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NEWS
- The prolific Rhonda Fleming, a "movie star made for Technicolor" who shone in films like Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, and especially Allan Dwan's Slightly Scarlet and Tennessee's Partner, has died at 97.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Barry Jenkins has released a "preamble" for his upcoming Amazon series The Underground Railroad, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead. The series follows two slaves who escape a Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad.
- The trailer for Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer's Apple TV+ documentary, Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, which focuses on the impact of meteorites on our planet.
- Roni Moore and James Blagden's Midnight in Paris follows a group of teenagers in Flint, Michigan, during the lead-up to their senior prom. The film will have its online premiere on October 23 through Metrograph's virtual theatre, after which it will be available on demand.
- Mati Diop has directed a music video for Bonnie Banane's "Flash." Filmed by Sean Price Williams and Inès Tabarin, the video is the newest addition to Diop's graceful, sensuous portraits of isolation.
- Paul W.S. Anderson's long-awaited Monster Hunter has an official trailer, which boasts a huge desert landscape, Milla Jovovich wielding two fiery blades, and plenty of CGI monster stampedes.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000).
- For SSENSE, A.S. Hamrah weaves together the overlapping careers of former classmates Ang Lee and Spike Lee, whose respective films Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Bamboozled turn 20 this year.
- Filmmaker Magazine has published its annual roster for the 25 New Faces of Independent Film, and this year it includes Tayler Montague (In Sudden Darkness), Ephraim Asili (The Inheritance), Merawi Gerima (Residue), and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (Spit on the Broom).
- Michael Snow's 1975 book Cover to Cover is being re-released through Light Industry. Described by Snow as a "quasi-movie," the film is "structured around a precise recto-verso montage."
Above: Michael Snow's Cover to Cover
Above: Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (2006).
- Issue 96 of Senses of Cinema is out, and among a wealth of features (including a "Great Directors" profile on Tony Scott by Notebook contributor Jeremy Carr), this issue includes a dossier on iconic uses of pop music in film, from Linkin Park's "Numb/Encore" in Michael Mann's Miami Vice to The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales.
- Reverse Shot has published the first of a two-part essay by Nick Pinkerton on "the return of the drive-in," from its origins as a "sporadic experiment" to its elevation as a national phenomenon.
- Another book for your fall reading: Critic Adam Nayman's Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, an illustrated monograph on the filmmaker's 30-year career, is officially out. It also features a foreword by the Safdie Brothers.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- From NTS Radio, cellist Okkyung Lee mixes together the sounds of Pedro Almodóvar, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergio Leone, and Hirokazu Kore-eda.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Indian filmmaker Amit Dutta is the subject of an on-going retrospective at MUBI. Srikanth Srinivasan, author of the monograph Modernism By Other Means: The Films of Amit Dutta, and his publisher Lightcube have generously provided an excerpt of the chapter of the book devoted to the 2008 film Jangarh: Film One to supplement the series.
- Celluloid Liberation Front provides a consideration of Med Hondo’s especially timely resurgence in the collective memory and consciousness of world cinema.
- Before he built his reputation as the master of the eerie, Kiyoshi Kurosawa created a 1989 video game entitled Sweet Home, intended to promote his film of the same name. In his essay, James Balmont explores the video game's impact on the survival horror genre, most notably as the inspiration for the Resident Evil franchise.
- Ben Rivers's Ghost Strata and Now, at Last! are exclusively showing October and November 2020 on MUBI in the series Ben Rivers: As Time Goes By. In a new conversation with Jordan Cronk, Rivers discusses shifting concepts of time, fiction, and self, and the progression of his films as an "ongoing conversation."