Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel will open the 64th Berlinale on February 6th, 2014.
- The 7th Russian Film Festival has officially kicked off in London, celebrating "the most illustrious new Russian films, documentaries and animation". You can browse their program here.
- Joaquim Pinto's What Now? Remind Me has taken the top prize at DocLisboa. Other winners include Pippo Delbono's Sangue, and Gonçalo Tocha's The Mother and the Sea.
- One of our impassioned community members, Risselada, has started a very cool project in our forum:
"You are all invited to participate in a project to collectively create, discuss, and perpetually revise a list of our top films as the MUBI forum community. The project is intended to provide a venue for us to discover great films, discuss our favorite films, and create a list of films that will hopefully express the varied cinematic tastes of our many knowledgeable forum users."
Finds.
- Above: from "Cassavetes's Company", Tom Charity's annotated gallery of the great filmmaker's family of actors.
- From Steven Soderbergh's "one-of-a-kind marketplace" Extension 765, the director writes an appreciation for Peter Hunt's On Her Majesty's Secret Service:
"For me there’s no question that cinematically ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE is the best Bond film and the only one worth watching repeatedly for reasons other than pure entertainment (certainly it’s the only Bond film I look at and think: I’m stealing that shit). Shot to shot, this movie is beautiful in a way none of the other Bond films are—the anamorphic compositions are relentlessly arresting—and the editing patterns of the action sequences are totally bananas; it’s like Peter Hunt (who cut the first five Bond films) took all the ideas of the French new wave and blended them with Eisenstein in a Cuisinart to create a grammar that still tops today’s how fast can you cut aesthetic, because the difference here is that each of the shots—no matter how short—are real shots, not just additional coverage from the hosing-it-down school of action, so there is a unification of the aesthetic of the first unit and the second unit that doesn’t exist in any other Bond film. And, speaking of action, there are as many big set pieces in OHMSS as any Bond film ever made, and if that weren’t enough, there’s a great score by John Barry, some really striking sound work, and what can you say about Diana Rigg that doesn’t start with the word WOW?"
- Above: via Cinephilia and Beyond, photos from the set of Twin Peaks.
- For Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz talks to Oliver Stone about "New York in the Sixties and Seventies and Taking Film Classes With Martin Scorsese":
"Do you remember the first time you met Scorsese? Can tell me what impression he made on you? How did he strike you?
A nutcase. A New York nutcase.
I knew a lot of cranky New Yorkers. People who talk fast like Joe Pesci in the movies, the kinda wiseguys. You could barely see Marty’s eyes. He had hair down over his forehead and ears. And definitely funny.
He always looked like he’d not had enough sleep because he’d probably been up the night before looking at all the films on TV. That’s the only way we could see them back then unless you went to a museum. Understand, there was no such thing as video. He would stay up pretty late to watch these old classics on the local channels. And as he was up, I don’t think he slept too much, he would have an early class. I remember him talking fast. I can’t say I understood everything at all. I do remember his enthusiasm and his energy for the subject matter and he was definitely a young protégé. He was the protégé of Haig Manoogian, who was the presiding chief."
- Above: speaking of Scorsese, here's "Street of Dreams", his new ad for Dolce & Gabbana.
From the archives.
- Above: "At Home with Clint Eastwood".