20Aug10
A largely unknown subject, the period's posters are mostly illustrated and are influenced by Bollywood advertising.
19Aug10
Eduardo de Gregorio re-imagines his haunted house from Celine and Julie Go Boating as a feature film in and of itself.
18Aug10
Ten exciting under the radar titles worth looking out for in the various sections of the festival.
16Aug10
The ostentatious maximalist (Christopher Nolan) vs. the restrained maximalist (Anthony Mann).
Starting tomorrow and running through Monday, the Telluride Film Festival will screen 24 new feature films in the "Show" as well as six programs curated by Guest Director Michael Ondaatje, 25 new shorts and 13 documentaries in its Backlot program. Read More
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"While Julian Schnabel's Miral packs an emotional punch, he tells the wrong story," argues Anne Thompson. "I was in tears during both of the film's bookend sections, which focus on real-life Hind Husseini (the great Hiam Abbass), a wealthy Palestinian woman who in 1948 takes it upon herself to feed, clothe, educate and house thousands of orphans left abandoned and destitute by the ongoing wars and strife in Jerusalem.... While Husseini remains a character in the drama, the screenplay, adapted by Palestinian/Italian broadcaster Rula Jebreal from her semi-autobiographical novel, focuses on Miral (Indian actress Freida Pinto), a young girl born in 1973 whose widower father (Alexander Sidding) brings her to the orphanage to live during the week.... This kind of earnest agit-prop material is tough to adapt to the screen; Schnabel needed a more proficient dramatist to pull this off." Read More
"With his striking visual sense and gift for conjuring a mood of languid sensuality, Tran Anh Hung would seem the ideal filmmaker to tackle Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami's beguiling novel of longing, loss and sexual curiosity in 1960s Japan." Justin Chang in Variety: "But while this beautiful-looking film at times succeeds in capturing its source material's delicate emo spirit, it's far less attentive to the richness of Murakami's characters — namely, a college student haunted by one woman and ardently pursued by another." Read More
Many thanks to Matthew Flanagan for pointing out the fifth issue of the multi-lingual journal La Furia Umana with its rapporto confidenziale devoted to Jacques Tourneur. It opens with a conversation on the filmmaker, and the talkers here are none other than Pedro Costa and Chris Fujiwara (author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall; see, too, Michael Guillén's recent interview with him). Tag Gallagher and Gwenda Young and Marco Grosoli have contributions in English as well. Read More
The big question about Chicago (1927), the first version of the famous play which later gave us Ginger Rogers as Roxie Hart and, ahem, some other people in a musical, is, "Did credited director Frank Urson really direct it, or is producer Cecil B. DeMille the film's true controller?"
I'm inclined to credit Urson, although I haven't seen any of his other fourteen films (he never made it into talkies, dying in 1928 just as the writing became visible on the wall, and the actors started reading it aloud). Possibly because the film's too good. But it certainly has a DeMille touch about it too, notably a reveling in sinful excess, followed by a bludgeoning morality play ending. Anybody who's enjoyed the crawling hypocrisy of a DeMille bible story will recognize the same mentality in Jazz Age drag.
Phyllis Haver is Roxie Hart, the most convincing if not the most charming embodiment of that particular fictionalized person. Journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins took her inspiration from a particularly hard-boiled dame, Beulah Annan, who shot her lover, then sat drinking cocktails and listening to a foxtrot record for four hours, watching the poor sap die. No movie version has recreated that particular scene. While Ginger Rogers really sells the comedy of the amoral slut who's so completely innocent of any shred of decency she's actually kind of winning, and Renée Zellweger... actually, I can't really remember what she did. Anyhow, Phyllis is aggressively vulgar, heartless, hypocritical and downright vicious in her alienation from any tender human feeling, and since the silent version robs the character of her best lines, the impression is all the more forceful.
(When Phyllis wanted to retire and marry a millionaire two years later, she invoked the Act of God Clause in her contract. DeMille asked what she meant. "Well, if marrying a millionaire ain't an act of God, I don't know what is!" He saw her point.) Read More
Updated through 9/2.
Yes, Robert Rodriguez's Machete opens Stateside on Friday, but its first public screening is tonight in Venice, a Midnight opener, Out of Competition, and the first yeas and nays are in. Read More
Updated through 9/2.
