Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Robert Koehler and Kent Jonesare taking over Richard Peña's programming duties at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. As two of the hardest working and knowledgeable film critics working, this comes as exciting news. We here at MUBI offer them ecstatic congratulations.
- TIFF has run its course, and the awards have been divvied up accordingly. Those prolific cats over at Cinema Scope have a "Listomania" ripe for those keen on the less official accolades.
Finds.
- You may have already noticed a post about this amazing find on our Facebook page. It comes by way of Khoi Vinh, who brought this to our attention at his blog. The idea over at FILMography is simple but very cool: Christopher Moloney goes to the original shooting location of a film, armed with a still, and takes a photo of it with the real location in the background, creating an image that merges cinema's past with the present.
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviewed Resident Evil: Retributionhere in the Notebook, and there are other articles on the new W.S. Anderson worth perusing. Among them: a conversation with Dave Kehr conducted by R. Emmet Sweeney, at Movie Morlocks, on the divisive director.
- At his website, Jonathan Rosenbaum has a report from TIFF, where he discusses, among other things, Room 237
"Like so much (too much) of contemporary cinema, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 is at once entertaining and reprehensible. Alternating between the extravagant commentaries of five analysts of Kubrick’s The Shining (Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Julie Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Jay Weidner), it refuses to make any distinctions between interpretations that are semi-plausible or psychotic, conceivable or ridiculous, implying that they’re all just “film criticism” and because everyone is a film critic nowadays, they all deserve to be treated with equal amounts of respect and/or mockery (assuming that one can distinguish between the two) -– that is, uncritically and derisively, with irony as the perpetual escape hatch."
- Johnnie To's forthcoming crime film Drug War has its first, fleeting teaser.
- Richard Brody takes on the aesthetics of the recently leaked—and very revealing—footage of Mitt Romney accusing working class Americans of mooching in his blog, The Front Row.
- Two pieces to check out from Ben Sachs over at The Bleader: a brief take on Ken Jacobs' Urban Peasants, and secondly some critical thoughts on King Vidor's The Crowd:
"The movie contradicts much of what I'd learned from my grandparents about U.S. urban life in the early 20th century. Both my father's and my mother's great-grandparents emigrated to American cities in the 1880s; by the time The Crowd takes place, they had settled firmly, if never exactly comfortably, into the Jewish immigrant enclaves of Chicago and New York. Community networks were in place to make sure that no one suffered too badly. The hardships of living in mass society were confronted communally, with institutions preserved from the old world (namely, synagogues) serving as hubs for group activity and support. King Vidor's film, for all its innovation, seems incapable of imagining any of this."
- It seems that Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan, which just screened at TIFF (and was remarked upon here in the Notebook by both Fernando F. Croce & Daniel Kasman), may have both a spiritual prequel and sequel (props to Chuck Stephens for this one):
From the archives.
- Above: Andy Romanoff has some gorgeous images of Nicholas Ray at the Chateau Marmont.