Playlist: Youth Without Youth

Why? Francis Ford Coppola's 2007 return to filmmaking

Yes, it was 10 years since Coppola last directed a movie (1997's forgettable The Rainmaker) and far longer since he had made a film. This and his follow-up, Tetro, are testaments to the resulting beauty of an artist rediscovering the love for his medium without the oppressive hand of a studio suit telling him how to be creative. These are indie arthouse films distilled from the mind that almost died under the bloated epicness of Apocalypse Now and all its fallout (Jack, anyone?).

I'm still trying to digest YWY. It's part Phenomenon, part Benjamin Button, part Mulholland Drive. I would go so far to say that it is a science fiction film, albeit one with far loftier ambitions than your standard time travel by the numbers fare. Not that it's a time travel movie...although it's not exactly not one either. Ok, let's go to the man himself, FFC, who calls it a meditation on time and on consciousness...a beautiful love story, or a mystery. Well, that clears things up.  

The source material was a 1976 novella by Romanian author Mircea Eliade about a professor (Tim Roth) who gets hit by lightning and starts a "new life with startling intellectual capacity". What's real and isn't, what happens and doesn't, is never clearly resolved. But thought-provokingly, not frustratingly. It's a film about ideas, or rather, the meaning and origin of ideas. I can't wait to hear Vin's take (yep, I saw a FFC film before him. Boom!)