Over the years, many friends and colleagues had mentioned the cinephile haven that is Telluride, but I was either too busy or too far to make the trip to the mountain tops. Finally I caved in to the (positive) peer pressure and applied to be a volunteer for the 39th Telluride Film festival over Labor Day. The deal is simple: work 40 hours over 4 days and you will eat for free, see incredible films and probably get hooked for the rest of your life. Enticing. Telluride is not easy to get to: you will need multiple connecting flights, an […]

Originally appearing in our Spring, 2012 print issue, my short report on Zona, Geoff Dyer’s fascinating critical memoir on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is being reposted today timed to the film’s run at Lincoln Center and forthcoming release by Criterion. — SM My first Tarkovsky film, my gateway picture, was his penultimate, Nostalghia, at the Olympia Theater near Columbia University in Morningside Heights. The seats slanted one way, the screen slanted the other, and there was a leak in the ceiling. Water dripped from the roof into a bucket on the floor, blending into Tarkovsky’s typically excellent sound design of distant […]

I’m halfway through Zona, Geoff Dyer’s book-length consideration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker but wanted to post now to alert Dyer/Tarkovsky fans to a weekend of great events. In Zona, Dyer critiques Stalker in what feels like real-time, explicating each scene and then allowing his mind to free associate and wander, filling up the book’s many footnotes with fascinatingly digressive asides. I’ll have some thoughts on the book in the next print edition, but take note now of this weekend of appearances in support of the book. If I wasn’t in Austin I’d be at some of these. Friday, March 9—NYC […]