"The Last Picture Show" (1971), Peter Bogdanovich

A few pointers about this known masterpiece. Bogdanovich goes back twenty years from the seventies and maintains his typical documentary feel. This time he shows one year in the life of high school seniors in Abilene, a small Texan town in the middle of nowhere. Music is diegetic, silence and boredom only broken by rampant promiscuity and the movies screened in a small cinema. The end of movies is the end of the world for somebody like Bogdanovich, a guy that expressed a couple of years before that all the good ones were already made. Time jumps are plentiful and keep the misery moving along, personal stories depend on fortunes made, forty-somethings feel ancient and just want to kneel and die. Actors are wonderful, all of them, especially the main trio (Bottoms, Bridges, Sheperd). The strange thing is that we seem to have gone backwards in many areas (the ubiquity and representation of real-life sex and romance being one), but now we have unlimited entertainment content in every smartphone. I wonder how's life now in today's Abilenes.

"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Season 3" (2019)

The third entry on the Maisel saga is a Jewish mother: insufferable but endearing.  Basic verbal jokes are established by unrealistic trite repetition, until they become part of your expectations. Sherman-Palladino machine-guns the viewer with her patented shtick, a million words per minute simulating Abbot and Costello routines.  And sometimes, it even works.  Interestingly, this time the plot is paused by varieté numbers, including an homage to the club sequence of the art film "I am Cuba".  Palladino wants go to back to a time where you could unironically be entertained by romantic songs, tap dance, and "subversive" comedy, before post-modernism, when bad and good felt as easy to define. It is also the time when the United States was still a developed country to be proud of, especially in this fantasy version where everything looks fabulous and everybody can answer with an appropriate funny quip.  If you can bear it, and in small doses, Maisel will put a smile in your face. 

I am Cuba sequence:

https://youtu.be/8aT3Ii3hWM0

"Paper Moon" (1973), Peter Bogdanovich, capsule review

Filmed in the 1970s but situated in the 1930s, the magnificent black and white photography of Laszlo Kovacs recalls all of Bogdanovich's heroes behind the camera.  Ford, Welles, Hawks, they all show in one way or another in this enchanting tale of a scammer and his maybe-daughter having adventures during the Great Depression.  Acting is stellar, with a well deserved Oscar win for Tatum O'Neal, daughter of co-lead Ryan. Economic inequality, police corruption, small-town hypocrisy, all shown up, but the movie succeeds to stay light and warm without being mawkish. Some elements, however, would not succeed in bypassing the political correctness of our era. Recommended.