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NEWS
- Actor Dorothy Malone, a true original of Hollywood's golden age and beyond, has died. David Hudson is collecting tributes at Criterion.
- In case you missed it, the 90th Academy Awards have announced their nominations. Find them on the Notebook here.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- We love Czech animator & filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, so naturally we're very excited for his long awaited new feature Insect, which premieres at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this week. Here's the beautiful and disgusting first trailer:
- Also at this years IFFR is Austrian experimental filmmaker Johann Lurf's "★". His cinema consistently challenges and surprises with its investigations of form and time, so we can't wait to see this structuralist space epic. Trailer:
RECOMMENDED READING
- The BFI has compiled a comprehensive (and crushing) list of all the film talents who died in 2017, complete with stunning visual tributes.
- For The New York Times, Wesley Morris carefully yet incisively eviscerates the politics of the Oscar front runner Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
- Sabzian has kindly translated a splendid appreciation (circa 2005) of Hong Sang-soo by Claire Denis:
At night, in the back of a cab, in the rumpled sheets of a bachelor’s bed, in a city without limits that could cover a whole territory, we see hotel rooms, restaurants and bars, with nature crouching on the edge of the frame. Visiting a temple means climbing a road that’s drowned in a group of tourists; boating on a lake means being trapped on a paddleboat that looks like a big sky-blue apple tree and fills the whole space. The grass, the slope, the mound overlooking the courtyards, the flowers are miserable.
- Over at Observations on Film Art, David Bordwell considers and challenges the commonplace reading of cinema's function under Stalinist Russia.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- In the event of our Krzystof Zanussi retrospective, we offer an incisive profile of the filmmaker and his many masterworks.
- Two marvellous new video essays, one on the mirroring and mysteries within Twin Peaks & Last Year at Marienbad, and another on the comedic mastery of Jerry Lewis.
- A new addition to the Current Debate considers the gender politics of Steven Spielberg's The Post.
EXTRAS
- "Mens Right Activists" recently recut The Last Jedi to remove all of its female characters, thus Twitter user Logan James has responded with a devastatingly hilarious recut of Saving Private Ryan sans-men:
In response to the MRA douche who edited all the women out of #TheLastJedi, I decided to edit all of the men out of Saving Private Ryan. Here it is in its entirety. pic.twitter.com/egZTDhDKi3
— Juche Box Hero (@LoganJames) January 17, 2018