NEWS
- It's been a devastating series of days for film lovers. First, Heaven's Gate director Michael Cimino passed away at 77, silencing one of American cinema's most importance visionaries. Then, Palme d'Or-winning Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami has died at the age of 76. It is very hard—very—to imagine cinema without these voices.
- Some good news from the much-criticized Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences: they are increasing the scope of their voting pool. Included in the roster, but strangely as writers and not directors, are such international luminaries as Mia Hansen-Løve, Jia Zhangke, and Takeski Kitano (Kiarostami was also added, as a director).
- With so much death in the news, let's celebrate a birth. Specifically, the 100th anniversary of Olivia de Havilland's birth. Farran Nehme Smith has penned a lovely homage for Sight & Sound:
She continued to work all the way up to 1988, and her life has been full, her attitude joyous. Now, as she turns 100 on 1 July, de Havilland is the last of the great pre-World War II Hollywood stars; her contemporary Kirk Douglas got a much later start. One by one, the others have died, including her sister Joan Fontaine in 2013. De Havilland remains, still willing to be photographed, still sharing her memories...
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- We don't know about you, but we're still avidly anticipating the films Clint Eastwood directs. Sully, his next feature and first collaboration with Tom Hanks, looks magnificent, with echoes of Robert Zemeckis' greatly under-appreciated Flight.
- Speaking of magnificence, we suppose that's what one expects from a trailer for a new Terrence Malick movie, so perhaps the first footage from his long-in-the-making documentary Voyage of Time doesn't quite carry the surprise for which we were hoping. Still, we'll see you in that IMAX cinema opening day this October.
RECOMMENDED READING
I won’t attempt to reconstruct the conversation; suffice to say he told me he was going to make a film about “our failure to understand the dangers of nuclear war.” He said that he had thought of the story as a “straightforward melodrama” until this morning, when he “woke up and realized that nuclear war was too outrageous, too fantastic to be treated in any conventional manner.” He said he could only see it now as “some kind of hideous joke.” He told me that he had read a book of mine which contained, as he put it, “certain indications” that I might be able to help him with the script.
- That's writer Terry Southern, above, recounting his experience with Stanley Kubrick and making Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
- The latest issue of essential Italian online (and sometimes print) magazine La Furia Umana is out, including four pieces for the late Peter Hutton.
- And the latest issue of Film Comment is also out. Online, among the articles you can read for free are Max Nelson writing on Nathaniel Dorsky and Amy Taubin reporting on the Cannes Film Festival:
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson rivals Toni Erdmann for the festival’s most audacious and pleasurable film. Both are comedies, but where Ade’s film sprawls and succeeds via its script and larger-than-life performances, Jarmusch’s is pared down, like a great three-chord rock song that transcends through repetitions and minute variations.
RECOMMENDED LISTENS
- Two podcast recommendations this week. For his WTF 'cast, Marc Maron talks to two great American genre masters we hope keep getting to make films, Joe Dante and John Carpenter. And Monocle's The Cinema Show has devoted some of its latest episode to giallo maniac Dario Argento (Suspiria).
EXTRAS
- The poster for the release of a new restoration of the Coen brothers' first film, Blood Simple.
- Following our trailer for Clint Eastwood's Sully, the sombre poster.
- And, so as to not end things on such a downer, here's Cary Grant doing a wardrobe test for Howard Hawks' I Was a War Bride (1949):