I
was just watching on cable a little bit of Scott Hicks’ 1999 film Snow Falling on Cedars, which I think of
as the neglected masterpiece of recent American cinema (the critics just didn’t
get it). It’s definitely about 12 minutes too long but it is exquisite—a tone
poem about what we remember and how we visualize what we remember in our mind’s
eye. As it does for me, it may spark your mind (or soul) to call up some of the
pictures of longing and love and loss and joy that you have tucked away in your
mental files, the ones that can suddenly pop up, unbidden, at the oddest time, only
to wash away in a blink, leaving behind an ache you can’t define. This is a
movie about the movie in your head, the one that can’t be described and that no
one but you will ever experience. (Chuck Wilson)