Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Red Road (2006)

Clyde: Do you know what I wonder about you?

Jackie: What?

Clyde: How your cunt taste like.
Shocked?

Jackie: Not really.

Gotta love them Andrea Arnold movies! No but seriously Red Road is one greatest films of the past twenty years, and you never hear anybody talk about it. Well that's what I'm here for. It's the actress and goddess Kate Dickie's 52nd birthday today and I considered doing a list of my favorite performances but I realized she's done a lot of work I've never seen, and besides that a lot of her roles are small supporting character roles -- like, she'll pop up in something like The Green Knight for five minutes and you won't be able to look at anything else while she's there. Of course if I did do a list it'd also include Robert Eggers' The Witch...

... basically if you're a filmmaker who has properly utilized Kate Dickie, who understands what a force she is, then you're one of my favorite directors. We speak each other's language. To get back to The Witch for a second though -- one of my favorite reveals in that film is when we realize that Dickie's prim mother character has blonde hair. We never see her hair until things start going wrong, she's got it all pinned up under her bonnet. But then the world begins to collapse and little strands of blonde hair start appearing, and then of course all the blood matted in the blonde at the end.

Dickie makes that hair feel wicked -- like it's her foul secret that she's cursed her wicked daughter with. And it's without saying anything -- it's all in the margins. Anyway it takes an actress capable of fully possessing such sternness as Dickie is called on for in the film's first three-quarters to make the revelation of a hair color feel apocalyptic, but she does it. God I love her. Absolutely one of the greats working today and people need to be giving her big roles!