![]() What is it about Bresson’s films that inspire such personal reactions and frank admissions from their admirers? The Village Voice’s J. Though he pickpockets in order fill a spiritual void, to pretend that he doesn’t derive some kind of pleasure, however fleeting, from stealing is to misunderstand the way we cheat and compromise our deepest and most meaningful desires. This is not an insult to Bresson, who understands that Michel steals in the same way a person does drugs (in Jeanne, he not only finds a healthy, albeit specious form of spiritual salvation but an inhibitor for his reckless self-abuse). ![]() Make no mistake: there’s a psychosexual urgency to the film’s thieving scenes that is perverse and thrilling. But Bresson connects us to Michel’s plight sexually as well as spiritually. This is why Michel is always passing through doors and ascending and descending stairways: Like the characters in the director’s equally fine L’Argent, Michel is a slave to his material world, and he spends his time looking for a passage into a realm that promises more meaningful, less transitory, rewards. Godard famously said Au Hasard Balthazar was “life in 90 minutes” for me, though, Pickpocket was “ my life in 75 minutes.” It was my life to live but one I didn’t necessarily want to-except I knew no other.īresson profoundly understood this kind of torture, confusion, and crippling sense of spiritual and emotional emptiness, and every image in Pickpocket evokes the director’s idea of the soul in transition. Lonely, just barely out of the closet, and recently divorced from God, I also used to steal, getting caught a number of times but always weaseling myself out of potential jail time. LaSalle was beautiful but it’s his turmoil and haunted eyes I found most attractive and, finally, instructive. Tall, dark, lanky, and Latino, we could have been related (we even have a mole in the exact same spot on our right cheek), a confession that probably pegs me as a narcissist, but let’s not pretend the movies we love most are not the ones that most forcibly hold a mirror to our faces. Crime and Punishment was my favorite book and the correspondence between the text and Bresson’s film was exciting. My mother-born in Cuba and raised on a ridiculous amount of Russian literature-turned me on to Dostoyevsky in high school. And in Hugo, he briefly played the role of a photographer who took pictures of a young Georges Méliès.I came to Pickpocket (or was it Pickpocket that came to me?) at a time, I think, I needed it most. In Gangs of New York, for instance, Scorsese appears as a wealthy landowner who becomes one of the targets of the pickpocket-main-character Jenny ( Cameron Diaz). Other films Scorsese has appeared in include The King of Comedy, New York Stories, Gangs of New York, Hugo, and many more. It is Scorsese’s most significant cameo to date, but he only made the cameo to replace the actor who canceled last minute due to an injury. Scorsese’s role, credited as “Passenger Watching Silhouette.” tells Travis Bickle ( Robert De Niro) to linger around outside an apartment building and tells Bickle how he will kill his wife with a. Some of his cameos are more noticeable and at a larger scale, such as his role as a chilling cab passenger in Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese has made a habit of making cameo appearances in his own films. Fun fact: he also made a cameo as a Resistance Trooper on Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Episode VIII). Despite it being a mistake, Wright decided to keep his unintentional cameo but required the help of VFX company DNEG to remove the monitor (used for actual filming) next to Wright so that he would look like a pedestrian. When Baby ( Ansel Elgort) imitates playing the trumpet in a music shop, Wright’s reflection is visible in the music shop window. And in 2018, funnily enough, he made an unintentional cameo in Baby Driver. ![]() In The World’s End, Wright appears as a construction worker. RELATED: 10 Underrated Movies Recommended by Director Edgar Wright But his face is never clearly seen in these cameos. He appears as a zombie on the news ‘remembering Z-Day’ on Shaun of the Dead and as the guy pushing a trolley when Simon Pegg’s character storms through the supermarket on Hot Fuzz. After this, Wright made cameo appearances in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The first film feature film he directed and starred in was A Fistful of Fingers in 1995. British filmmaker Edgar Wright has directed many iconic films since the 1990s and has starred in eight of them.
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