&tc.

The 10 Best Films I Saw in 2009

An Education (2009, United Kingdom)

Into Temptation (2009, USA)

(500) Days of Summer (2009, USA)

The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005, USA)

My Summer of Love (2004, United Kingdom)

Somersault (2004, Australia)

Unfaithful (2002, USA)

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979, USA)

Susuz Yaz, Dry Summer (1964, Turkey)

Cléo de 5 à 7, Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, France)

Dad’s mug from both sides

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

—	Federico Fellini

Cabaret (1972)

What did I get from Simon? An education - the thing my parents always wanted me to have. I learned a lot in my two years with Simon. I learned about expensive restaurants and luxury hotels and foreign travel, I learned about antiques and Bergman films and classical music. All this was useful when I went to Oxford - I could read a menu, I could recognise a fingerbowl, I could follow an opera, I was not a complete hick. But actually there was a much bigger bonus than that. My experience with Simon entirely cured my craving for sophistication. By the time I got to Oxford, I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent, straightforward boys my own age, no matter if they were gauche or virgins. I would marry one eventually and stay married all my life and for that, I suppose, I have Simon to thank.

—	Lynn Barber, “My harsh lesson in love and life,” the memoir on which An Education was based.

An Education (2009)

I believe science can eventually explain everything, but only if it gets a whole lot better than it is now and discovers realms we do not even suspect. You could call such a realm God. You could, of course, call it anything you wanted; it wouldn’t matter to the realm.

—	Roger Ebert in his review of Henry Poole Is Here

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

—	Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

oldhollywood:

Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (1946, dir. Billy Wilder)

Innuendo doesn’t get much better than this scene.

Humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.

—	Reinhold Niebuhr, best known for penning “The Serenity Prayer”