“Frankly, I hate dialogue,” the filmmaker told The Times of London in a recent interview. “Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today.”

First off, no. If I bothered to have an all-time list of my Top Ten or Top Twenty movies, Robert Altman, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles would be heavily represented, and they were all very focused on dialogue.

However, what caught my eye about this quote is that this is exactly how I feel about Villeneuve’s movie Blade Runner 2049. I have long wanted to watch a version with the visuals, the music, and the sound design, all of which are amazing, with the dialogue buried way down in the mix somewhere. Once you know the plot of the movie, the words aren’t important, and none of them are memorable, but the rest is a constant pleasure.

 
2) There are rumors that Paul Thomas Anderson is going to make a movie based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland.

There are a few reasons that I should not be excited by this news.

One: It may not be true. (Anderson is apparently directing a movie right now, but it’s not confirmed what movie.)

Two: He directed Inherent Vice, also based on a Pynchon novel. I enjoyed that movie, or at least parts of it, but it is not, I would say, actually good.

Three: Vineland may be my least favorite Pynchon novel (with the necessary caveat that I still haven’t read Against the Day).

Nevertheless, I am curious, and if the movie actually exists at some point (see point one above), I imagine I will go see it.

Update: Yeah, Vineland is my least favorite Pynchon novel. By a wide margin. I just checked Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t forgetting a novel, and, no, I remembered them all.