Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • American Honey

    American Honey

    AMERICAN HONEY is as close to guileless as film can be, in its shots, its editing, its acting, its casting. It shakes you awake with its freshness. Sasha Lane, plucked off a beach by the director Andrea Arnold to play the lead, is an instinctive talent whose craft seeps from her bones on its own…

  • Carol

    Carol

    Acting is the art of the inscrutability of the self. If, as Sartre would have it, the other person is unknowable, and, as Grotowski said, “no one can know the mind of the other person,” then it is the actor’s conundrum to know the mind of the person she plays and make him knowable to…

  • On the Road

    On the Road

    Jack Kerouac’s On the Road  was a literary rush when I read it sometime in the 1980s, the perfect expression of a sort of counter-mythology to the mainstream myth of the American Dream. The Dream myth holds that we can do anything we want in this country, choose our professions, attain wealth, and build families,…

  • Mesrine

    Mesrine

    MESRINE Parts 1 & 2 is a strangely compelling cinematic event, which seems the word to describe anything in the theater that requires a double commitment. I saw the parts on subsequent days but had the timing been different would have happily taken an intermission or lunch break on a single day. The anti-hero was…