ava-duverbae

[ava-duverbae]

1.15.23

“Over the next few hours you will ingest fat, salt, sugar, protein, bacteria, fungi, various plants and animals, and, at times, entire ecosystems. But I have to beg of you one thing. It’s just one. Do not eat. Taste. Savor. Relish. Consider every morsel that you place inside your mouth. Be mindful. But do not eat. Our menu is too precious for that. And look around you. Here we are on this island. Accept. Accept all of it. And forgive. And on that note… food!”

THE MENU (2022) dir. Mark Mylod

[ava-duverbae]

I haven’t logged onto this blog since 2017.... Anyway, this is a Last Black Man stan blog now

[ava-duverbae]

The Last Black Man in San Francisco dir. Joe Talbot

[ava-duverbae]

Stills from The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

[ava-duverbae]

EASTERN PROMISES // Aesthetics

[ava-duverbae]

“I am so self-conscious because I have a big mouth. Everything else is little. But my mouth is huge. So I have to be very careful. All through the beginning when we were starting, and [Lucasfilm] would say, ‘You can’t say that! Don’t say that!’ I was like, ‘You mean I can’t say that? Well if I can’t say that, we’re fucked, because I’m used to being candid.’” – Carrie Fisher

[ava-duverbae]

Coppola’s notes on his “The Godfather” notebook. 

[ava-duverbae]

A sampling of aperture framing in Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

In one aesthetic stroke these apertures simultaneously articulate the film’s themes of isolation, enclosure, and entrapment, as well as those of intimacy, fetishism, and photography.

[ava-duverbae]

I plan on being an engineer at NASA, but I can’t do that without taking them classes at that all-white high school, and I can’t change the color of my skin. So I have no choice but to be the first, which I can’t do without you, sir. Your Honor, out of all the cases you gon’ hear today, which one is gonna matter a hundred years from now? Which one is gonna make you the first? Hidden Figures (2016) dir. Theodore Melfi

[ava-duverbae]

No Country For Old Men (2007)          Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen         Cinematography by Roger Deakins

[ava-duverbae]

This, Madame, is Versailles.

MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006), dir. Sofia Coppola

[ava-duverbae]

[ava-duverbae]

“Luck is like the Tour de France. You wait, and it flashes past you. You have to catch it while you can.”

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet

[ava-duverbae]

[ava-duverbae]

Rees initially came out to her parents and grandmother, who still live in Tennessee, over the phone after she’d moved to begin film school at New York University in 2004. Her mother was horrified; her grandmother wasn’t happy either. Both of them trekked to New York to figure out what was up. Her father came the following week. Her father, she said, was afraid that Rees had been sexually abused as a child. She wasn’t.

“I’m in love with a woman,” she told them.

There was some initial tension and pushback, but gradually it eased.

At first, “my grandmother was like, ‘We don’t do that,’ ” Rees said. “But in a weird way, that was all my grandmother ever said on it. And then in the Thanksgivings since, it was my mom who was saying a prayer about being thankful for who we are, and my grandmother said, ‘I wouldn’t change a thing about you.’ And my mom was like, ‘Well, there’s one thing,’ and my grandmother was like, ‘No, I wouldn’t change a thing about you.’ ”

Dee Rees on coming out to her family. 

[ava-duverbae]

[ava-duverbae]

you can do this. stop sabotaging yourself and your dreams. there will be risks, there will be stress, but go on and actually pursue what you want to do. you will not regret having tried, all things considered. self-doubt can destroy so much of your life. don’t let it, please.