Another year, another Cannes not seen. I am in my apartment in Brooklyn, sipping from my cup, typing away with casual abandon on my laptop and clicking away on link after link from writers, bloggers, photographers, and critics. I am working on other things as well; a film series and budget for Sarasota, wedding plans for me and the Mrs. To Be, getting ready for the upcoming World Cup by compulsively watching every friendly soccer match available--England's B team vs Belarus in three hours, USA's terrible loss to Morocco on Tuesday night (boy did we look BAD, better get that team in shape), but for some reason, I haven't been to the movies or watched a DVD in forever. I take that back; I did go two weeks ago to see Friends WIth Money which I enjoyed and finally saw Army of Shadows at the Film Forum. I loved it. I thought the film was really quite funny insomuch as it portrayed the entire French Resistance as a group of people who spent their time punishing snitches and getting caught and rescuing one another from prison. There wasn't really any resistence going on per se; a few radios being transported, some black market goods being bandied about, and lots of capture and rescue, shadows and light. It felt more like Mean Streets than The Sorrow and The Pity and maybe that is what I liked so much about it. There are some images and moments I will not ever get out of my head; the murder by stragulation of a traitor in a beret which trumps the strangulation sequence in The Godfather as an empathetic crisis of conscience, and the machine gun sprint down a prison corridor by condemned prisoners as rescuers use smoke as cover for their timely arrival. Good stuff.

But this was all weeks ago. In the meantime, I have been attending to a lot of family and personal matters and taking a much needed break from the film scene. I plan on getting back in the swing and the habit very soon, and I will also be passionately following the World Cup in the coming weeks. But for now, I am reading about film from afar, tracking Cannes and its pleasures (I can't wait for Marie Antoinette, critics be damned; just reading about the film's gilded-cage naievté makes me think of American youth itself. How many people voted in the American Idol finale last night? 64 million? Ah, the pleasures of courtly living...), and looking forward to summer.

Let Them Eat Cake: Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette

More posts soon, and sorry for the dearth of writing, but life has been beckoning me, pulling me away from the blog. Back in the habit asap.