NEWS
Barry Jenkins' Moonlight
- The New York Film Festival has announced its main slate, which among many of the year's better known titles includes new films by Barry Jenkins, Hong Sang-soo and Alison Maclean. The closing night film will be James Gray's The Lost City of Z.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The teaser for Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. We are notable fans of this too often derided filmmaker.
- Another future-set teaser: Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi flick Arrival, which is to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
- A third teaser, this one for Woody Allen's series for Amazon, Crisis in Six Scenes.
- Aussie director John Hillcoat made one of the more under-appreciated big budget films this year, Triple 9, and now he returns to the director's seat for a video for Massive Attack, featuring Hope Sandoval and Cate Blanchett.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Shallows
In a moment when any halfway competent hired gun is exalted as a new-style auteur, the Barcelona-born Jaume Collet-Serra seems like an actually credible candidate for critical contemplation.
- Adam Nayman, above, introduces an interview with The Shallows director Jaume Collet-Serra for Little White Lies.
- "Movies seem at one and the same time more ubiquitous and less commanding than ever," observes Nick Pinkerton in Sight & Sound:
We all basically know what we’re referring to when we talk about a movie – in the commercial context, it’s something about an hour or longer that you can maybe see in a room with a bunch of other people or, more likely today, watch on television, laptop, pay cable, home video, iPhone, etc. But what makes a movie a movie?
Jacques Tati in Parade
- Legendary comedian-director Jacques Tati comments on legendary comedian-director Charlie Chaplin and the difference between Tati's "Hulot" character and Chaplin's tramp:
What I wanted to present with the character of Hulot was a man you can meet in the street, not a music-hall character—and I know what a music-hall character is, since I have been in the music-hall. For instance, if you invite Chaplin to a dinner you would be certain to have a genial clown who would turn to his wonderful tricks—after eating. With Hulot it is dif-ferent. You may or may not wish to invite him for dinner, because he is a person. He does not wear a label saying: "I am a funny man." He is at the same level as the other people in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot: and besides, he does not know he is being funny.
- In a spoiler-laden exploration of James Schamus's directorial debut, Indignation, David Bordwell looks at strategies of adaptation in this version of Philip Roth's novel:
No, what makes Indignation intriguingly “novelistic” is a matter of attachment. We’re simply with Marcus through almost the entirety of the movie. We know only as much as he knows. This means that we learn about certain things when he does.
John Waters by Danny Field
- John Waters tells the story of his mustache to the New York Times:
But it didn’t emerge as pristine as it appears today. Dismayed by his initial attempts to grow facial hair, Waters was offered a solution by the sister of Mink Stole, a childhood friend who would make legendary appearances in the director’s movies including “Maniacs” and “Pink Flamingos” (1972), that would change his life: “Just put a little pencil on it.”
- For those fans of the saucy early Talkie era of Hollywood, the Nitrate Diva has a guide to pre-Code era's salacious cinema.
RECOMMENDED LISTENS
- The next subject of Karina Longworth's essential You Must Remember This podcast is Joan Crawford:
EXTRAS
- Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman on the set of Stromboli.
- The poster for The Ornithologist, the new film by João Pedro Rodrigues (To Die Like a Man, The Last Time I Saw Macao).
- Abbas Kiarostami's gravestone. Via Ehsan Khoshbakt.