NEWS
- Film scholar V.F. Perkins, author of the essential book Film As Film (1972), has died at the age of 80.
- The BFI in London has announced Black Star, the UK's largest celebration of black screen actors, to run October 17 - December 31, 2016.
- Consummate Hollywood director Garry Marshall, best known for Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride and such television productions as Happy Days and Mork & Mindy, has died at 81.
- Filmmaker and MUBI team member Kurt Walker and filmmaker Isaac Goes are launching online film exhibition space Kinet, "catered to the dissemination of new and boundary pushing avant-garde cinema." Kinet's first program, which begins next week, includes Masha Tupitsyn's epic Love Sounds.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The feature debut of Canadian director Isiah Medina, 88:88, which received its global online premiere on MUBI last spring, is now streaming for free.
- An English-subtitled, behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Johnnie To's excellent thriller, Three.
- The teaser trailer for Damien Chazelle's follow-up to Whiplash, the Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone musical La La Land.
- For the Criterion Collection, Joshau Oppenhaimer, director of the controversial documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, introduces Alain Resnais' powerful Holocaust essay film, Night and Fog.
- Wildflower, Australian band The Avalanches' second album and 16 years in the making, has been accompanied by a cinema mash-up visual mixtape by Soda_Jerk entitled The Was.
- A tantalizing, unsubtitled teaser for Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's new documentary, Safari.
RECOMMENDED READING
Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer in Leo McCarey's Love Affair
- Rarely has a Hollywood film racked up so much one-sided controversy as the Ghostbusters remake. At the New York Times, critics A.O. Scott, Wesley Morris and Manohla Dargis discuss the politics of the new film:
As for Ms. Jones’s given occupation as a transit worker, it leaves me, once again, annoyed by the optics. If the other Ghostbusters were, say, Ms. Henson, Jada Pinkett Smith and Gabourey Sidibe as the scientists, and Ms. Jones’s Patty was still the subway worker, who’d care? But under the circumstances, it just seems like the same questionable, stay-in-your-place choice that movies have always made for black performers — and an excuse for the plot to ride the subway. But, look: She’s an equal member of the team and black people work in public transit. Politics!
- New York's MoMA is currently hosting a retrospective of Hollywood studio auteur Leo McCarey (Duck Soup, The Awful Truth, Love Affair), and Nick Pinkerton's overview for Artforum is invaluable:
Jean Renoir adored McCarey, once stating that he “understands people better perhaps than anyone else in Hollywood.” McCarey was parochial and universal. His approach was, as the saying goes, “revolutionary,” though like more than a few revolutionary artists he found the prospect of actual revolution abhorrent. He was both devout Catholic and a right-winger—and a sharp satirist of the institutions which he held dear.
- Also at the Museum of Modern Art is the first complete retrospective of artist Bruce Conner, who cinephiles know and love for such radical films as A Movie, Cosmic Ray and Report. J. Hoberman writes on Bruce Conner and the exhibit for the New York Review of Books:
As a fifteen-year-old Pop Art aficionado wandering through the Whitney Museum’s 1964 Sculpture Annual, I discovered Conner’s work in the form of the assemblage Couch. There was no warning. It was like rounding a corner and bumping into Death or seeing the title Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! on a 42nd Street marquee. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
- For Criterion, programmer extraordinaire James Quandt has written on Resnais' follow-up to Last Year in Marienbad, his 1963 masterpiece Muriel, or The Time of Return:
Like the man who asks where the center of the city is only to be told that he is already in it, Muriel’s viewer may be left grasping for narrative and temporal coordinates. The film’s anxious, shardlike editing—Resnais claimed that the cuts numbered close to a thousand, though others have subtracted a hundred or two from that total—detailed in Cayrol’s script and ostentatiously announced by that initial cubist fusillade, further confounds the sense of duration and chronology, despite the scenario’s linear, symmetrical five-act structure.
- The Summer issue of Film Quarterly is currently free online, and includes a Google Hangout discussion with Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Annie Baker:
BAKER, 2:51 PM: I’m very interested in what people sound like when they’re recounting the plot or details from a movie they love. One of the first things that I wrote for The Flick was an incredibly long summary of Apocalypse Now [Francis Ford Coppola, 1979] by the young man in the play . . . And when my best friend and I were traveling in Sicily when we were 18 and sitting for hours in hot train stations, we would tell each other the plots, beat by beat, or as beat by beat as we could manage, of movies one had seen that the other one hadn’t. And I’m weirdly obsessed with The Hunger Games franchise because the trailers uncannily resemble childhood nightmares of mine but I’m too scared to watch the movies. So one Thanksgiving when we were driving back from Washington, DC my brother and his now-wife recounted the entire first The Hunger Games [Gary Ross, 2012] movie to me, together, and they each remembered shots, moments the other one hadn’t, and it took almost an hour, and I was rapt.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- "Paradise Vice" by Alan Vega from the soundtrack to Philippe Grandrieux's art-horror film Sombre (1999).The master musician, most famous for his work in the group Suicide, passed away over the weekend.
EXTRAS
- A terrific fan poster by Philipp Banken for Dario Argento's Suspiria.
- The driver's license for Blue Velvet's Jeffrey Beaumont, played by Kyle MacLachlan.