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NEWS
My Life as a Dog (Lasse Hallström, 1985).
- Amid concerns over new provisions for AI, IATSE members have voted to ratify their new three-year contract with AMPTP, which includes a historic 40 percent raise for television and theatrical costume designers.
- Meanwhile, Teamsters Local 399 “remain far apart” on terms after five weeks of bargaining, reporting that “this was the first week in which we saw the employers take this process seriously.” Their current contract will expire on July 31, after which the union could strike.
- The Swedish motion-picture industry is calling for a change to the state’s “first-come, first-served” funding process, which most recently distributed all available funds in one minute and seven seconds.
- Germany plans to nearly double its national film funding over the next three years to €20 million.
FESTIVALS
Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976).
- Sundance may find a new host city, starting in 2027. The festival is considering bids from Atlanta, GA; Boulder, CO; Cincinnati, OH; Louisville, KY; Santa Fe, NM; and its current home in Park City and Salt Lake City, UT.
- Due to Argentinean President Javier Milei’s defunding of the nation’s film body, the Ventana Sur festival will indeed relocate across the Río de la Plata to Montevideo, Uruguay, beginning in December.
- According to a new survey, 85 percent of film festivals need more public funding to survive.
- The Venice International Film Festival has posted this year’s line-up, the Toronto International Film Festival has shared their Discovery slate, and the New York Film Festival has announced RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024) as the opening-night selection.
IN PRODUCTION
- Robert Pattinson is set to appear opposite Jennifer Lawrence in Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love, which will begin shooting next month.
REMEMBERING
Catch-22 (Mike Nichols, 1970).
- Bob Newhart has died at 94. The American comedian transitioned from stand-up to sitcoms in the 1970s and starred in two long-running eponymous television series. He also acted in such films as Hell Is for Heroes (1962), Catch-22 (1970), In & Out (1997), and Elf (2003). The former accountant’s life in comedy began, as have so many others, with making prank phone calls.
- Cheng Pei-pei has died at 78. The Chinese American actress had trained as a ballerina and earned the nickname the “Queen of Swords” during a run of twenty Shaw Brothers films, including King Hu’s first wuxia, Come Drink with Me (1966). After a period of retirement, she returned to prominence as Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).
- Carla Balenda has died at 98. The American actress—sometimes billed by her birth name, Sally Bliss—was a contract player at Columbia and RKO Pictures, starring in such films as Sealed Cargo (1951), Outlaw Women (1952), and Phantom Stallion (the last singing cowboy western, 1954) before transitioning to television with roles in The Mickey Rooney Show (1954–55), Lassie (1958–63), and others.
La dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960).
- Yvonne Furneaux has died at 98. The French British actress starred in such films as Michelangelo Antonioni’s breakthrough Le amiche (1955), Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).
- Donna Berwick has died at 66. The American costume designer is perhaps best known for her work with Ruth E. Carter on Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X (1992), and Crooklyn (1994), and she was promoted to lead costume designer for She Hate Me (2004), Inside Man (2006), and Da 5 Bloods (2020). She got her start as an artist and fashion designer, clothing the likes of Grace Jones.
- Whitney Rydbeck has died at 79. The American actor and mime had a long career of bit parts, including Sleeper (1973), Rocky II (1979), and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986). His most memorable work may have been as Larry the crash test dummy for a series of public service announcements between 1985 and 1999.
RECOMMENDED READING
Janet Planet (Annie Baker, 2023).
- “The studio moguls weren’t just enterprising, talented men with private flaws. They created and enforced a system of power which had real victims, which entrenched marginalization in American popular culture, and which contemporary Hollywood was still grappling with as the museum opened its doors.” For the New Yorker, Michael Schulman takes in the Academy Museum’s new (and newly sanitized) permanent exhibition on Hollywood’s Jewish founding fathers.
- “When we think about a child’s point of view, we often fetishize its imputed innocence; their perspective is a vehicle for an adult’s pathetic idealization of how they appear to others.” For The Baffler, Moeko Fujii considers Annie Baker’s Janet Planet (2023) as an example of “films about girls who look.”
- “A certain combination of an actor’s embodiment, a cinematographer’s frames, a writer’s phrasing synthesizes to construct what audiences experience as specific to the present.” In the first installment of a new column on screen acting for Reverse Shot, Shonni Enelow focuses on Anna Cobb’s performance for the webcam in Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021).
- “It opens with a tracking shot of the grounds of a huge refinery. Rendered with an abstract beauty, it appears inimical to human flourishing.” For New Left Review’s Sidecar, Julia Hertäg memorializes Thomas Heise via an introduction to his documentaries, including a controversial trilogy on a group of neo-Nazi youth and their families.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Batwoman (René Cardona, 1968).
- New York, July 26 through August 8: Film at Lincoln Center presents “Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema,” a survey of genre classics from the 1940s through the ’60s.
- London, July 27: Close-Up Film Centre presents Evans Chan’s To Liv(e) (1992) alongside written responses to the film by UK-based artists of the Hong Kong diaspora.
- Los Angeles, through August 4: American Cinematheque’s 70mm series continues with screenings of Vertigo (1958), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Spartacus (1960), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and more.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Janus Films has released a trailer for the restoration of Time Masters (1982), directed by René Laloux and designed by Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Mœbius), in theaters this week.
- Utopia has released a trailer for Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms (2023), of which Adam Nayman wrote, “It’s a movie that dares to leave threads dangling and doors ajar, allowing certain images and ideas to scuttle into your subconscious.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
S'en fout la mort (Claire Denis, 1990).
- “Rather than a window into another world, or a light source illuminating our own, the lamp is a mass-produced material object.” Isabella Miller traces the border between kitsch and sublimity in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997).
- “The film ultimately hangs on our perception of such shifts, between the subtle passage of ordinary moments and abrupt confrontation of historical events.” Re’al Christian considers Raqs Media Collective’s The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone (2023), a short film that draws its perambulating narrative from the historical events of 1980 in India.
- “Simultaneously courting and mitigating real danger, stunt work occupies a liminal zone between artifice and authenticity.” Jonah Jeng surveys the representation of stuntpeople on screen, from Hooper (1978) to The Fall Guy (2024).
- “Animated by economies of desire and exploitation, this tightly wound film sees the rearticulation of the colony in the banlieue and the continuation of racialized oppression in a dance of death.” Yasmina Price writes about the influence of Frantz Fanon on Claire Denis’s S’en fout la mort (1990).
- “In this particular moment of reviving and remounting, I had the film in mind, and was thinking about Amanda coming in and doing what I was doing at the time. It was a direct transference from me to her.” Saffron Maeve speaks to Atom Egoyan about Seven Veils (2023), in which Amanda Seyfried plays the director of Richard Strauss’s Salome, a role Egoyan himself has long filled for the Canadian Opera Company.
WISH LIST
- Keanu Reeves and China Miéville have coauthored a novel, The Book of Elsewhere, involving the main character from Reeves’s comic book series, BRZRKR, an 80,000-year-old immortal warrior who happens to meet Sigmund Freud.
EXTRAS
- Michael Mann Archives is a new platform offering an authorized package of bonus material from his films, starting with material related to six scenes from Ferrari (2023), which costs $65, plus “gas fees” for the use of blockchain technology.