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NEWS
First Case, Second Case (1979)
- A restoration of Abbas Kiarostami's banned 1979 film First Case, Second Case will premiere at this year's edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato. Ehsan Khoshbakht writes that the unseen film is a "testimony to [Kiarostami's] seldom acknowledged political shrewdness and his objective, complex perspective on the tumultuous events of the late 70s in Iran."
- Studio Ghibli has announced plans for a "Ghibli Park" to be built by 2023. The park will be divided into several themed "lands" as seen in My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and Kiki's Delivery Service.
- Last week a meme of what appeared to some to be a real video of a man abandoning his family in light of an approaching avalanche took hold of social media—the clip was actually from Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure and was initially posted by MUBI. Kelley Dong writes about the genesis of this meme and similar confusions of reality in history.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- TROISCOULEURS examines the use of symmetry in the films of Bong Joon-ho, whose Parasite recently won the Palme d'Or.
- Rob Zombie continues his trilogy about a serial killer family started with House of a Thousand Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, while reuniting all of the same cast over a decade later. The first trailer for Three From Hell:
RECOMMENDED READING
- Two decades after the release of Lana & Lily Wachowski's Bound, Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon reunite for a viewing and live commentary of the film, discussing its legacy as a lesbian neo-noir picture despite the initial pushback it faced from studios.
- In his latest entry for Film Comment's Queer & Now column, Michael Koresky considers the "anxiety of closeness, of thirsting for union and sympathy" in Fred Schepisi's Six Degrees of Separation.
- "In this world of heroic cinephilia, the critic lady – the lady critic – is a problem." Erika Balsom investigates the gendering of the "critic lady" as characterized in Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind.
- Writer Grace Lavery delves into the self-contradictory "t4t eroticism" (or, "the attraction of trans people for each other") of Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Jeremy Carr investigates Josef von Sternberg's Anatahan, "a plainly audacious motion picture, still underrated within von Sternberg’s immensely impressive filmography." Anatahan is showing June 4 – July 3, 2019 in the United States.
- Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails discuss their feature debut, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and the many contradictions and complexities of the city of San Francisco.
- MUBI's collaborative video essay project with FILMADRID International Film Festival continues with Diego Cepeda & Luis Franze's A House With Many Voices, which pairs Marguerite Duras's India Song with Manuel Mur Oti's Morir... Dormir... Tal Vez Soñar.
EXTRAS
- A small remnant of Satyajit Ray's The Alien, written in 1967 and brought to Hollywood, then abandoned.
A sketch from Satyajit Ray's unproduced THE ALIEN. pic.twitter.com/knbqSfWZaE
— Janus Films (@janusfilms) June 9, 2019
- From the Film Comment archives, an interview with cinematographer Néstor Almendros, who discusses Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, his work with natural light, and drawing inspiration from paintings.