best evocation of a summer night's drive since American Graffiti . Like that movie, it is transporting us to an idealized version of a lost world. In this case it is Hollywood in 1969. Tarantino is my age. I have no doubt that, like me, the one time enfant terrible  of Hollywood is beginning to notice the first signs of rust as he moves toward the far side of middle age.   Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is elgiac in tone; its hero is past his pri...

Yes, this is supposed to be a film blog, but Bruce Springsteen is one of our most cinematic songwriters, and his new album Western Stars is drenched in the iconography of westerns old and new. It also reminds us that if you ride far enough west you end up in Hollywood; forgotten b-list actors and limping stuntmen make up some of the characters in this collection of stories put to music. Listening to a Springsteen album from beginning to end is like watching a movie full of separate stories intertwined around a central theme or location, like Short Cuts or American Graffiti . Even if they are now streamed rather than spun his songs always sound best in the context of an LP: his aesthetic sense was forged in vinyl. His work retains the sense of structure and thematic unity that was a hallmark of the great albums in the glory days of FM rock. Springsteen has always been fond of western imagery, but this time around instead of the monochrome noir of Nebraska or the Depression era...