NEWS
- The news from Brazil these days is focused on the Olympics, but the country's film culture has just gone through a shuddering convulsion with massive cuts to the Brazilian Cinematheque that, after an uproar, have been withheld.
- Luc Besson, the French mega-producer and director, has been ordered to pay €465,000 in damages to John Carpenter, his co-writer and StudioCanal for plagiarism of Carpenter's Escape from New York in Besson's 2012 film Lockout.
- The complete Venice Film Festival 2016 lineup is out. What are we looking forward to most? Terrence Malick's IMAX documentary Voyage of Time, and new films by Lav Diaz (The Woman Who Left), Andrei Konchalovsky (Paradise), Ulrich Siedl (Safari), Amir Naderi (Monte) and Sergei Loznitsa (Austerlitz).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Despite some bumps, we continue to be champions of M. Night Shyamalan. The trailer for his latest, Split, seems to be made in the same lower budget style that inspired his last—and excellent—thriller, the horror-comedy The Visit.
- The French, as so often is the case, recognizing genius before many of the rest of us, have restored Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls and given it a delirious new trailer.
- We can't say we recommend this ridiculous thing; it's more like...would you look at that! A new film from once-maverick 5th generation cinematographer-turned-director Zhang Yimou starring Matt Damon as a white man who battles monsters on the Great Wall of China.
RECOMMENDED READING
- Wired is running a story that's a little bit review, little bit profile, and little bit making-of for Werner Herzog's terrific new (commissioned!) documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World:
Perhaps Herzog could shoot a series of online shorts for NetScout, demonstrating how much we depend on the Internet and the catastrophes its destruction—or even its interruption—might unleash? This, it turns out, was an apt pitch for Herzog, who has described civilization as a thin layer of ice atop a roiling, chaotic ocean.
- For the New York Times, Tilda Swinton has picked her ten favorite books, including Derek Jarman's Modern Nature:
Joy and life and more life and more joy and street corners and making a garden out of stones and making films and love.
- Amazing looking movie posters painted on flour sacks for neighborhood screenings of kung fu movies in Ghana. Notes from the gallery exhibition in Hong Kong tell us more:
Starting in about 1985, and continuing until just before the millennium, there existed a ‘Golden Age’ of hand-painted, imagination-driven movie posters in Ghana. This was a time when market forces from abroad were minimal and these unique and exotic paintings were created solely for the local Ghanaian movie-viewing audience. The best and brightest artists of a generation competed fiercely and directly in the public eye to produce this exciting new work, being careful to sign and date the great majority of their paintings. Their hand-made artistry stood its ground against the inevitable tide of printing technology that globalization thrust upon them, and for a short while, they carved out a small oasis in time, where man actually won out over machines.
EXTRAS
- Louis Garrel as Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Michel Hazanavicius's Redoutable.