The very first rumblings from the Lido are raves. Most of us can't see Mike Goodridge's review for Screen, but Awards Daily can, so here we go: "Already back on track after Venice Golden Lion winner The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky soars to new heights with Black Swan, an enthralling drama set in the competitive world of ballet. Alternately disturbing and exhilarating, this dark study of a mentally fragile performer derailed by her obsession with perfection is one of the most exciting films to come out of the Hollywood system this year. Indeed it's the perfect film to open the autumn season with its gala at Venice tonight, a bold display of cinematic fireworks that will leave audiences breathless." Read More
"For much of the half-century since the premiere of Frantisek Vlácil's feature debut The White Dove (Holubice), the Czech director has been treated in his home country with a reverence out of all proportion to his undeservedly minuscule international profile," writes Michael Brooke in Sight & Sound. "Although he is considered one of the most important harbingers of the Czech New Wave — and lived to see his medieval epic Marketa Lazarová (1967) voted the best Czech film of all time by a panel of local critics and industry experts on the centenary of Czech cinema in 1998 — his work was practically invisible in the UK until the enterprising Second Run DVD label released his masterpiece in 2007. Thankfully, Vlácil's UK profile is set to rise significantly this year: Second Run has also disinterred his films The Valley of the Bees (Udolí vcel, 1967) and Adelheid (1969), and September sees a near-complete retrospective of his work playing in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow." Read More
"'Bourne meets Antonioni!' is not a marketer's dream tagline," notes Mark Olsen in the Voice, and not without some degree of sympathy for the team trying to pass off Anton Corbijn's The American as "a fast-paced Euro-stylish thriller starring George Clooney as a dashing, conflicted hero." Read More
Tom Tykwer has had a somewhat up-and-down career, at least according to the reviews, but what he's up to now may be that rare thing in cinema, an unqualified good. Using his own money, he's set up a scheme to train filmmakers in Africa—directors, writers, crew, actors. Projects are workshopped, then made. Soul Boy is the first feature to emerge from the scheme. Made for €80,000, shot in just thirty days, with highly trained professionals largely standing by to let the first-timers have their crack at it, this movie is sixty minutes of pure dream.
I haven't written much about African cinema (have I written anything?) because I don't know much about it, and I've struggled to get into it because I always get the feeling I'm supposed to see it as a good liberal, or to show an interest in other cultures. I do have an interest in other cultures, but that has almost nothing to do with what I watch films for. I want any film I watch to do two or three things, in no special order of preference:
1) Be a beautiful object (defining "beautiful" in as loose and sloppy a way as possible)
2) Give pleasure (defining "pleasure" with similar laxity)
3) Provoke rewarding thought (so that the experience isn't over when the film's done)
I stand by all of the above, but have to admit that failing to engage with pretty much a continent's worth of cinema cannot be defended on those grounds. There's going to be stuff there for me to love!
Happily, Soul Boy is eminently loveable, and satisfies my three big needs thoroughly. One might be favourably inclined towards it purely on charitable grounds, but the movie creates an affectionate response all its own, in synch with the first warm feeling but distinct from it, totally earned by the movie's own merits. Read More
David Cairns
The Forgotten: Remember
The Forgotten: Cold Warrior
The Forgotten: The Other Other House
The Forgotten: Girls on a Motorcycle
Adrian Curry
Movie Poster of the Week: The Alamo Roadshow Posters of Olly Moss
Movie Poster of the Week: The Movie Posters of Tom Whalen
Movie Poster of the Week: Iranian Cinema of the 60s and 70s
Movie Poster of the Week: "On the Bowery"
Doug Dibbern
For the Filming of Widescreen Snowscapes and Against the Interpretation of Dreams
Veronika Ferdman
Karlovy Vary 2010: A Bohemian Rhapsody
Matthew Flanagan
Image of the Day. Records of Material Objects in the Cinema #4
S. Hahn
Image of the day. Looming
Boyd van Hoeij
Venice 2010 Preview
Daniel Kasman
Mysterious Extracts from a Film's Subtitle Track
A Gentleman Prefers Friends
Image of the Day. Cinema Villains & Villainy #1
The McKay Way
Image of the Day. Frames We Love
Video Sundays. Cabaret Cinema
For The Icon, The Shadow, and The Glimmer Between: 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg
Images of the Day: A Smile in the Sun
Glenn Kenny
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Thundercrack! " (Curt McDowell, 1975)
The Joys of Disreputable Cinema: "William Lustig Presents" at Anthology
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Deutschland im Herbst" & "Die Patriotin" " (Alexander Kluge, 1978 & 1979)
Comin' At Ya, Again: Film Forum's "Classic 3-D"
Tuesday Morning Foreign Blu-ray disc Report: "Psycho" (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Tuesday Morning Foreign Blu-ray disc Report: "Paranoiac" (Freddie Francis, 1963)
The Pulp Imagination of Eric Rohmer; or, The Shortest Film-Critical Website Post Ever!
