3:9:25

Against All Odds, 1984. I was completely obsessed with this movie and Jeff Bridges as a kid. Watched it over and over. Some artist friends of my parents had it on a grainy VHS tape when we lived in Moscow for a year. I think I saw it for the first time when I was twelve. I like to revisit the movie every few years for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes it’s just a feeling about a world that felt better, even though it wasn’t. We were just further from the truth of it. The hell of it (Against All Odds, a remake of the 1947 noir Out of the Past, scratches the surface of some of that hell and the matrix of corruption). We were just more removed from the evil that is now all coming to light. That remove was both a blessing and a curse. There was that sweet spot between heaven and earth called life. Old movies for me capture this sweet spot. Where I can just feel, look at, and listen to things in the frame—the world, faces, voices—the way they were, irrespective of plot or merit. As I have written about many times, movies were a big part of the veil, the cover, the lie. But they were beautiful too, and sometimes filled with truth. Especially in light of what movies have become, which is as ugly and fraudulent as everything else out there now, when it comes to “art” and “culture.”