NEWS
- We wish we were at the Telluride and Venice film festivals, but since we're not that lucky, we've been voraciously following the buzz. To see what the critics are saying from the Telluride, which was last weekend, and Venice (on-going) check out David Hudson's round-ups at Keyframe. From the former, we're particularly excited about Barry Jenkins' Moonlight and Clint Eastwood's Sully, and from the latter, can't wait to see Uhlrich Seidl's Safari.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Since we just wrapped our Kelly Reichardt retrospective on MUBI, we're feeling much need for her new film, Certain Woman. Starring Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, and Kristen Stewart, its first trailer is only getting us even more excited.
- We love Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice. And we also love the video essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Sight & Sound has made made the connection and presents Haunted Memories, exploring "the joy and regret of nostalgia with one of the cinema’s great, spare poets of sense-memory."
RECOMMENDED READING
I could see a lot of young people becoming real movie buffs watching things on their phones and so on and then arriving in New York and going to Metrograph three times a week. Yes! And there's real energy in the room. I recently stood in the back of the theater for the opening credits of Phantom of the Paradise, the De Palma movie, which I had never seen before. I wasn't going to watch it, but I stood completely still for the entire movie. It was a sold-out house. And the place went nuts during the film. It blew me away. I'm still reeling from that screening. People were leaving the theater and coming over to the bar and going into our restaurant talking about the film, getting even more excited about it.
- The stunning exhibition dedicated to artist Bruce Conner at the Museum of Modern Art gets a welcome exploration by Amy Taubin in Artforum, who focuses on Conner's film work:
It may be because Conner’s greatest strength lies in his moving-image work, or because my expertise lies in the moving image, or because MoMA’s installation of the moving-image pieces is so intelligent and controlled that I saw them in ways I hadn’t before (and these are movies I know almost by heart). Or it may be because the moving image shapes our world today with even more dire consequences than those which Conner—a child of World War II who reached puberty in sync with the A-bomb, the Cold War, and the arrival of a TV in every American home—already knew it had.
- The massive Toronto International Film Festival begins tomorrow and Cinema Scope has continued its ambitious online project to cover as much of the event as possible. You can find an impressive and boundlessly useful index of their TIFF 2016 coverage here.
- Max Rose doesn't look to be much of a picture (though we love the poster!), but we're overjoyed that the great Jerry Lewis is still at it. For Interview magazine, Jerry answers a classic Andy Warhol questionnaire:
- Speaking of TIFF, bound for that festival is Belorussian director Sergei Loznitsa's new documentary Austerlitz. Nicolas Rapold at The New York Times caught up with the director to talk about this documentary about Auschwitz:
ANDY WARHOL: What did you have for breakfast? JERRY LEWIS: Same thing every morning: lox and bagels WARHOL: Do you dream? (What's the last one you remember?) LEWIS: Always (none of your business)
“I realized, in front of the crematorium, that I was myself like a tourist,” he said. “And at the same time, I thought, ‘How can I be? How can I stay there?’ “It was like in a Kafka novel. I can’t be in this place,” Mr. Loznitsa continued. “And my question is: How can we keep memory? Is it possible in general to share this memory?”
RECOMMENDED LISTENS
- We always look forward to the music, original and sourced, in French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello's movies. His new one, Nocturama, now has a soundtrack to stream on Spotify.
EXTRAS
- Most important: Takeshi Kitano has appeared on Japanese television dressed as Donald Trump.
- Where's Waldo in this photo of Telluride Film Festival attendees and you'll find Clint Eastwood, Isabelle Huppert, Barry Jenkins, Tom Hanks, Amy Adams, and more.
- Jordan Bolton's fan art poster for Pulp Fiction, which re-creates every room from the film in miniature using paper, foam and paint.