"Right after I dropped out of high school I worked at a video store where we got free rentals. Truffaut's were my first ones...

and like any self-respecting "artsy" high school drop out I immediately became obsessed with Antoine Doinel."

[That second half is from here: http://twitter.com/ThisMoiThisMoi/status/166561097753694208 ]

"This repulsion toward vulnerability is really a resentment at being put in charge of a person who doesn’t know how to play the game of affecting invincibility. The main purpose of this game is pretending death will never come; the smaller goal is to pretend that we are all perfectly self-sufficient. This is why so many people were outraged at Lana del Rey’s “Saturday Night Live” performance: She stopped playing the game and forced us to bear witness to her crippling fear. This is also why people abuse the elderly and disabled and animals — their vulnerability is too obvious and provokes hostile resentment."

"It’s important to mess with the spiritual structure of the world — the architecture of ideas, institutions, identities and even the structure of filmmaking. Only by doing this can the ludicrous nature of the game be revealed. Maybe one day we will overcome our repulsion toward weakness and admit our fragility on a daily basis…"

"I left film school for a number of reasons…frustrated by what seemed to be a fear among my peers—to be serious, thoughtful, or experimental…film department, in my experience, didn't approach making movies in a way that I believed in…<br />
<br />
I started writing plays in school because I found that the theater department was more open to the artistic or unusual. It is also a solitary activity, whereas making a film is collaborative…<br />
<br />
"The best advice I can give to any young lass who wants to do anything in film is to watch movies nonstop like it's your job. I mean, like, five movies a day if you have the time. In fact, make the time, dammit! Pick a director and watch all their films in chronological order. Keep a notebook and jot down your thoughts. You’ll absorb the rhythm of great filmmaking and though you may not think it’ll make a difference, it absolutely will."

"Some days you and I didn’t make it to school. Some days you and I would begin to walk and begin to think about school and begin to think about not being there that day. On those days you and I would cross the street to the left. We would not continue straight to Map Ball. We would go left to mother’s house. With luck mother would be at work by now.<br />
<br />
You and I would lie on the couch in the living room and thank god that you weren’t where you weren’t. Sun in a living room at 7:20 in the morning is a very wonderful thing. Few people get to see it (except babies etc). Most teenagers never get to see it. I suspect they are the ones that need to see it the most.<br />
<br />
You and I would be in that living room in that sun and we would turn on Turner Classic Movies…<br />
<br />
There were other things that were the same too.<br />
<br />
You and I decided that these mucho meloncholy mornings were no good. And so you and I bid adieu to high school Feb of Junior Year. It is was a mucho ducho great decision."

"It would be easy to say, that no one *needs* a piece of lemon loaf, and you might be correct, but maybe *this* boy *did*. Maybe he had a very real need for a piece of iced lemon loaf. Maybe he needed it for comfort. Maybe he needed it for power. Maybe he needed it for the Indian in his cupboard that would only eat iced lemon loaf and would starve to death if he didn’t get it for him. Maybe he had a whole wealth of emotional difficulties or mental challenges I didn’t know about. Who knows? Do you? I don’t…

…It was a panic that I remember having experienced sometimes. Perhaps you do too. The panic in realizing that you have no power at all. You are a child and you are powerless. There is nothing you can do.

I understand it may be extremely hard for many to have sympathy for a little white western boy deprived of a sweet as this is precisely what I would say if I had not observed the child in person, but the look  on his face is a universal one: “Life is not fair”."

"…As extremely white and male as The Tree of Life is, it is also very much a slap in the face of White American Masculinity.<br />
<br />
And since White Maledom is what we measure the worth of everything against, since it is our deeply ingrained default point of view, it is easy to dismiss that which strays as being pretentious…<br />
<br />
But like all his characters, Malick is a white man trying to escape the confines of white maledom because for all the earth-controlling privileges it awards, to be white and male is not only to be in a prison, but to be the prison itself. This could be eye-rolling inducing; the last person we need to have sympathy for is a White American Man, but through his films, particularly through The Tree of Life’s form, Malick encourages us to rebel against the confines of this deadly default. He knows what many have yet to realize: whiteness and maleness destroy us all."<br />
<br />
[Read all of it.]