Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Above: Audrey Diwan's Happening.
- The Venice Film Festival has come to a close. Check out all of the award winners, which include Audrey Diwan's Happening, Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God, and Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, here.
- Comedian Norm Macdonald, best known as a former cast member of Saturday Night Live and for his performances in films like Dirty Work, has died at 61. In a tweet dedicated to Macdonald, Adam Sandler described Macdonald as the "most fearless funny original guy we knew."
- Once titled Soggy Bottom, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest feature has a new title: Licorice Pizza, a reference to the record store chain from the 1970s. Surprise 35mm trailers for Licorice Pizza, described as having similarities to Anderson's Boogie Nights, have been seen playing before films like American Graffiti and Repo Men.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The official trailer for Lana Wachowski's The Matrix Resurrections is a stunning collage featuring time-bending gun fights, romantic reunions, blue pills, and Keanu Reeves as Neo with a rubber ducky on his head.
- Steven Spielberg's West Side Story now has an official trailer, which showcases a bit more of the music as well as the cinematography of Janusz Kamiński.
- For the next two weeks, Le Cinéma Club is showing Michael Snow's equally gravity-defying 2019 short Cityscape, which depicts the cityscape of downtown Toronto.
- An official trailer for the 4K re-release of Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street, starring Carol Kane in a breakout role as a Jewish immigrant who moves to New York City.
- Netflix's official trailer for Alonso Ruizpalacios' genre-bending documentary A Cop Movie, which follows two cops in the Mexican police force.
- The Prototype short film platform is currently screening a newly commissioned essay film by Delhi-based group Raqs Media Collective, entitled When Proust Catches the Glare.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Clint Eastwood's Cry Macho.
- It's Cry Macho season, and the Los Angeles Times has a new profile on 91-year-old Clint Eastwood, who shares how little he cares about aging and being open to making more films.
- Over at Ultra Dogme, a dossier on re-introducing the films of Andy Warhol with texts by Nel Dahl, Dana Reinoos, Caden Mark Gardner, and more.
- The Fall 2021 issue of Film Quarterly is out now, featuring an essay on the works of Garrett Bradley by critic Yasmina Price, a celebration of the Berkeley Pacific Film Archive, and a special focus on binge-watching during the pandemic.
- For 4Columns, Melissa Anderson reviews Andreas Fontana's debut feature Azor, a "slinky political thriller about deception, dissembling, and self-delusion."
- A conversation between director Charlie Shackleton and illustrator Hattie Stewart about Stewart's title sequence design for Shackleton's essay film Beyond Clueless. Beyond Clueless is currently playing on MUBI in many countries.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Experimental musician and Candyman composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe has created a mix for the Unsound Podcast exploring his favorite film scores.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Dieudo Hamadi introduces his film Kinshasa Makambo, which is playing on MUBI in the series Kinshasa Calling: A Dieudo Hamadi Double Bill in many countries starting on September 13, 2021.
- The series Stanislaw Lem Centennial is currently playing on MUBI in the US. Ela Bittencourt has written an investigation of Lem's view of humanity and mortality, as well as the differences between his novel Solaris and Tarkovsky's adaptation.
- Jean-Gabriel Périot introduces Our Defeats, in which teenagers from a school outside Paris reenact scenes from political films from the French ‘68 era. The film is exclusively showing on MUBI starting September 15, 2021 in many countries in the series Undiscovered.
- Andrew Northrop takes a look at the environmental impact of streaming media & the possibilities of lo-res filmmaking through the Small File Media Festival.
- In a conversation with Leonardo Goi, Franco weighs in on his dystopian provocation New Order, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. New Order is showing exclusively on MUBI in the United Kingdom.
- With this new Soundtrack Mix by Florence Scott-Anderton, enter into the dark depths of Paul Schrader's world.
- Leonardo Goi concludes his coverage of the Venice Film Festival with his final thoughts on the past ten days, the awards, and two last highlights.
- For Patrick Holzapfel's Full Bloom series, Holzapfel considers plant horror in cinema (namely Jessica Hausner's Little Joe) and the ways in which we might communicate with the fauna in our lives.
EXTRAS
- The great Terence Davies has joined Instagram.
- Jean-Paul Belmondo's state funeral took place this last Sunday, following a national tribute led by French president Emmanuel Macron. Speaking of Belmondo to Europe 1 Radio, Alain Delon stated: "We have made French cinema, the two of us, he and I, we are two icons of French cinema, you can't speak of one without the other."