Rushes: "RRR" Sequel, Charles Burnett in Lisbon, Edward Yang's Mitsubishi Commercial

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.

NEWS

RRR (S.S. Rajamouli, 2022).

• First: Notebook is launching a weekly email newsletter in 2023! Sign up here to keep up with our latest writing in this precarious digital age.
• At a recent screening of RRR in Chicago, S.S. Rajamouli mentioned that his father and screenwriting partner V. Vijayendra Prasad is beginning to draft a sequel. In the meantime, Rajamouli is preparing an untitled film starring Mahesh Bubu, set to begin filming in the spring. (Before then, revisit Ruairi McCann’s Notebook essay on RRR.)

• In this Willamette Week article about George Saunders’s new short story collection Liberation Day, there is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mention of a film project. Richard Ayoade will direct an adaptation of Saunders’s 2012 short story “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” set to begin filming next year. Though Ayoade stole the show in both parts of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, this will be his return to directing after 2013’s The Double.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Next year, Magic Mike returns for one Last Dance, rounding out the trilogy. Directed by Steven Soderbergh—returning after sitting out XXL—Magic Mike's Last Dance has a trailer ahead of a Valentine's Day release in the States. (In 2012, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky wrote for Notebook about Magic Mike's "major minor" charms.)

• Hildur Guðnadóttir’s expectedly earth-rumbling score for Tár includes a piece titled “Mortar.” Todd Field directed an intense music video for the composition, spinning off of the film’s dream sequences: 

RECOMMENDED READING

Palestinian Women (Jocelyne Saab, 1974).

• Sabzian has published a translation of Nicole Brenez’s 2013 portrait of Jocelyne Saab, coinciding with BAMPFA’s current series The New Lebanese Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. “Her creative journey has been one of the most exemplary and profound,” writes Brenez, “rooted completely in historical violence, the multiple ways in which one can participate in it and resist it, and the awareness of the gestures and images needed to document it, reflect on it and remedy it.”

• Raymond Ang writes for Vogue about the excitingly eclectic work of Filipino filmmaker Mike De Leon, the subject of a current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Along the way, Ang speaks to series curator Josh Siegel, filmmaker Isabel Sandoval, and actor Charo Santos-Concio, who made her screen debut in De Leon's Rites of May and recently starred in Lav Diaz's The Woman Who Left.
• Vera Drew, director of the The People’s Joker, tells Jen Yamato of the Los Angeles Times about the parody Joker film’s abrupt withdrawal from TIFF, prompted by a stern letter from Warner Bros. The piece goes on to consider the workings of copyright and parody law, quoting many of Drew’s collaborators. (For the record, we thought The People’s Joker was one of the best at TIFF.)
• In Artforum, J. Hoberman considers another absurdist, festival-season treasure. Radu Jude's new short The Potemkinists "samples" the Eisenstein film during a chat between a sculptor and a cultural bureaucrat.
• The first major U.S. retrospective of Noriaki Tsuchimoto is ongoing now at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Interviewed by Screen Slate’s Emerson Goo, series programmer Max Carpenter speaks to Tsuchimoto’s contemplative humanism, adventurous musicality, and wry humor.
• Briefly unpaywalled at Vulture is this conversation between Baz Luhrmann and Matt Zoller Seitz about Elvis, which the filmmaker describes as "the great tragic American opera." Within, Luhrmann reflects on his theory of the "collective eye" in cinematography and sheds some light on his editing and production design practices.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Her Name Was Europa (OJOBOCA, 2020).

• London: ALT/KINO bring Berlin-based filmmaking duo OJOBOCA to ICA London for a one-off screening of recent works. "Ardent in their use of analogue technologies and even more so in their penchant for cryptic investigations that blend factual research with almost mythic fabulation," the pair will present three films, all on 16mm. Heading the bill is their recent feature Her Name Was Europa (2020).
• Lisbon: The Lisbon & Sintra Film Festival has mounted the most comprehensive European retrospective of the L.A. Rebellion, work that “challenged the white hegemony in the cinema industry, while expanding the aesthetic and social reach of cinema.” The program includes work by fourteen filmmakers, with Charles Burnett and Julie Dash speaking on November 17 and 18 respectively. For those of us who are homebound, the festival uploaded Burnett’s 40-minute talk after Saturday’s screening of Killer of Sheep (below).

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Heat 2 (Michael Mann, Meg Gardiner, Harper Collins, 2022)

Features:

• J.D. Connor walks us through Michael Mann’s first novel, Heat 2, co-written with crime novelist Meg Gardiner. In Connor’s telling, the book is “haunted and energized” by the original 1995 Heat, while also offering something distinctly contemporary: “a bildungsroman for a world built on violence, strategy, and misdirection.”
• On the occasion of the abovementioned Noriaki Tsuchimoto retrospective, Matt Turner surveys the documentarian’s earliest films from the 1960s, which centered on modernization in postwar Japan. “Tsuchimoto finds ways to channel his own socialist perspective through the stories he tackles, without ever misrepresenting the nature of his subject’s struggles or sidelining their views,” Turner writes.
• “Ever heard that Emerson quote, ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’? Who says I can’t try out new things?” The one and only Frederick Wiseman speaks to Leonardo Goi about doing just that for A Couple, a rare venture into fiction for the nonagenarian documentarian. Wiseman discusses adapting Leo and Sophia Tolstoy’s letters into monologues, and how the film’s bucolic garden setting offered something “like punctuation.”
• “At the Viennale, the idea of invisible cinema doesn’t just relate to a physical space that projects films; it’s a kind of film, forgotten or unknown, worth bringing to light and contextualizing for modern eyes.” Jordan Cronk reports on the vital retrospectives at this year's Vienna International Film Festival, including a sidebar on Argentine noir and director spotlights on Med Hondo, Ebrahim Golestan, and Kijū Yoshida.

Quick Reads:

• For our newest Five Inspirations column, Lorenzo Vigas shares five films that inspired his newest thriller, The Box, touching on the subtlety of Lucrecia Martel, the inexhaustible humanity of Federico Fellini.
• “We knew Starfuckers was a risk, both terrifying and exciting, and there is no better place to create from.” Antonio Marzales introduces his electrifying debut short Starfuckers, now streaming on MUBI.

EXTRAS

• Escape the hustle and bustle with this idyllic 1997 Mitsubishi commercial directed by Edward Yang, featuring music composed by his widow Kaili Peng.