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NEWS
Louis Cha, 1924 - 2018
- Louis Cha, widely regarded as the most influential Chinese martial arts novelist of the 20th century, has died at the age of 94. Notably, several of Cha's best-selling wuxia novels—written under the pen name Jin Yong—have been adapted into films, including King Hu's The Swordsman and Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time.
- Parasite, Bong Joon-ho's follow-up to Okja, has finished shooting ahead of its 2019 release. Bong has stated that "despite the title, the film does not include either parasites or alien creatures," though these stills certainly point to creeping tensions.
Here is a first look at Bong Joon-ho’s PARASITE starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-sik & Park So-dam that wrapped last month!! #기생충 pic.twitter.com/C9jjkjoWhK
— Jason Bechervaise (@Jasebechervaise) October 23, 2018
- We're naturally saddened to hear that the Wachowski sisters have closed their production offices, with Lana Wachowski reportedly suggesting that she had "accomplished everything she wanted to do [with cinema]." Few filmmakers can arrive at this resolution in their careers, thus we can't help but wish the Wachowski's the very best.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- An icy, edgy trailer for Brady Corbet's Vox Lux, starring Natalie Portman. From our coverage of the Venice Film Festival, Leonardo Goi described the film as "a merciless autopsy of a bulimic society and its inability to process success and horror."
- Mariano Llinás' 14-hour epic of spy games and storytelling gets its first sweeping trailer. Here's our review of this wondrous film.
- The latest comedic vision from the Romanian New Wave will soon hit U.S. theaters—here's the delightful trailer for Corneliu Porumboiu's Infinite Football.
- New Hollywood auteur Monte Hellman directed this short documentary on Francis Ford Coppola, who appears to be in the middle of production on his 1981 opus One from the Heart at the time. The director eloquently speaks on the future of cinema, art, and love.
- We love this magical livestream of a train ride through the Norwegian mountainside, not only for its relaxing effect, but also because it feels like a technological extension of the sensorial effective of the Lumière brothers' 1896 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.
RECOMMENDED READING
Natalie Portman in Vox Lux.
- Also for Vanity Fair, writer Durga Chew-Bose pens a keen profile of Natalie Portman, and the personal and political changes that have occurred throughout her career, including her involvement in #MeToo and Time's Up.
- The Brooklyn Academy of Music is now showing a number of postwar Japanese horror films for Ghosts and Monsters: Postwar Japanese Horror. For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri has provided a primer for the series, and the distinct dimensions of Japanese horror, which is "based less on surface scares and more on mood and moral complexity."
- Continuing the October 31st celebrations in the form of film criticism, there's Mike Thorn and Nathan Smith discussing the complex view of Evil in Rob Zombie's maligned revisions of John Carpenter's Halloween, and elsewhere the Graveyard Shift Sisters consider the treatment of class and race in Wes Craven's underestimated The People Underneath the Stairs.
Elaine May by Brigitte Lacombe
- For the first time in 50 years, Elaine May returns to Broadway in Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery. Vanity Fair's K. Austin Collins reviews the "righteously historic occasion, [...] a poignant, agonized, but also warm, funny, generous turn—in other words, a perfect Elaine May vehicle."
- Surveying 209 critics from around the world, the BBC has provided a list of the "100 greatest foreign language films," or films in a language other than English. Notably, the roster only includes four films directed by women, and a quarter of its titles are from East Asia. You can find a catalog of individual submissions here.
- For her column Phantom Light, Film Comment's Imogen Sara Smith pairs Karpo Godina's satirical jazz film Red Boogie and Paweł Pawlikowski’s musical Cold War: "Both use a patchwork of different musical styles to evoke the turbulent historical currents their characters must navigate."
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Artist Ben Rivers and Tom Emerson discuss their new film Trees Down Here, a collaborative effort about the natural history of Cowan Court, Churchill College Cambridge.
- Following the premiere of Monrovia, Indiana at the Venice Film Festival, Frederick Wiseman sat down with Annabel Brady-Brown for an interview regarding his approach to the American Midwest, and the "ghost of politics [hovering] over the film."
- Evan Morgan reviews Vetrimaaran's Vada Chennai, and its depiction of oscillating movements of underworld power in a Chennai neighborhood.
EXTRAS AND RE-DISCOVERIES
- Jamie Lee Curtis upends the press junket interview format for an impromptu reading of a moving, prescient Steinbeck passage:
Jamie Lee Curtis (@jamieleecurtis) treated @jdrrr to a reading of her favourite literary passage, taken from John Steinbeck's classic novel East of Eden. pic.twitter.com/BdK9dq1T9a
— ABC Arts (@ABCArts) October 25, 2018