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NEWS
- Last weekend the generally derided yet fiercely observed Golden Globes winners were announced 2016, which included La La Land (Best Director, Screenplay, Song, Score and Actor, Actress and picture for a musical/comedy), Moonlight (Best Drama), and Elle (Best Foreign Language film, Best Actress for a drama).
- Okay, it's not strictly cinema news, but 18 episodes of new moving pictures directed by David Lynch counts as news to us! Showtime has revealed the number of episodes of the upcoming season of Twin Peaks, all directed by Lynch, and that the two-hour premiere of the show will be on May 21, immediately followed by the digital release of the third and forth episodes. Those film professionals who will be in Cannes at the time better plan on skipping their Monday morning screenings!
- Great news for those, like us, still enamored by celluloid: KODAK has announced that by the end of the year it will manufacture and release EKTACHROME film stock "for both motion picture and still photography applications."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- We (and many others) love the intoxicating, by turns melancholy and joyous dance scenes in French director Philippe Garrel's films. Lovely, then, that the first clip we've seen from his new film, Lover for a Day, is just that, set to music by Jean-Louis Aubert, who did the score for Garrel's last two pictures, In the Shadow of Women and Jealousy.
- Apologies for missing this during the fall, but the irrepressible Jean-Marie Straub has made a new short film, Où en êtes-vous, Jean-Marie Straub? for a retrospective last summer at the Center Pompidou. Unsubtitled, but, yes: cats, light, Straub. We ask for little else from cinema.
- A new Death Race film produced by Roger Corman? Yes, please!
RECOMMENDED READING
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
- Anna Biller, the director (and writer, star, production and costume designer and editor) of the terrific sexploitation pastiche Viva, which we showed on MUBI in the fall, and most recently the acclaimed The Love Witch, has written an incredible article for her website about working in Hawaii as a Japanese bar hostess:
When I first took that job I saw it as a kind of performance art, but over the months I was unable to maintain that distance or to properly dissociate, and the job became me; I became the job. It was like those harrowing postwar Japanese movies about prostitutes (STREET OF SHAME, WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS, THE LIFE OF OHARU, GINZA COSMETICS), all highly recommended films
- Bless American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, he's been relentlessly re-publishing critical pieces onto his blog jonathanrosenbaum.net this New Year, including stellar articles on Chris Marker's documentary essay about Andrei Tarkovsky, English film critic Raymond Durgat, a 1980 interview with Godard, and an incensed review ("Rating — Worthless") of Star Wars: Special Edition.
- One of our very favorite film writers, Farran Smith Nehme, has written for Criterion on one of our very favorite films, Howard Hawks' screwball comedy His Girl Friday:
Over the years, Hawks had developed a refined understanding of how romantic comedy works. The audience must be convinced that the central couple are made for each other; a screwball comedy’s own particular cleverness lies in keeping the lovers apart for as long and in as crazily creative a way as possible. Remarriage plots are the most grown-up variation, because these are the movies that say two people can be perfectly suited and still louse it up. Matching (or, if you will, marrying) this device to The Front Page, so famous for its bite and cynicism, resulted in the most bracingly adult screwball comedy (and romance) of them all. Hawks and Lederer found a fresh spin on the remarriage comedy, making the question not how the wandering spouse will find her way home but how she’ll get back to work.
- The one end of the year film poll we always look forward to (and recommend) most is Senses of Cinema's sprawling World Poll. Many, many gems here, including lists by several Notebook contributors.
- Lisa Schwarzbaum has reviewed critic Molly Haskell's biography of Steven Spielberg for The New York Times:
The result is a fascinating jumble of messages — a study of a critic inevitably analyzing herself as she considers the life (Jewish and otherwise) of Steven Spielberg.
RECOMMENDED LISTENS
- Coming soon from one of our favorite vinyl re-issuers, Waxwork Records, Ennio Morricone's brief but unforgettable score to John Carpenter's The Thing.
EXTRAS
- Photographer Stephan Zaubitzer has been shooting old cinemas around the world, some in magnificent preservation, others in ramshackle decline.
- And over the weekend, Jean-Claude Van Damme busted a move. We're still waiting for the proper release of the action auteur's 2014 directorial effort once titled The Eagle Path and now seemingly named Full Love. We caught it in the Market in Cannes that year and found it a thrill. One day...