BONES: Any of the pieces of hard whitish tissue making up the skeleton in humans and other vertebrates.
AND: Conjunction, used to connect words of the same part of speech, clauses, or sentences, that are to be taken jointly.
ALL: Everything – everything under the sun, and, indeed, above and/or beyond the sun, including your very own chosen God or Gods. Poetry of emotion, poetry in motion, cinema, and pure cinema. Performers at the absolute top of their game, technicians and craftsmen, director of photography, camera operator and grip, the editor, guided and led and inspired and orchestrated by a proper director, with a plan in mind. Altogether, as a team, they go for it ALL. Bones and ALL.
SCREEN ACTING: What makes a great actor? A studied technical excellence? Emotional intelligence? A certain authenticity, or purity? The late, great film critic Philip French said great actors “can explore and reveal aspects of the human condition, while bringing the writing to life”, and “seem to be simultaneously interrogating us and examining themselves”. See Mark Rylance, in Bones and All (2022).
CANNIBAL: A person who eats the flesh of other human beings.
METAPHOR: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else.
ADDICTED: Physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance.
COMING OF AGE: As in coming of RAGE. As in OUTSIDERS, as in, we are what we are, and who we are, and YOU ARE MEAT.
TRUE LOVE: Skinny dipping. Diner sitting, coffee topping-upping. Rebels. On the road. Scraping together a bus fare, and then, later, long-distance driving. Progress. Landscapes, beautiful sunsets – unforgettable sights. Eating someone – negating them, usurping them, consuming them ALL. Getting high on it. Being able to talk about ANYTHING. Talking about it ALL. Being together, being apart, and deciding, ultimately, together is better. Killing, and then eating someone else.
A BIGGER SPLASH: A 2015 film by Bones and All’s Italian director Luca Guadagnino. See Suspiria, a 2018 remake of the 1977 Dario Argento horror classic. And, also, Call Me by Your Name (2017), with Timothee Chalamet. Plus, I Am Love (2009). Check out the rest, check them ALL.
GUADAGNINO: See “Grand Guignol” (Google it or Wiki it, get off on it ALL).
CASSETTE TAPES: A music format somewhere between vinyl and CD, somewhere between Kiss and make-up, somewhere between Neil Young and Nirvana, somewhere between Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and “Something in the Way.”
TWILIGHT SAGA: IMDB it, in case you don’t know. Google “YA”, and then forget about it, and forget about zombies. See, instead, Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973), and vampire movies like Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995), Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008), and Jim Jarmusch’s achingly cool Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
TAYLOR RUSSELL: In Bones and All, an absolute revelation. What’s next?!
CHALAMET: It has to be said, the camera loves Chalamet. There’s not much to him, physically – bones and … not much else – but he can be a real presence, fearsome as well as vulnerable and … intensely human, intensely emotional (“How dare you make this harder!”) and intensely real – the real deal. James Dean. Montgomery Clift. See “SCREEN ACTING”, above.
YOUR FAVOURITE MOVIES: Think about it – they always have a strong supporting cast. In Bones and All, there’s Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Harper, Chloe Sevigny, Andre Holland. David Gordon Green! Just like all your favourite movies.
TRENT REZNOR: And Atticus Ross. See Nine Inch Nails. Oscar winners, musical gurus. Bones and All is graced by a superb soundtrack and a climactic theme as soaringly romantic and heart-grabbingly physical as Randy Newman’s work on The Natural (1984 – a very different film, but, like Bones and All, an adaptation of an acclaimed novel).
THE END: When you sit through ALL the credits, ALL the way to the AFL-CIO, and beyond, and wonder what you did to deserve this. And then it’s back to the real world, back into the daylight (Consuming ALL of it. Cinema. Pure cinema. We’ve ALL been there. See “Guadagnino”. See “Grand Guignol”. See untrustworthy internet references, make up your own terms, your own genres, make up your own mind. See the bit where RYLANCE returns, and he wants it ALL).
SEE: Bones and All.