Tuesday Morning Foreign DVD and Blu-ray disc Report: "The Battle of the River Plate/The Pursuit of the Graf Spee" (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1956)
Mina Lunzer
Smashed to Pieces: Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film 2010
Ben Sachs
Now on DVD: "Death at a Funeral" (Neil LaBute, 2010)
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Now in theaters: "The Expendables" (Sylvester Stallone, USA)
Marshall's Women and Men
Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times on The Red Riding Trilogy: "From one film to another — 1974, 1980, 1983 — stories overlap, contexts shift and characters recur. But while the plots are busy and intricate, the emphasis is not really on narrative propulsion or coherence, let alone closure.... The north of England is very much a physical location in these films: a wasteland of postindustrial decline, an expanse of gray skies, foggy moors and grim concrete structures. But this being, as the title suggests, a twisted gothic fairytale, it is also a kind of existential landscape, an almost mythic place where 'the rot,' as one of the thwarted good guys calls it, has penetrated to a cellular level." Read More
by Glenn Kenny
This is the film that made me fall in love with Montvideo. Montevideo being the major city in Uruguay and the setting for the climax of this picture, a naval battle whose outcome I shall be spoiling (SPOILER ALERT!) below. The climax of this splendid 1956 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, one of the least-talked about pictures in the team's ouevre, takes place in Montevideo, where the notorious German "pocket battleship" (the term, rather confusingly, refers to a large cruising war ship) had been docked for repairs in late 1939. (One thing that made the ship notorious was that it had sunk nearly ten Allied merchant ships by that time.) Hot on its trail...and hence, one of the film's two titles, The Pursuit of the Graf Spee...were several British and Australian ships. Once those caught up with the Graf Spee, the captain of the latter vessel—played here by the great Peter Finch—would be faced with something of a Hobson's Choice...
The resultant fireworks are, in the film, reported over radio by one Mike Fowler, played by Lionel Murton, who's watching the dock from a very cozy Montevideo bar. Throughout the climax, we are treated to views of Montevideans, upper-crust and below, all taking in what could well be an epic sea battle from the comforts of bars, balconies, and such, as the sun goes down and creates a beautiful mauve mirror of gold, purple and pink. It's all rather lyrical for an "action" scene and it fits the elegiac tenor of the actual action. In any event, watching this picture for the first time, it was Mike Fowler's situation that most enchanted (maybe it had something to do with the prospect of working from a bar), and made me think that Montevideo was a city I ought to visit one day. (I have not yet achieved this aim, or even conceived of any sort of pretext which might prod/enable/allow me to achieve this aim.) Read More
This is the week we ramp up for the fall festival season. Venice opens on Wednesday, Telluride happens over the weekend, followed shortly thereafter by Toronto, then San Sebastian, Fantastic Fest, and of course, New York, which'll carry us over into October. In short, it's the perfect time for Girish Shambu to strike up the conversation he has; he's "been wondering: How have film festivals slowly changed in the last decade or two? And what are things that a good film festival ought to be doing?" Read More
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Le Monde and other French news outlets are reporting that Alain Corneau has succumbed to cancer at the age of 67. Just last week, Jordan Mintzer reviewed Corneau's latest, Crime d'amour (Love Crime), for Variety, calling it a "taut, sinister psycho-procedural." Starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier and having just opened in theaters in France, the film is set to screen in a couple of weeks at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In 1992, Corneau's Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings of the World) swept France's César Awards, winning best film, director, cinematography (Yves Angelo), supporting actress (Anne Brochet), music (Jordi Savall), costume design (Corinne Jorry) and sound. In 2004, Corneau was awarded the Prix René Clair.
Updates, 8/31: "Mr Corneau's movies included science fiction, police thrillers, a look at office politics in Japan and a mood piece about ancient India," writes Douglas Martin in the New York Times, "but his big success was Tous les Matins, which took its title from a sentence in the novel by the same name by Pascal Quignard. That sentence, reflecting the mystical fatalism of a main character, is sometimes translated as 'Every morning on Earth is irrevocable.'... 'Many people got emotional about this film, and that made it possible for it to escape cult status,' Mr Corneau said of the movie's broad success, speaking in an interview with The New York Times in 1992."
Ronald Bergan in the Guardian: "Série noire (1979), based on Jim Thompson's novel A Hell of a Woman, but moved from LA to a dreary Paris suburb, was Corneau's best noir, in which his influences, including Jean-Pierre Melville, had become more absorbed into his own style. The low-key film has since gathered an additional shadow because its two young leads, Patrick Dewaere and Marie Trintignant both died in their 30s. (Corneau was the partner of Marie's mother, the director Nadine Trintignant.) Choice of Arms (1981), a perfectly paced, atmospheric gangster movie à la française, had a trio of great French stars — Montand, Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve."
Update, 9/1: Fear and Trembling is now viewable in the US.
Image: Corneau directs Patrick Dewaere in Série noire (1979). For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow The Daily Notebook on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.
Displaying 10 of 42 reviews.
in Venice 2010. Robert Rodriguez's "Machete"
2Sep10
by Mac