The Brattle Theatre here in Cambridge, Mass. has film notes for some of the stuff they show, and I wrote this one about Edward Scissorhands, which they showed on Christmas day.
I'm pretty proud of this review, and writing it reminded me what I love about taking apart movies: You sit down to put together something decent, and you realize you don't actually understand the movie. You have a reaction to it but you can't quite explain it -- you want to talk about impressions you had, but you don't want to talk in vagaries, and as an internal version of Socrates starts asking you questions about these assertions that you want to make about the movie it occurs to you that you really don't know what you were talking about. So you go back to square one, and maybe you even go back several times. And then, after you do this over and over again, you begin to have a handle on all the issues that have come up if it's any kind of good movie, and a skeptical question wouldn't be enough to derail your whole argument. And hey, that's pretty neat.
