Tim Blake Nelson

“So I'm just going to start, Allen Baron's Blast of Silence. And what I love, about the Criterion Channel is that you can discover movies on it, and, I love noir. I'd never heard of this movie. It is one of the best hardboiled, unsentimental detective movies shot with mostly an objective, camera, not a lot of compression. It's like 35 to 50 millimeter lens most of the time. But what the best aspect of it is, is the voiceover. It's some of the best voiceover I've ever encountered in a film. This one is not to be missed.”

“And then, a movie that could not be more different, Topsy-Turvy by one of my favorite filmmakers, Mike Leigh. This movie is exquisitely acted, which is true about all Mike Leigh's films, because he develops his movies with actors. It's a, it's a long, long, meticulous, involved, research-oriented process. This is a rare period movie made by Mike Leigh, but he still applied all the rules of making sure that his incredible cast—Allan Corduner, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent—that they researched, the world of, in this case, Gilbert and Sullivan. But what's amazing in addition to the acting and the writing in this movie is the production design. It is as good as it gets, in any movie. I'm, I'm just gonna say this, in any movie you'll ever see, and my buddy Joel Coen agrees. This is one of his favorite movies as well.”

“Okay, so, you know, I'm just going to be completely cliche here and I'm going to pick a Cassavetes. Here is my favorite Cassavetes film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. You have everything that one comes to love in a Cassavetes movie: incredible extras casting, but then also incredible casting in the actors around, Ben Gazzara. Seymour Cassel, of course, is in it, another, Cassavetes muse. And the photography, you can see the focus pulls as the, as they're trying to improvise, the movement with the actors. So the, The Cameraman is dancing with the actors in, in a, in a really jittery way. That's the way Cassavetes achieves immediacy, and you don't feel like actors are acting, you feel like you're present in a room. And an exquisite, exquisite portrait of a small-time loser who gets in, way over his head.”

“All right, I'm going to go there and I'm going to do, I'm, I'm going to do not one, but two Coen brothers movies. And yes, that is, pro domo, very, you know, selfish of me, because without Joel and Ethan I probably wouldn't have much of an acting career. But what can I say? How can you not do the Coen brothers when you're in this closet? They're two of the most important filmmakers not only alive, but who've ever lived, in my opinion. So, among those that are available here, the first one I want to talk about is Inside Llewyn Davis. And it tells the story of a guy named Llewyn Davis, a fictional character, inspired by Dave Van Ronk, who just misses the boat. He's a down-on-his-luck, talented singer-songwriter who makes bad choices personally, irresponsible choices personally, and is always, like many Coen brothers characters are, just a step behind the inimical forces in life. And he's trying to catch up and just impose some measure of control over life's haphazard, Topsy-Turvy, unfair forces. That's the quintessential, to me, Coen brothers character. Even when a character is talented or optimistic, or is just sure of success, they're, they're always going to get smacked down.”

“So another Coen brothers film, that's here, absolutely one of my favorites is Miller's Crossing. This is a movie, I'm just going to tell you, you need to watch it not twice, but you need to watch it three times, at the very least, because the, the story is so intentionally, almost willfully, convoluted. And Gabriel Byrne is incredible. Marcia Gay Harden is, phenomenal playing the character of Verna. Albert Finney, extraordinary performance. But it's Turturro. John Turturro plays a character named Bernie Bernbaum. And what John does, in, in this performance in terms of what I like to call, as an actor, taking a dive. When an actor takes a dive, they just allow themselves to be ugly, to be humiliated, to be unappealing in every way without any vanity to it. Because of course you can be unappealing and it can be vain at the same time, because you're saying to the world, "Look at how unappealing I can be, aren't I a wonderful actor?" That's not what's going on in John's performance. He just embraces the notion of being, the aesthetic of being unappealing, and it's a gorgeous performance. It's one of my favorite character actor performances in all of cinema, and it's certainly my favorite performance by John Turturro, who has given performance after performance worthy of nothing but praise.”

“I've been presented with the option of just picking something randomly off the shelf. Probably I'm not going to know what the movie is, and here we go. Okay, well already I want to see this. It's Ozu's Tokyo Story, but look at this cover. There you go. Bye.”