Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- The Rome Film Festival has come to a close and the awards have been handed out. David Hudson has the details at Keyframe. The big winner? Larry Clark's Marfa Girl, which as of today has been independently released online.
- The Berlin Film Festival has announced its retrospective for February, and it's a particularly inspired choice: "The Weimar Touch," which is "devoted to how cinema from the Weimar Republic influenced international filmmaking after 1933. It will focus on continuities, mutual effects and transformations in the films of German-speaking emigrants up into the 1950s."
- A welcome surprise in casting news: Viggo Mortensen has signed up for Lisandro Alonso's next feature, on which he will also serve as producer.
Finds.
- Above: via Three Colors, Jean-Luc Godard on the set of his next film, Adieu au langage. On the very left is cinematographer Fabrice Aragno, whom I interviewed here in the Notebook.
- Check out J. Hoberman's list of "21 Films of the 21st Century."
- Via Girish Shambu, a beautiful, image-heavy piece on Jean-Pierre Melville by Roland-François Lack of The Cine-Tourist.
- Above: the trailer for House of Cards, the Netflix exclusive series executive produced by Eric Roth and David Fincher, who directs the pilot.
- On Kino Slang, Bill Krohn writes on Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again (newly released on DVD & Blu-ray last week):
"Nicholas Ray’s We Can’t Go Home Again begins with a homecoming, like The Lusty Men, where injured rodeo champion Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum) returns to the house he grew up in, only to realize that going home can be “like visiting a graveyard.” Jeff has withdrawn from the fray, like the violent cop played by Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground, who is sent to assist in a rural murder investigation to get him out of town, or the gunfighter hero of Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), who has seen it all and has no illusions left when he rides up to Vienna’s Saloon at the beginning of the film. Life has surprises in store for all of them, and for the filmmaker, who becomes a Ray hero himself in this cinematic testament."
- Above: The Hollywood Reporter presents a Writer Roundtable featuring Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty), Judd Apatow (This is 40), Michael Haneke (Amour), John Krasinski (Promised Land), David Magee (Life of Pi) and Chris Terrio (Argo).
- Above: a poster by Larry Gormley of "The History of Film" (you're going to want to click this one to get a closer look). This intricate graphic took Gormley five years to create and features around 2000 films. The print is available for purchase from HistoryShots.
- For Sight & Sound, Kevin B. Lee looks at the evolution of Paul Thomas Anderson's cinema through his use of tracking shots throughout his career, from Hard Eight to There Will Be Blood.
From the archives.
- Martin Scorsese turned 70 years old on the 17th. Here's the cineaste on the importance of visual literacy: