Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.
NEWS
Anton Yelchin in Green Room
- Unexpected and tragic news at the end of the weekend was that actor Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Only Lovers Left Alive, Joe Dante's Burying the Ex, Green Room) was accidentally killed at his home.
- French New Wave director Éric Rohmer was intensely private, so details of his long, productive life have generally been slim. But now, as Richard Brody writes at the New Yorker, a 2014 biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe has been translated into English, and makes for essential reading about one of cinema's greats.
- We won't get properly excited until, first, the cameras are rolling, and second, there's a hope of some kind of release date, but The Film Stage has gathered enough evidence to point towards what Terrence Malick's next film will be: Radegund, about a World War 2 conscientious objector beatified by the Catholic church in 2007.
- Always eager for the latest announcement of new releases from the Criterion Collection, we're particularly tickled by a double whammy of Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and if we had to choose just one, would it be Kieślowski's Dekalog or Jacques Tourneur's Cat People? Ah, let's just get them all!
- Lucky Angelenos can attend the newly announced Festival of Disruption; or, more precisely, "David Lynch's Festival of Disruption." "Two full days and nights of music, art, virtual reality, films, talks and more," taking place this October, the music lineup looks ace already, but oh, if only the "virtual reality, films...and more" were new work by Lynch himself!
- Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn—You may know the names of these two American indie filmmakers because we've showing both of their films, the short feature Blondes in the Jungle and their wry debut L for Leisure, on MUBI last year. Now the duo have turned to Kickstarter to help fund their new film, Two Plains and a Fancy, which they describe as a "subversive, joyfully anarchronistic 'Spa Western.'" We don't know exactly what that is, but darn if it doesn't sound outstanding. During the campaign, their first two features are free to watch, too boot!
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- An amazing moment in 1978 when both Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma were on the Dick Cavett Show.
- If you read our coverage from the Cannes Film Festival, you'll know we weren't big fans of Andrea Arnold's American Honey. But if you want a good sense of what the film is like, the new trailer does just that. (The film went on to win the Jury Prize at the festival.)
- One of our favorite films from last year, the beguiling and unique quasi-documentary The Academy of Muses, directed by Jose-Luis Guerín (read our interview with him), is finally seeing a release in the U.S. via Grasshopper Film, which has cut the above trailer.
- Cohen Media Group is releasing on home video a restored version of Maurice Pialat's Palme d'Or-winning masterpiece, Under the Sun of Satan.
- In a less religious (but perhaps no less spiritual?) vein, the trailer for Despite the Night, the new film from French sensual impressionist Philippe Grandrieux.
RECOMMENDED READING
- What do Peppermint Frappé, Amenábar's Thesis, and Luis García Berlanga's The Executioner have in common? They are three of Pedro Almodóvar's annotated list of "13 great Spanish films" at the BFI.
- Speaking of the Criterion Collection, their Current has posted Farran Smith Nehme's essay on Alexander Hall's Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941):
The story comes from a 1938 play by Harry Segall called Heaven Can Wait. But Twentieth Century-Fox had dibs on the title, and indeed used it two years later for a delightful and wholly unrelated Ernst Lubitsch comedy, thus ensuring years of confusion that only increased when Warren Beatty remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan in 1978 but went back to the name of Segall’s play.
- If classical Hollywood is too old and too American for you, try David Bordwell's look at the films of Taiwanese director Edward Yang and his 4-hour stunner A Brighter Summer Day:
The new generation of Taiwanese directors faced a local cinema divided between commercial genres (action, melodrama, romantic comedy) and government-sponsored “healthy realism” promoting a bucolic, idealized rural life. Like the Italian Neorealists, the New Taiwanese Cinema sought a more humanistic realism. The new films told humdrum but heartfelt stories using non-actors and deglamorized locations.
Madam Satan
- Meanwhile, from the mainland is Chinese mega-star and mega-director Jiang Wen and his truly indescribable Gone with the Bullets, his follow-up to his hyper-clever (and possibly subversive) blockbuster Let the Bullets Fly (read our take on the former here). Still unreleased in the U.S., Sean Gilman has the best take we've read in English:
Gone with the Bullets does for the musical comedy what The Sun Also Rises did for the period art film and Let the Bullets Fly did for the action film; all are wholly unique, wholly unexpected variations, pushing each genre beyond their conventional notions of realism and into the fantastic. It finds in modernity such a dense web of performance/lies that any kind of truth is unattainable and unsustainable and incommunicable, and asks what the role of the filmmaker then is in such a world.
- Also by Smith Nehme (we're fans, obviously), but over on her must-read blog Self-Styled Siren, is a completely amusing look at Cecil DeMille's 1930 "musical comedy-romance-drama-disaster film" Madam Satan:
And perhaps the zero-to-90mph structure is meant to offer a provocative metaphor for life. Yes, life. For aren’t we all, in some sense, just waiting to party on a zeppelin? No?
RECOMMENDED LISTENS
- Courtesy of the Criterion Collection, listen to the mixtape suggestions of Richard Linklater to the cast and crew of his 1992 classic, Dazed and Confused. Above is the letter the director wrote his team.
EXTRAS
- Steven Spielberg, photographed by Platon for Wired.