Rushes: Anne Wiazemsky, Harvey Weinstein, Alan Rudolph, "Reservoir Dogs" at 25

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NEWS

• The luminously thoughtful French actress Anne Wiazemsky, indelible for her starring roles in Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, Jean-Luc Godard's Le chinoise, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema and Porcile, and Philippe Garrel's L'enfant secret, has died at the age of 70. Part of her memoir Un an après has been adapted in the controversial film Redoubtable, which premiered at Cannes this year.

• Significant writings concerning Miramax and The Weinstein Company co-founder Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse are appearing far and wide: Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker, Jodi Kantor & Rachel Abrams for The New York Times, Heather Graham for Variety, and Naveen Kumar for VICE.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Uploaded five months ago and undiscovered until now: Neil Bahadur has found the first trailer for Alan Rudolph's first film in 15 years, Ray Meets Helen. View on Vimeo.

• On the complete other side of trailer anticipation is the full preview for the next entry in the revived Star Wars franchise, Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi. A far cry in terms of budget and scope from his 2005 debut, Brick, but just as dense in insider argot.

READING

People tend to think of Pulp Fiction as Tarantino’s essential L.A. movie—only at the intersections of Glendale would it be apropos for Butch (Bruce Willis) to run into Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) while stopped at a red light—but his first three movies are all equally rooted in the nondescript environs of downtown Los Angeles: “Jackie Brown” in the depressing sprawl of ticky-tacky tract houses, strip joints, and malls near LAX, “Reservoir Dogs” in the coffee shops and diners of Highland Park, and the funeral home in Burbank that doubled as the gang’s rendezvous point.

• For The New Yorker, Tom Shone revisits and champions the over-criticized yet under-recognized qualities of Reservoir Dogs on its 25th anniversary.
• Gérard Depardieu makes a delightful appearance in Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In, which, along with a new book by the grand French actor, is the reason for Nick Pinkerton's gleefully unwieldy conversation with Depardieu Film Comment:

"Who pays for the art? Before, you had patrons of the art like the Medicis, who had the Pope in their family. You had Francis I for Michelangelo. Now, who are patrons of the art? It’s not Gagosian, because Gagosian is nothing. You have Bernard Arnault and François Pinault in France, who have money, but they don’t have taste. They try to make the value of artists, like Koons. Koons, I respect Koons, because he works with Cicciolina, and he finds that art and sex—it’s okay. So, he did his pieces with that very smart woman, Cicciolina—she isn’t just a vagina, she was smart. And Koons was smart. He did exactly like Rodin did. He multiplicated the artist, and took the best of them. I went to Venice two weeks ago, and it’s disfigured. It’s full of sculptures made of compressed plastic, of monsters from Atlantis. These sculptures are right in the middle of the buildings of Venice, with spotlights on them; it’s a rape. You also have now also the designer, like Felix Stark. He trying to put decorations in Venetian palaces. It’s shit. But I like Koons. Koons knows you have to fuck the stone to find the beauty of the thing."

• Speaking of Let the Sunshine In and critic Nick Pinkerton, his richly observed article for Reverse Shot is the best we've yet read on Claire Denis's funny, erotic, strange new film starring Juliette Binoche:

It should be noted that the primary architects of Let the Sun Shine In—Denis, Binoche, Godard, and Angot—are all women, and that the movie contains certain scenes that are difficult to imagine were this not the case, and one in particular that I still can’t believe exists at all. An exchange between Isabelle and a girlfriend, played by Sandrine Dumas, it’s a showcase for Binoche, who in the course of a single unbroken take can be seen turning a 180 between girlish giddiness and wet-eyed despair, bemoaning “My love life is all over.”

"The choices I make is to show the performers and let them do everything, and make the scene happen on a set. Like Fred Astaire in his movies: when you see him dancing, you see him from head to toe and you know he’s doing every bit of it. It’s harder to get and you need actors who are comfortable getting punched in the face, which happened to all of them — none of them badly."

• For The Film Stage, Christopher Inoa interviews S. Craig Zahler regarding his latest film, Brawl in Cell Block 99. We saw the film at the Toronto International Film Festival and loved it.
• Last week we included an interview with Jonas Mekas—and here's yet another delightful dialogue with the Lithuanian-American filmmaker about his life in movies and his new book, for The Creative Independent:

"I always had a job of one kind of other to support myself because I had to live, I had to eat, and I had to film."

• "It is no exaggeration to say that Twin Peaks is the great political work of our time," says Cahiers du cinéma editor Stéphane Delorme. His editorial introduces the latest issue of the magazine, which features Laura Dern in David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks: The Return on the cover. Alas, its the only piece published online.