Rushes: Alice Rohrwacher x JR, Claudia Weill's "Girlfriends," Covid Documentaries

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NEWS

Above: Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (2019).

• The first few details have emerged regarding Ari Aster's next feature, with Joaquin Phoenix in talks to star. Tentatively titled Beau is Afraid, the film (previously a 2011 short film by Aster) involves an anxious man's surreal and nightmarish trek to his overbearing mother's home following her death.
• Meanwhile, Spike Lee has announced his plans to direct a musical about the launch of launch of Pfizer’s erectile dysfunction drug, Viagra.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• New York's Screen Slate and Collaborative Cataloging Japan recently hosted a Twitch discussion with legendary filmmaker Masao Adachi on Gewaltpia: Motoharu Jonouchi and the Japanese Avant-Garde. The stream will remain online through tomorrow, and then will be available to Screen Slate's Patreon supporters.
• Omelia Contadina, by JR and Alice Rohrwacher in collaboration with the inhabitants of the Alfina plateau, is also now available on Youtube. The film documents the community's celebration of a funeral for traditional agriculture.

• The latest film by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel (whose film Jessica Forever premiered on MUBI in 2019), Baby Anger (or Bébé Colère) features a "default CGI animated child" filled with despair.

• The official trailer for Sam Pollard's documentary MLK/FBI, about the FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s activism.

• Regina King's feature debut, One Night in Miami..., follows a fictional meeting between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke on the night of Ali's title win over Sonny Liston.

RECOMMENDED READING

Above: Claudia Weill and Melanie Mayron on the set of Girlfriends (1978).

• "Going way back you always have these sidekicks—usually they’re funny, maybe a little overweight, maybe a little ethnic—and I wanted the sidekick to be the protagonist. It came out of feeling like I didn’t actually see myself or my friends in the movies, if you understand what I’m talking about." In a new interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Claudia Weill discusses the production of her film Girlfriends. Criterion has also made Molly Haskell's essay on the film, included in the release of its blu-ray restoration, available online.
• For the 25th anniversary of Martin Scorsese's Casino, turn to Adam Nayman's reappraisal for an in-depth look at the film's portrait of Las Vegas, and its place in Scorsese's career as a "massive [gamble] with studio resources."
• "You can’t help but experience a somatic response to the surfeit of beauty and omen and ecstasy in McQueen’s living painting." Doreen St. Felix reflects on the sensuality of Steve McQueen's anthology film, Small Axe.

• Amid a growing number of "Covid documentaries," critic and Notebook contributor Matt Turner appraises three such films, from Alex Gibney's Totally Under Control to Ai Weiwei's CoroNation, and their differences in perspective, rhetorical strategies, and access to information.

Above: Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).

• New Republic editor Ryu Spaeth reflects on learning from the "extraordinarily heroic and thoroughly ordinary girls" in the films of Hayao Miyazaki.
• Melissa Anderson reviews the new David Bowie docudrama, Stardust, and the many limitations of its "low-budget LARPing."
• Ahead of the Netflix release of David Fincher's Mank, Richard Brody revisits the battle over Citizen Kane and the questions of its authorship raised by Pauline Kael's essay "Raising Kane."
• A number of web exclusives and previews from the new issue of Cineaste are available online, including Matthew Hays' review of Antoine Damiens' much-needed book, LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Above: The deluxe edition vinyl for Ghost Dog - Original Motion Picture Score.

• For the first time ever, the score for Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog (produced by RZA and featuring appearances by Wu-Tang Clan) is now available on vinyl outside of Japan.
• Notebook contributor Florence Scott-Anderton continues her Sounds on Screen series at NTS with a journey into the imaginative soundscapes of Satoshi Kon.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

• Michelle Cho's new video essay traces the fragile passage of time through the shifting textures of Lee Kang-sheng's face in the films of Tsai Ming-Liang.
• The latest Notebook Primer explores the poignant stories of happenstance and deliverance by Krzysztof Kieślowski.
• Yoon Sung-A introduces her documentary Overseas with an excerpt from her logbook describing a class attended by Filipino women training before being deployed overseas as domestic workers. The film is exclusively showing November 25 - December 24, 2020 on MUBI in the Viewfinder series.

• Danielle Burgos dives into the softer side of Shinya Tsukamoto, with his most compassionate films, Vital and A Snake of June. The two films are now playing on MUBI in the United States in the double bill The Human Extremes of Shinya Tsukamoto.

EXTRAS

• Filmmaker Joanna Arnow, whose short Laying Out premiered at the New York Film Festival and most recently played at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, has been publishing timely, grimly funny pandemic-era comics on her Twitter and Instagram.