Edited by Adam Cook
- First up: the summer issue of Cinema Scope has arrived, and aside from Mark Persanson's annual biting take on Cannes (this year's is particularly inspired), there are several pieces available online to read. For the rest (including my review of Abel Ferrara's Welcome to New York!), you'll have to pick up the print issue.
- The latest edition of La Furia Umana is also now available online. Check out Toni D'Angela's editor's note, "The 'Film' of the Visible".
- From Interview Magazine, Harmony Korine talks to Kenneth Anger!!
- Interesting takes on Michael Bay's Transformers: Age of Extinction are few and far between (hopefully our forthcoming piece on the film will suffice...), but Richard Brody has two measured, insightful articles: one on the film itself, and one on its cultural impact.
- In Film Comment, Graham Fuller chats with British filmmaker Joanna Hogg:
"FC: Why did you choose, in Exhibition, to explore an interior space so intensively?
JH: I’ve spent a long time in each place I’ve lived in and have always had difficulty moving out. That was the starting point. I wanted to put the fear of change into the story. The need for security is the heart of it. As I get older, I find it more and more difficult to change and try to fight it, but it’s reality."
- A curious little interview conducted by Oliver Lunn with Michael Deeley, the producer of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, has popped up on Grolsch Film Works.
- For Movie Morlocks, R. Emmet Sweeney writes on Bertrand Tavernier’s debut feature The Watchmaker of St. Paul.
- "Artful Guises in the Belle Epoque": J. Hoberman writes on Georges Franju's Judex, now out from the Criterion Collection, and a handful of new home video offerings.
- Cineticle has polled a handful of film critics and filmmakers (including yours truly, and Notebook's editor-in-chief, Daniel Kasman!) about their favorite films of the 1990s.
- Above: occasioned by the actor's recent passing, Sight & Sound have republished an interview with Eli Wallach from 2005:
"Stepping out of the elevator I find a short corridor with two identical doors at either end. I look left and right; neither is numbered. I continue to look one way then the other, like an idiot at a street crossing. A line spoken by Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly flashes through my mind: “There are two kinds of spurs, my friend. Those that come in by the door, those that come in by the window.” Not very helpful: there aren’t any windows and I’m not wearing spurs… This deranged line of thought is interrupted when the door on the left opens to reveal Wallach himself – Broadway legend, Hollywood character star and Brooklyn’s greatest gift to the Western. We shake hands and he welcomes me in, grinning as if at some shared joke."
- Via Film Studies for Free, listen to Adrian Martin discuss audiovisual film criticism with Catherine Grant.
- A new issue of [in]Transition is now online, in which, along with the next two future editions, "co-editors will take turns editing special themed issues, and guest curators will offer critical appreciations of selected videographic work."
- On his blog, David Bordwell has a dispatch from the Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. From his intriguing introduction:
"In all, Ritrovato is becoming the Cannes of classic cinema: diverse, turbulent, and overwhelming. How best to give you a sense of the tidal-wave energy of the event? I’ve decided to take off one morning and write up just one day, Monday 29 June. I don’t know when Kristin and I will find time to write another entry, for reasons you will discover."
- Above: from "Movie Stars Revisit Their Famous Role", via our official Tumblr.
- John Lehtonen has written a supreme piece on Clint Eastwood's Jersey Boys for The Vulgar Cinema:
"The neighborhood is a place of voices and memories. Like Iwo Jima, Madison County, even the confines of NASA, whispers and past murmurings seem to haunt and linger. Belleville, New Jersey, 1951, “…four guys under a street lamp.” It’s all hazy conjuring, a sense of presence and time’s persistence. It’s Clint Eastwood, each moment of his new film Jersey Boys at once being driven into the future, fame, success, regrets, while simultaneously becoming nearly a dream, a dream running simultaneously to the events it imagines. Everything is made memory the instant it happens. It isn’t exactly fantasy, not quite melancholy, not jubilation. It’s a chorus of voices and emotions."
- Above: spotted via Pegleg, Walter Hill's Southern Comfort.