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NEWS
Amy Heckerling on the set of the Off Broadway musical of her film Clueless.
- We are delighted by the news shared by the New York Times that American auteur Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) is producing an Off-Broadway musical of her pop culture landmark film (and so much more!), Clueless. For more on the director, read our 2016 interview.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Marcelo Martinessi's lovely debut film The Heiresses, a delicate drama focusing on the self-discovery of a wealthy, middle-aged queer women in Paraguay, gets an English trailer. We reviewed the film at the 68th Berlinale held earlier this year.
- The Criterion Collection produced this lovely video exploring the birth and programming vision of New York's Walter Reade cinema.
RECOMMENDED READING
- It's that time of the year again: Year-end lists of the best films of 2018 have begun trickling in from Cahiers du cinéma (whose number one film, The Wild Boys, received its online premiere on MUBI in September), Artforum (Amy Taubin, J. Hoberman, Melissa Anderson, James Quandt, and Ed Halter), Sight & Sound, and Film Comment!
- The recent publication of Jim Lochner's book The Music of Charlie Chaplin has uncovered an unreckoned matter with Chaplin's film scores: he was not always the sole composer as credits would imply. Tina Hassannia investigates this finding for The Atlantic.
- Speaking of film music, Scroll.in hosts an excerpt from translator Nasreen Munni Kabir's new book on the craft of subtitling Hindi songs in cinema. This excerpt in particular focuses on the translation of "Jiya Jale" from Mani Ratnam's masterpiece, Dil Se...
China's Hendgian Studios
- At The New York Times, Steven Lee Myers provides a rare, essential look into the world of China's Hendgian studios, which features the world's largest outdoor film set.
- Critic Sarah-Tai Black considers the racial politics of Travis Wilkerson's Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? for the programming series Vertical Features. Elsewhere, for The Globe and Mail, Black revisits Spike Lee's BlackKklansman and questions its "easy political palatability" for white critics and audiences.
- Criterion has also published an interview with Germany director Christian Petzold to mark his on-going retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Petzold discusses his personal history as a cinephile, the role of choreography in his films, and his use of "transient spaces."
- Angela Shpolberg of the L.A. Review of Books examines Sergei Eisenstein's "ambitious Mexican-American project, ¡Que Viva México!" and his strained relationship with author Upton Sinclair.
- For Vulture's 100 Scares week dedicated to the horror genre, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas has provided an eclectic and thoughtfully curated beginner's guide to women's horror filmmaking, from avant-garde pioneer Lois Weber to J-horror legend Mari Asato.
- Tom Silver, for Cultural Bulletin, explores the most unique genesis of a cinema in Amsterdam known as Kriterion.
- The Ringer's Michael Tedder offers a re-appraisal of Chris Elliott and Alan Resnick's nonsensical 1994 comedy Cabin Boy, which "has been extremely important to the development of American comedy."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- For the A24 podcast, composers Oneohtrix Point Never (also known as Daniel Lopatin) and Mica Levi share an enlightening conversation on electronic music and scoring films as a process of "[turning] flat images into 3D objects."
- Film Comment has posted its 2018 Filmmakers' Chat from the New York Film Festival, a dialogue between filmmakers Jodie Mack, Louis Garrel, Alex Ross Perry, and Albert Serra.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Our film poster specialist Adrian Curry rounds up his favorite designs of the year.
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviews a lavish new book exploring the career of a master cinematographer Darius Khondji.
- In our latest video essay, David Verdeure explores the significance of location in Billy Wilder's The Apartment.
- Jason Wood remembers the great innovator-auteur Nicolas Roeg, director of Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth.