1996: la scatola del gioco da tavolo Jumanji viene trovata su una spiaggia, esattamente dove l'avevamo vista al termine del film originale, ma quando il ragazzo che se la porta a casa capisce di cosa si tratta ne è molto deluso, perché gli interessano solo i videogame. Così nella notte il gioco si trasforma in una cartuccia per console. La stessa viene ritrovata oggi da quattro liceali in punizione, che scelgono i quattro personaggi restanti di un gioco per cinque player e commettono l'errore di interrompere la partita, finendo quindi intrappolati nel gioco e nel corpo dei personaggi che avevano scelto.
2016 set in motion a series of collapses on so many fronts it seemed like some terrible dream. But in 2017, it began to sink in that, no, this is our new reality. Perhaps in 2018 we’ll decide that it doesn’t have to be our new normal.
I’ll be spending a good chunk of 2018 catching up with many, many films appearing on the lists I’ve been rounding up up this year, including, just for starters, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute), Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places, Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, and on, and on. My greatest offense this year is not having yet cleared the eighteen hours for Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. I know. I will.
If you decide to stop reading now, having decided that I simply cannot be taken seriously, I’ll understand. Otherwise, here’s my own 2017 top ten:
1. David Lowery’s A Ghost Story. To be perfectly honest, I went in suspecting that I’d be agreeing with Bilge Ebiri’s assessment, that “its what-the-fuckery feels more calculated than organic.” The suspicion wasn’t immediately tossed, either; it evaporated slowly. I don’t know what it is that’s emerged in its place, but it’s got a hold on me still. When Will Oldham’s character launches into his monologue, he’s probably not exactly sure where he’ll be going with it, but a hunch in his gut guides him to a desolate conclusion. Lowery’s story rolls out as if he were thinking out loud, and though it also eventually wanders out to the very infinitude of the universe, he ends up in far less desperate straits. There can be such a thing as a ghost of a ghost. Learn that there comes a time to let go. Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot: “The draped figure, scratching the walls as it seeks a possibly unattainable answer to his own little life’s question, is as elemental an image as any in recent American cinema, possibly even more resonant than Lowery could have intended. This film’s ideas are so maddeningly simple that they touch the profound.”
2. Valeska Grisebach’s Western. As in her quietly moving Longing (2006), Grisebach explores facets of masculinity, but here the focus is on the dynamics of dominance—interpersonally as well as geopolitically. More from Andrew Chan.
3. Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time. Pure propulsion. Connie’s impromptu solution to the crisis of each moment immediately creates the crisis of the next. See James Schamus on this one.
4. Jordan Peele’s Get Out. We all got sick of hearing every other weekend all year long about how this or that film addresses our moment, but come on, this is the one. George A. Romero certainly wasn’t the first to tool horror’s conventions into political allegory, but he was one of the best. Peele’s debut helps assuage the loss.
5. Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In. For all of Isabelle’s frustrations, this is a film in love with love. It’s infectious. Also, the best closing credits of the year.
6. Michael Glawogger and Monika Willi’s Untitled. A genuinely enlightening travelogue, sounding an urgent alarm even as it celebrates the wide, wide world; and a stirring eulogy (Willi, Glawogger’s editor, completed the film after he passed away during production).
7. Hong Sangsoo’s The Day After. I might have gone for On the Beach at Night Alone, the only other of the three films Hong made this year I’ve seen, but there’s something about the more compact structure (and more compact frames, too) about The Day After that nudges it ahead for me.
8. Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name. Guadagnino finally reels in his penchant for the immoderately sensational to arrive at the truly sensual.
9. Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. As with Tangerine (2015), it takes a few scenes to become accustomed to Baker’s rhythm and tone, but once you’re there, it flies.
10. Chloé Zhao’s The Rider. For all the film’s beauty, it’s Brady, one of the most subtly intriguing characters of the year, and his relationships, particularly with his father and sister, that makes this one of the most unassumingly vital films of 2017.
Fa sempre piacere quando il nome di John Williams viene accostato a un film dell'universo di Guerre Stellari. Il leggendario compositore, vincitore di cinque premi Oscar - uno dei quali proprio per il primo Star Wars realizzato nel 1977 da George Lucas - comporrà infatti le note del tema principale del prossimo Solo: A Star Wars Story diretto da Ron Howard, il quale come noto ha rilevato in fase di riprese gli "esonerati" Phil Lord e Chris Miller. Il film uscirà nelle sale di tutto il mondo il prossimo maggio.
Non sarà però Williams l'autore della colonna sonora del film, bensì John Powell. Era successo qualcosa del genere anche per il precedente spin-off della saga, Rogue One, la cui colonna sonora era stata opera di Michael Giacchino. A confermare la notizia è stato lo stesso Williams: "Il piano al momento è che io scriverò un tema per Han Solo, mentre Powell scriverà il resto della musica, e lo farà in maniera brillante. Questo compito è qualcosa di cui sono molto felice. Posso offrire questo a John e a Ron Howard, e se tutte le parti in causa saranno felici, lo sarò anche io."
La notizia che John Powell sarebbe stato l'autore delle musiche di Solo: A Star Wars Story era già trapelata la scorsa estate. Tra le colonne sonore più famose della carriera di John Williams ci sono senza dubbio quelle che ha scritto per Steven Spielberg. Bastano titoli come Lo squalo, I predatori dell'arca perduta, E.T. e Schindler's List per confermare che la collaborazione tra il cineasta e il musicista è una delle più importanti della storia del cinema contemporaneo? A nostro avviso bastano eccome...
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2loFT05
Cinema lost a few giants this year, some soldiers, some heroes, duly heralded or not, and links from a good number of the names here will take you to collections of remembrances. I’ve also added notes and a few more recent tributes.
JANUARY
January 2. John Berger (90). The author of Ways of Seeing also co-wrote screenplays with Alain Tanner: The Salamander (1971), The Middle of the World (1974), and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976).
January 6. Om Puri (66). The actor “exuded a reassuring warmth and gravitas over a long career divided largely between Bollywood and Hollywood,” writes Ryan Gilbey for the Guardian.
January 12. William Peter Blatty (89). Best known for writing The Exorcist in 1971, Blatty also wrote, directed, and produced The Ninth Configuration (1980).
January 13. Mark Fisher (48). The critic, theorist, and author (Capitalist Realism) blogged as k-punk.
January 19. Miguel Ferrer (61). He was Twin Peaks’ FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield and chalked up over 120 more acting credits.
January 25. Mary Tyler Moore (80). The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Mary Richards “was a perfect guide for navigating the a-wokening of the corporate American man (a project that is still ongoing, to say the least),” writes Taffy Brodesser-Akner in the New York Times Magazine.
January 27. John Hurt (77). “That voice, distilled from alcohol and Gauloises, a single malt of a voice, caressed the nation for half a century,” writes John Boorman in the Guardian. “In The Elephant Man it was only the voice. As Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant the voice swerved into a gay queenery. It expressed pain and suffering as a monster exploded out of his stomach in Alien. His Christ for Mel Brooks persuaded us that Jesus had such a voice. Its emollience spread over hundreds of movies, plays and commercials. On stage, it put audiences into a light hypnosis.”
Emmanuelle Riva (89). She worked with Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, 1959), Gillo Pontecorvo (Kapò, 1959), Jean-Pierre Melville (Léon Morin, Priest, 1961), Georges Franju (Thérèse Desqueyroux, 1962), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Three Colors: Blue, 1993), Julie Deply (Skylab, 2011), and Michael Haneke (Amour, 2012).
January 31. David Shepard, “a film preservationist who restored hundreds of discarded, hidden or forgotten films by masters like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and F. W. Murnau.” (William Grimes,New York Times).
FEBRUARY
February 13. Seijun Suzuki (93), “best known in the west for his deliriously entertaining and inventively realized crime and gangster B-movies, and turned out at a conveyor-belt rate by Nikkatsu studios in the 1960s,” as Jasper Sharp writes in the Guardian.
February 18. Richard Schickel (84). The author and critic wrote for Time from 1965 to 2010.
February 25. Bill Paxton (61). An accomplished director in his own right, he’s probably known to most for his work with James Cameron, playing a punk in The Terminator (1984), a soldier in Aliens (1986), a car dealer in True Lies (1994), and a treasure hunter in Titanic (1997).
MARCH
March 6. Robert Osborne (84). The actor and film historian was a host on Turner Classic Movies for more than twenty years.
March 14. Robin O’Hara (62). “Fierce, committed and above all, tough—these are the words that collaborators use to describe producer Robin O’Hara, a longtime fixture of the New York independent film scene,” writes Anthony Kaufman for IndieWire.
APRIL
April 2. Radley Metzger (88). “What has Metzger done for the American cinema?” asked Steve Macfarlane at Slant in 2014. “Consider the love scenes in movies like Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me or David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, too lurid to survive the censorship of the prior 1960s, but too flowery and poetic to be considered anywhere near exploitation. The trend—triangulating lovemaking, eye candy and mood music into a kind of art-sex stew—had many fathers, but given Metzger’s surprisingly classy softcore riffs on Shaw, Bizet, or Dumas, there’s no questioning he was one of them.”
April 6. Don Rickles (90). Audiences seemed to love being insulted by him. Cinephiles remember him as the manager in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) and as the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the Toy Story movies.
April 12. Michael Ballhaus (81). The legendary cinematographer worked with Rainer Werner Fassbinder on sixteen films, with Martin Scorsese on seven, with James L. Brooks on Broadcast News (1987), Francis Ford Coppola on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Robert Redford on Quiz Show (1994), and Mike Nichols on Primary Colors (1998).
Toshio Matsumoto (85). The filmmaker and video artist was a pioneer of the Japanese avant-garde best known for Funeral Parade of Roses (1969).
April 26. Jonathan Demme (73). “Jonathan had this gigantic generous heart, and his films are full of warmth and humanity,” Paul Thomas Anderson said in August. “On the other hand, when Jonathan decides to turn the screws to you, for anybody that’s seen Silence of the Lambs, he really does it deeper and nastier than anybody, which is the flip side of him. . . . One thing I would say about all of Jonathan’s films is that there’s not background in the traditional way that you see like somebody mindlessly crossing in the background of an office. Literally everything, every person in the frame seems to have some role or story going on.”
April 30. Jean Stein (83). The author and editor worked as an assistant to director Elia Kazan on the original production of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, co-wrote Edie: American Girl with George Plimpton, edited Grand Street, and wrote West of Eden, “an oral history of Los Angeles, full of myth and rancor and especially desolation,” as Dan Piepenbring put it, writing for the Paris Review.
MAY
May 14. Powers Boothe (68). He appeared in George P. Cosmatos’s Tombstone (1993), Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005), David Milch’s Deadwood (2004–2006) and won an Emmy for his lead performance in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980).
May 23. Roger Moore (89). From 1973 to 1985, he was James Bond in seven features. He was also Simon Templar in The Saint (1962–1969) and a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
May 24. Denis Johnson (67). Philip Gourevitch for the New Yorker: “Johnson’s work throbbed with his irreducibly American voice, veering between hardboiled banter and hyperacute physical and emotional immediacy.”
In 1999, Alison Maclean made a film based on his 1992 collection of linked short stories,
Jesus’ Son.
JUNE
June 9. Adam West (88). “His Batman showed us that occasionally we need our superheroes to be a little more like us,” writes Rob Hoerburger in the NYT Magazine.
June 13. Anita Pallenberg (75). “People think of her in one way—a 60s muse, all that shit—but she was so much more than that,” writes Marianne Faithfull in the Guardian. “A really talented artist, a great actor, intelligent, funny, thoughtful, fearless . . . she truly didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought of her. I was desolate when she died.”
June 16. John G. Avildsen (81). The AP’s Jake Coyle and Anthony McCartney noted that the two films he’s probably most famous for directing, Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid (1984), were “dark-horse, underdog favorites that went on to become Hollywood franchises.” He also worked with Jack Lemmon on Save the Tiger (1973).
June 27. Michael Nyqvist (56). The first Mikael Blomkvist in the Millennium series (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2009 and so on) and the heavy in Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) and Chad Stahelski and David Leitch’s John Wick (2014).
JULY
July 15. Martin Landau (89). Actor, teacher, producer, editorial cartoonist. After appearing in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), he rose to fame in Mission: Impossible on television and remains unforgettable in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and as Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994).
July 16. George A. Romero (77). He’ll “always be known for turning hordes of dead people into a new kind of mainstream monster, but what made him a revolutionary artist is that he didn’t let the living off the hook,” wrote Jason Zinoman in a conversation with New York Times critic A. O. Scott, who looked back to a 1979 interview in the Village Voice in which “Romero called his movie [Dawn of the Dead] and [John] Carpenter’s Halloween ‘a form of punk; that’s purposeful disrespect.’ I wonder what’s become of that impulse—the anti-authoritarian, anti-respectability bravado that infused Mr. Romero’s movies (including nonzombiecentric work like Martin [1978] and Knightriders [1981]).”
July 21. John Heard (71). This was quite a run: Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), John Byrum’s Heart Beat (1980), Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981), and Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982). And then there was that well-earned Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Detective Vin Makazian in The Sopranos.
July 26. June Foray (99). The voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Cindy Lou Who, Jokey Smurf, and many more. She’s also credited for playing a vital role in getting the Academy to create the Best Animated Feature category.
July 27. Sam Shepard (73). “I was a writer and he was a writer, and we both loved movies,” writes Johnny Dark in the Guardian. “He was an alcoholic and I was a drug addict. And we had an inflated sense of how wonderful we were. It was during this time that he was first approached to be in a movie. Bob Dylan called to ask him to go on the road with the Rolling Thunder Revue to do some writing for a movie they were making. And on the basis of that, the director Terry Malick called and asked him if he would like to be in Days of Heaven, with Richard Gere, an unknown at the time. . . . He played Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, the man who broke the sound barrier, and people literally thought Sam broke the sound barrier.”
Patti Smith in the New Yorker this summer: “Sam liked being on the move. He’d throw a fishing rod or an old acoustic guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a dog, but for sure a notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books. He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.”
July 31. Jeanne Moreau (89). Just this list alone from the top of that collection of remembrances: “She worked with Jean Gabin in Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), and took the lead in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958). François Truffaut immortalized her iconic visage in Jules and Jim (1962), and she would work with him again on The Bride Wore Black (1968). She appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961), [Orson] Welles’s The Trial (1962) and Chimes at Midnight (1965), Joseph Losey’s Eva (1962), Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels (1963), Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) [image above], Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982), Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World (1991), François Ozon’s Time to Leave (2005), Tsai Ming-liang’s Face (2009), and Manoel de Oliveira’s Gebo and the Shadow (2012).”
AUGUST
August 1. Eric Zumbrunnen (52). “Creative kindred spirits, Zumbrunnen and [Spike] Jonze collaborated for more than two decades, teaming for the features Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and Her (2013),” wrote Mike Barnes in the Hollywood Reporter. “A proficient guitarist, Zumbrunnen brought his love of music to his work editing music videos, among them classics like ‘Buddy Holly’ from Weezer, Björk’s ‘It's Oh So Quiet’—both helmed by Jonze—‘Where It’s At’ from Beck and ‘Tonight, Tonight’ from Smashing Pumpkins.”
August 19. Dick Gregory (84). “In a documentary in production by Andre Gaines,” writes Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in the NYT Magazine, “Gregory explains in a radio interview—once again—why fighting for justice trumped show business. ‘It’s just—I liked what I felt,’ he says. You can hear the good feeling in his voice—one still alive on sixteen albums and as undaunted on the page.”
August 20. Jerry Lewis (91). Introducing MUBI’s Jerrython the other day, Christopher Small admits that he’s “found it hard to translate into words the way Jerry’s shtick—the flurry of mercurial personalities, the endless generation and regeneration of masks, the Brechtian refusal to acknowledge the sanctity of a self-contained dramatic universe—revealed something deep about the guy. Indeed, I started to believe that this in itself pointed to the limits of Lewis criticism as a whole. Jerry is too fast for description; his effortless parrying between conflicting emotional states overrides the critics’ attempts to pin down his essence. The total filmmaker in command of every aspect of the medium, the atomically precise image and sound sculptor, the master of the loaded gag, was quite obviously also its most ephemeral, diffuse physical presence.” See, too, “Meeting Mr. Lewis” by Bill Krohn and “Jerry and the Prefab People: Hardly Working and Americana” by Jessica R. Felrice.
August 26. Tobe Hooper (74). Writing for Sight & Sound,Nick Pinkerton notes that Hooper “credited an encounter with George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead as opening his eyes to the unexplored potentialities of the genre. But if the homemade, rough-edged Night signified a definitive break with what had come before, Hooper’s 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a scorched-earth, burned-bridges piece of work.” And “you can still feel the impact of its shocks on a more than merely ‘gotcha’ level.”
SEPTEMBER
September 11. Peter Hall (86). He “was just twenty-five when Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot arrived on his desk, and he directed the UK premiere,” writes David Hare for the Guardian. “On any night in his theaters you could see Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench and Paul Scofield and Peggy Ashcroft and Ian Holm, while he also produced some of Peter Brook’s greatest work as a director.”
September 15. Harry Dean Stanton (91). Rolling Stone, introducing an annotated list of ten of his “essential films,” notes that he was “a child of the Depression, a WWII vet, a beatnik, a bit player in TV and movies, a troubadour, a hipster icon. Most of all, though, people referred to him as ‘a character actor,’ a term that he always hated and considered reductive at best and an insult at worst. But Stanton was part of an elite canon of screen performers who not only brought an edge or a sense of lived-in authenticity to a supporting turn, but could often lift a film out of the rut of a rote narrative.”
September 20. Lillian Ross (99). She started writing for the New Yorker in 1945 and kept at it for seven decades. Among the most famous of her books is Picture (1952), about the making of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951). Film Desk offers a collection of her writing on François Truffaut.
OCTOBER
October 5. Anne Wiazemsky (70). She made her onscreen debut at the age of nineteen in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), married Jean-Luc Godard while they were making La Chinoise (1967), and appeared in his Week End (1967) and One Plus One (1968) before they divorced in 1979. Wiazemsky worked with Pier Paolo Pasolini on Teorema (1968) and Pigsty (1969), with Marco Ferreri on Il seme dell'uomo (1969), with Marcel Hanoun on La vérité sur l'imaginaire passion d'un inconnu (1974), with Philippe Garrel on L'enfant secret (1979), and with André Téchiné on Rendez-vous (1984).
October 17. Danielle Darrieux (100). “Unlike most branded stars whose appeal can be captured in one well-chosen adjective, the multifaceted Darrieux would require the whole thesaurus,” wrote Steven Mears for Film Comment in May. “The early 1950s brought three collaborations with Max Ophuls for which she is likely best known: La Ronde [1950], Le Plaisir [1952], and most particularly, The Earrings of Madame de . . . [1953], in which she offers a performance of breathtaking complexity as [Charles] Boyer’s faithless wife, in what Andrew Sarris called “the most perfect film ever made.’” She also worked with Jean Cocteau, Claude Chabrol, Henri Ducoin, Joseph L Mankiewicz, André Téchiné, Anne Fontaine, and François Ozon.
October 20. Federico Luppi (81). The Argentine actor is best known for his work in Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).
October 23. Walter Lasally (90). The German-born British-Greek cinematographer worked with Tony Richardson on A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), and won an Oscar for his work on Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek (1964). He plays the older writer in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013).
NOVEMBER
November 7. Debra Chasnoff (60). “I think that very first film has done more to change the world than anything else I could possibly do,” she said on Blog Talk Radio in 2013, referring to Choosing Children (1984). “It’s no longer assumed you can’t be a parent if you’re gay.” In 1992, she won an Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment.
November 15. Betty French Jarmusch (96). She wrote about theater and the movies for the Akron Beacon Journal, wrote features for magazines, short fiction, and a screenplay. Her daughter, Ann, is a journalist, and of course, both of her sons, Jim and Tom, are filmmakers.
November 19. Della Reese (86). Singer, actress, ordained minister, and the first black female guest host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. She appeared in Eddie Murphy’s Harlem Nights (1989) and is probably best known as Tess on Touched by an Angel, which ran on CBS from 1994 to 2003.
November 23. Anthony Harvey (87). He directed Katharine Hepburn, Peter O'Toole, and Anthony Hopkins in The Lion in Winter (1968), George C. Scott in They Might Be Giants (1971), and Liv Ullmann in The Abdication (1974) and Richard’s Things (1980). Harvey also worked as an editor for Stanley Kubrick on Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
November 28. Shadia (86). The Egyptian actress and singer appeared in more than a hundred films starting in the 1940s. “Her fan base reached across the Arab world. Her roles ranged from willful country girls and city career women to emotionally disturbed women and hopeless romantics,” notes the AP. “Her roles in two films based on novels by the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz won her lavish praise from Mr. Mahfouz himself.”
November 30. Alain Jessua (85). After working as an assistant for Jacques Becker and Max Ophuls, he made his first film, Léon la lune (Leon the Moon), a short documentary that won the Prix Jean Vigo in 1957. La Vie à l’envers (Life Upside Down) won an award in Venice for best feature debut in 1964, and Jeu de massacre (The Killing Game) won a best screenplay award in Cannes in 1967. For more, see his entry at newwavefilm.com.
Jim Nabors (87). His character on The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, would eventually get his own show.
Alfie Curtis (87). As Katie Kilkenny notes in the Hollywood Reporter, he “famously intimidated Luke Skywalker as Dr. Evazan at the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope [1077].” He also appeared in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980).
DECEMBER
December 2. Ulli Lommel (72). Known for his collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol, Lommel directed nearly sixty films (many of the later ones would go directly to video) and acted in over eighty.
December 4. Shashi Kapoor (79). “English-speaking audiences will remember him best in Merchant Ivory films such as The Householder (1963), Shakespeare Wallah (1965) and Heat and Dust (1983), and for these he willingly accepted far less money than for the Bollywood movies that made his name,” writes Derek Malcolm in the Guardian. “In fact, he appeared in some of the best Bollywood films of his era, opposite the greatest stars in the business.”
December 5. Johnny Hallyday (74). “He was one of these artists who burns, like Elvis or Edith Piaf,” writes Carla Bruni in the Guardian. “He would sing like he was going to die the very next minute. He was a good actor too—the only problem was that his presence was so strong, it was hard to forget it was him.” He appeared in Godard’s Detective (1985) and Patrice Leconte’s Man on the Train (2002).
December 9. Grant Munro (94). The award-winning Canadian animator appeared in Norman McLaren's Neighbours (1952).
December 10. Bruce Brown (80). What his landmark 1966 documentary The Endless Summer did for surfing, his 1971 film On Any Sunday did for motorcycling.
December 14. Chuck Kleinhans. With Julia Lesage and John Hess, a co-founding editor of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, which has taken “an explicit political stand as a nonsectarian left, feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist publication” since 1974.
December 19. Thérèse DePrez (52). As a production designer, she worked with Tom DiCillo on Living in Oblivion (1995), Mary Harron on I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), Todd Solondz on Happiness (1998), Spike Lee on Summer of Sam (1999), Stephen Frears on High Fidelity (2000), Darren Aronofsky on Black Swan (2010), and Park Chan-wook on Stoker (2013).
December 22. Jerry Greenberg (81). The award-winning editor worked with William Friedkin on The Boys in the Band (1970) and The French Connection (1971); with Brian De Palma on Dressed to Kill (1980), Scarface (1983), Body Double (1984), Wise Guys (1986), and The Untouchables (1987); with Joseph Sargent on The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974); with Arthur Penn on The Missouri Breaks (1976); with Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now (1979); with Robert Benton on Kramer vs. Kramer (1979); with Michael Cimino on Heaven’s Gate (1980); and with Penny Marshall on Awakenings (1990).
December 23. Thomas Stanford (93), also an editor. “Over a career that spanned nearly three decades, Stanford worked on features including The Yakuza,The Legend of the Lone Ranger, and his first credited work, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 film Suddenly Last Summer, but it was his work on 1961’s West Side Story for which he received his sole best film editing Oscar,” reports Denise Petski for Deadline.
December 28. Fernando Birri (92). In February, the Berlinale presented a restoration of ORG, a rare screening since the 1979 premiere in Venice. “For almost three hours, 26,000 cuts and some 700 audio tracks,” writes Celluloid Liberation Front for the Notebook, “ORG evokes a visual cataclysm where the signified, be it narrative or political, is never assigned a fixed signifier. Fernando Birri dares the impossible and ends up with the improbable, channeling in one film the cosmic (im)potential of 60s and 70s cinema and all its naïve yet desperately needed ambition. Georges Méliès and Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich and Jonas Mekas are just some of the diegetic extras the film swallows in its multitudinous folds of expressionist extremism. . . . It is significant that a director like Birri, forever associated with the ‘New Latin American Cinema,’ a man who founded adversarial film schools in Argentina and Cuba, conceived of this film while exiled in Italy (where the director had already studied after the war before debuting in 1960 with Tire Dié). ORG is in fact a film summa, a sampled cut-up of all the currents, moods and visions political cinema had expressed until then, both in the western and in the so-called third world.”
Rose Marie (94). Born in 1923, she won a talent contest at the age of three and “began her professional career as Baby Rose Marie.” Alison J. Peterson for the New York Times: “By the time she was four, she was starring on a local radio show, and within a year after that she had her own national show on NBC.” Donald Liebenson for Vanity Fair: “She was a pistol as comedy writer Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s. And in 2017, she reemerged as a voice in the #MeToo movement. Rose Marie . . . was one of the last of a generation of entertainers whose career spanned vaudeville, radio, movies, Broadway, television, and social media.”
Recy Taylor (97). She’s passed on three weeks after the theatrical release of Nancy Buirski’s The Rape of Recy Taylor. In Alabama in 1944, Taylor was abducted and raped by six white men. “Two all-white, all-male grand juries refused to indict the men, even though one of them had confessed,” writes Sewell Chan in the New York Times. The efforts of the then-young activist Rosa Parks to attain justice will be the subject of a film by Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust).
Sue Grafton (77). Her series of mysteries began with A Is for Alibi in 1982 and ended this year with Y Is for Yesterday.Sarah Weinman for Vulture: “Grafton refused to sell the film and television rights to her books. She spent sixteen years as a Hollywood screenwriter, the latter part with Steven Humphrey, her third and surviving husband. She saw firsthand how adaptations mess with a writer’s head. Grafton didn’t want someone else’s vision of Kinsey Millhone to compete with her own.”
December 29. Dan Talbot. With his wife, Toby, he ran the immeasurably influential distribution company New Yorker Films as well as the New Yorker Theater and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. “What we talk about when we talk about ‘foreign films’ is in no small part defined by their curatorial instincts,” writes Jordan Hoffman in the Village Voice.
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Non avranno certamente il valore auratico di Leoni, Orsi e Palme d'Oro, non avranno certamente il valore commerciale (e auratico) degli Oscar, ma gli European Film Awards una qualche importanza, vivaddio, ce l'hanno. Quest'anno – la cerimonia si è tenuta a Berlino venti giorni fa - era una partita fra Cannes e Berlino: tre film passati e premiati a maggio alla Croisette (The Square, 120 BPM e Loveless) contro due film passati a febbraio a Berlino, l'ungherese Corpo e anima, vincitore dell'Orso d'Oro, di Ildikó Enyedi, in uscita in Italia all'inizio del nuovo anno, e L'altro volto della speranza di Kaurismäki). Ha vinto The Square sia in generale, sia nella categoria “Miglior Commedia”. E chi scrive – a differenza di chi ha recensito il film per “Close-Up” al momento della sua presentazione a Cannes, concedendogli due misere stelle - apprezza molto la scelta di questo film disturbante e divisivo, come apprezzò la scelta di un film, per certi aspetti, altrettanto disturbante e divisivo, la scelta di Vi presento Toni Erdmann della tedesca Maren Ade, premiato dagli “European Film Awards” l'anno scorso, nella città polacca di Breslavia.
Proviamo a dire sei ragioni perché The Square è un grande film (ed è bello, arrivando tanto tempo dopo, poter dare per scontato l'intreccio). 1) da un'ottica apparentemente snob, intellettuale e privilegiata, trattando cioè argomenti che alla gran parte della popolazione non interessano, The Square riesce in realtà a negoziare conflitti potentissimi: conflitti identitari, conflitti etnici, conflitti di classe, conflitti antropologici, tutti clamorosamente calati nel presente (non sono moltissimi i film che lo fanno). Insomma cerca di problematizzare questioni su cui si gioca il presente e l'avvenire politico dell'Europa, su cui, fra le altre cose, si decidono elezioni, maggioranze. Ogni singola sequenza pone il personaggio principale – una brava persona in fondo, solo un po' coglioncello e narcisista- dinanzi a un ventaglio di opzioni rispetto alle quali non esiste una scelta giusta e una sbagliata, probabilmente sono tutte sbagliate; ma soprattutto lo spettatore è portato a interrogarsi se esistano da qualche parte istanze sovraordinate autorizzate a decidere che cosa è giusto e che cosa è sbagliato, che cosa è politicamente scorretto o scorretto; 2) The Square innesta su un realismo di fondo costanti e alla fine rigorosi inserti surreali, producendo una versatilità stilistica piuttosto infrequente nel cinema contemporaneo che, fatte salve le serie e i sequel ascrivibili a fantascienza/fantasy etc, presenta una vieppiù stucchevole egemonia neorealistico-documentaria; 3) anche in grazia di questo aspetto, The Square è un film (anche) divertente che sa mantenere costantemente il precario e instabile equilibrio fra i toni del dramma e quelli della commedia. Si potrebbero citare almeno una decina di sequenze dove lo spettatore non può fare a meno di ridere: il non più giovanissimo collaboratore del museo che arriva con l'infante al meeting in cui si deve decidere la strategia pubblicitaria per la mostra da inaugurare, i due pubblicitari che decidono a morra cinese chi parlerà, gli episodi con lo scimpanzé, la lite sul preservativo, le due sequenze con i donatori del museo (quella iniziale in cui lo chef alza la voce e poi quella con la performance da teatro della crudeltà con protagonista Terry Notary, esperto di/in scimmie), l'intervista all'artista disturbata dallo spettatore affetto da sindrome di Tourette etc etc. Ma tutte le sequenze citate rappresentano costantemente un momento di minaccia, sembra che possano capovolgersi nel loro contrario, la minaccia vera è sempre dietro l'angolo e talvolta si concretizza davvero; 4) The Square è un film molto rigoroso sul piano formale che esemplifica l'assunto di fondo, ossia il contrasto fra ordine e caos, attraverso due figure ricorrenti, il quadrato e la spirale, rappresentate iconicamente, ad esempio, nella continua inquadratura di scale e pianerottoli, con plongée ora geometriche ora labirintiche. Il simbolo di fondo di cui al titolo inglese equivale, in italiano, a due significati diversi, solo in parte coincidenti, anzi fra loro in contraddizione (ciò che poi corrisponde, appunto, alla dialettica fondamentale del film): la piazza e il quadrato. La piazza come luogo di una socialità aperta, fiduciosa e solidale della cultura occidentale; il quadrato come delimitazione almeno apparente e in fondo vana del caos, come spazio, magari anche auratico e sacro (più volte nell'autocaratterizzazione dell'artista lo si definisce un “santuario”) ma alla fine iperstrutturato esclusivo ed escludente; 5) The Square racconta in modo non retorico, non saccente la progressiva virtualizzazione della società e dei rapporti umani, anche qui con inquadrature memorabili, tipo quella in cui il protagonista cerca le figlie nel grande magazzino e tutti sono affacciati sulla balaustra con i loro cellulari in mano e non si curano della sua richiesta di aiuto, la virtualizzazione dei valori, l'ipocrisia del politically correct, esemplata in modo particolare dallo choc (e dal voyeurismo) mediatico-estetico del video caricato su YouTube dal quale si dipanano una serie di questioni di portata colossale a cui, com'è giusto che sia, Ruben Östlund non intende dare una risposta definitiva; 6) last but not least The Square è una – si potrò obiettare: facile - satira sul mondo dell'arte, soprattutto contemporanea e dei suoi farfugliamenti pseudo-critici. In occasione della visita alla Biennale di Venezia discutevamo con amici circa l'assoluta interscambiabilità dei pannelli illustrativi, di quel gergo confuso e vago, del tutto privo di referenzialità. E l'intervista della giornalista americana, all'inizio del film, ne rappresenta un esempio impagabile.
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Il doppiaggio è assolutamente necessario. Leggereste mai Tolstoj in russo? Questa affermazione di Stanley Kubrick campeggiava sullo sfondo del palco dell'Auditorium Parco della Musica di Roma dove si è svolta, lo scorso 23 novembre, la serata di gala della nona edizione del Gran Premio Internazionale del Doppiaggio; una cerimonia che ogni anno riunisce, omaggia e celebra le star dalle voci nell'ombra, i direttori, gli autori e i tecnici che rendono, con arte e professionalità, il doppiaggio un'eccellenza della produzione culturale italiana. Questo è quanto ha sottolineato il Presidente della Repubblica, Sergio Mattarella, nel messaggio augurale letto durante il galà da un commosso Pino Insegno, infaticabile fautore, direttore artistico e presentatore di questo importante evento. Evento preceduto da un'altra magnifica occasione per celebrare il doppiaggio italiano: il bel libro di Massimo M. Veronese, Simonetta Caminiti e Maurizio Pittiglio, Senti chi parla , edito da Anniversary Books e presentato a settembre alla Mostra del Cinema di Venezia, contestualmente alla consegna del Leggio d'Oro - il premio dei doppiatori per la prima volta, in quasi novant'anni, all'interno del Festival - e alla mostra audio-fotografica AttorInVoce curata da Maurizio Pittiglio.
Il libro racconta il mondo del doppiaggio, e dei suoi grandi protagonisti, partendo dalle famose frasi di film che sono entrate nella leggenda della Settima Arte grazie anche a quelle battute che sono diventate veri e propri aforismi nell'immaginario collettivo cinefilo. 101, come i dalmata di Disney, quelle scelte e presentate: potremmo citarne diverse, ma preferiamo lasciare al lettore la sorpresa di scoprirle, ricordarle e riviverle attraverso l'indimenticabile voce dell'artista che le ha rese nella nostra bella lingua con risultati sorprendenti e, in alcuni casi, più emozionanti rispetto alla lingua originale. Questo è possibile in quanto ogni pagina è contrassegnata da un codice QR che consente di ascoltare con lo smartphone le frasi raccolte dagli autori attraverso un vasto e minuzioso lavoro di documentazione su cinema e doppiaggio che si respira in ogni riga. Il volume si apre con il pensiero di Ennio Flaiano sull'italiano come lingua parlata dai doppiatori e la bella introduzione firmata da Massimo M. Veronese che, ricordando l'amore del padre per i film, ci accompagna nelle centosessanta pagine. Pagine belle, dinamiche, colorate, ricche di illustrazioni, inserti, articoli di giornali e impreziosite dalle splendide foto di Pittiglio che ha immortalato i doppiatori nel buio delle sale mentre danno voce agli attori sullo schermo e ha inoltre curato il suggestivo booktrailer di presentazione del libro.
Si inizia con la storia del doppiaggio e da lì in poi il volume si sviluppa con le pagine dedicate ai doppiatori, e alle celebri frasi dei film, presentati in ordine alfabetico, utile per un'agile consultazione del loro profilo e del percorso artistico. Ci sono veramente tutti, viventi e non, vecchie e nuove generazioni di voci memorabili. Dai grandi nomi del passato - Emilio Cigoli, Pino Locchi, Francesca Braggiotti, Tina Lattanzi - a quelli del teatro e del cinema: Gabriele Lavia, Flavio Bucci, Giancarlo Giannini, Alberto Sordi, Enrico Maria Salerno. Dalle attuali celebrities del doppiaggio come Luca Ward, Francesco Pannofino, Roberto Pedicini, Pino Insegno, Christian Iansante, Maria Pia Di Meo, Domitilla D'Amico, alle famiglie di notevoli doppiatori: Izzo, Rossi e Boccanera. Non possono certo mancare Oreste Lionello, Ferruccio Amendola, Tonino Accolla che hanno reso il doppiaggio un'arte apprezzata ed elogiata anche dai rispettivi alter ego internazionali, vale a dire, Woody Allen, Al Pacino ed Eddie Murphy. E tanti altri importanti abitanti di questo mondo di voci, più o meno iconici, ma sempre di grande livello artistico e professionale. Quello che maggiormente colpisce del libro di Veronese e Caminiti è la rilevanza che hanno dato, non tanto e non solo ai film e alle leggendarie battute, ma anche alle vite di ogni interprete del doppiaggio, attraverso un racconto, corredato da aneddoti e curiosità ben calibrate, dal quale emerge che tali personaggi hanno vissuto situazioni artistiche e personali avvincenti come i film.
Lo stile del libro è pop, una scelta di editing riuscita poiché rende la lettura godibile, fruibile e interessante: da leggere come un dizionario enciclopedico del doppiaggio o da sfogliare come una rivista e con la piacevolezza di aprire una pagina a caso e ritrovarsi in una scena di un film o in un momento della Storia del Cinema. E' un libro che dà “voce” e luce alla nobile arte del doppiaggio italiano, talvolta in ombra o bistrattata da detrattori, anche celebri, come Vincent Cassel che non perde occasione per scagliare dardi contro i film doppiati. Ma il mondo è bello perché è vario e per un Cassel che è giustamente libero di dire quello che pensa, c'è un Al Pacino che ama vedere i propri film doppiati in italiano per “ascoltarsi” nella lingua di famiglia che lo incanta; o un Woody Allen che disse di Oreste Lionello: “Mi ha reso per anni un attore molto migliore di quanto non fossi veramente”. E ancora, Vittorio De Sica che esortava il figlio Christian, desideroso di fare l'attore, a studiare il doppiaggio…la scuola migliore. Per non parlare poi di Stanley Kubrick, genio assoluto e imperituro della cinematografia, nonché raffinato e maniacale cultore del doppiaggio. Grandi artisti che di cinema ne capivano e ne capiscono “qualcosa”.
Senti chi parla è un libro sul cinema, prima di essere un libro sul doppiaggio, e rivela in ogni pagina il grande amore degli autori per la settima arte e per i doppiatori che, non va dimenticato, sono innanzitutto attori, spesso eccellenti, e in quanto tali fanno parte delle storie leggendarie raccontate nel tempo sul grande schermo. Un libro che entusiasmerà i cinefili e gli appassionati di doppiaggio e incuriosirà chi vuole approfondire quest'ambito dello spettacolo e un aspetto della cultura italiana. Un aspetto eccellente…come ricordava il Presidente!
Autore: Massimo M. Veronese, Maurizio Pittiglio, Simonetta Caminiti Titolo: Senti chi parla - le 101 frasi più famose del cinema (e chi le ha dette veramente...) Editore: Anniversary Books Catalogo: Storia & storie Dati: 160 pp, oltre 300 illustrazioni a colori Anno: 2017 Prezzo: 20,00 € Isbn: 9788896408193 webinfo: Scheda libro sul sito Anniversary Books
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There’s been a furious flurry of list-making going on at IndieWire over the past couple of days. “IndieWire has reached out to a number of our favorite filmmakers to share with us their lists and thoughts on the best of the year,” writes Chris O’Falt, introducing a wide-ranging collection of forty-two responses. Because they’re presented alphabetically, Pedro Almodóvar’s passionately annotated list is up first, and Karsten Meinich is quick to point out that, while the jury in Cannes that Almodóvar presided over presented the Palme d’Or to Ruben Östlund’s The Square, that film hasn’t made his list here. Three other films that screened in Competition, however, have: Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute) (image above), Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here.
Overall, these nine pages are a rich holiday browse. A sampling:
Sean Baker (The Florida Project) on BPM: “It’s going to be tough to push this out of my number one slot. Moving, visual and important.”
Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) on Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name: “Halfway through, I actually paused my screener to yell ‘WOW!’ to no one in particular.”
Xavier Dolan (It’s Only the End of the World) on Call Me by Your Name: “It hit so close to home that, for a while, it paralyzed me.”
Heidi Ewing (One of Us) is thrilled that Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman) has ventured “into the Hollywood man cave and emerges with an actual, fair and equitable paycheck for the sequel! I swoon! Git it, Patty, Git it!”
Rick Famuyiwa (Dope) on Get Out and Mudbound: “I view Jordan Peele’s and Dee Rees’s films as companion works of art that found unique ways to speak about race, class, and privilege.”
Daniel Kwan (Swiss Army Man) on A Ghost Story: “I don’t find myself recommending it to others as much as I probably should. Partially because this movie feels like its mine, and selfishly I don’t want anyone else to have it.”
For Haifaa Al Mansour (Wadjda), James Mangold’s Logan is “a really great reimagination of what can be done within the super hero genre.”
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk tops the list from Alex Ross Perry (Golden Exits).
“Nathan Fielder’s show Nathan for You on Comedy Central has always been a source of inspiration, but two episodes in this fourth season reached heights I never thought possible,” writes Benny Safdie.
James Schamus (Indignation) comments on the “mix of fictional and documentary modalities” that’s “a notable feature of so much of what’s interesting in recent cinema.” And the first scene in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time “is exemplary in this light—no other scene I’ve watched in 2017 dealt so boldly with all these confusing and conflictual aesthetic and political conflicts.”
Adam Wingard (The Guest) on David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return: “Episode 8 was one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV or at the movies or otherwise.”
IndieWire’s also invited “friends and colleagues in the independent film community—programmers, distributors, publicists, and others” to submit lists, and among those responding are Toronto International Film Festival artistic director Cameron Bailey, Sony Pictures Classics co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, Seattle International Film Festival artistic director Beth Barrett, Nitehawk Cinema programmer Caryn Coleman, Film Society of Lincoln Center executive director Leslie Klainberg and deputy director Eugene Hernandez, Pixar senior story and creative artist Mike Jones, A24’s David Laub, MOMA chief curator of film Rajendra Roy, and programmer Basil Tsiokos.
“From Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood to David Lowery and Daniel Hart, several of the most remarkable director-composer duos in the business returned with their finest collaborations to date,” writes David Ehrlich, introducing his list of the ten “Best Movie Scores of 2017.”
And then the whole IndieWire team’s gotten together to come up with an annotated list—with trailers—of the twenty “Best Sequels of the 21st Century.”
POLLS AND PUBLICATIONS
Roger Koza has posted the results of his spectacular annual international poll, gathering ballots this time around from 135 programmers, critics, and filmmakers from thirty-six countries. Among the participants are Denis Côté (A Skin So Soft), Miguel Gomes (Arabian Nights), Alain Guiraudie (Staying Vertical), Bill Morrison (Dawson City: Frozen Time), Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), Julian Radlmaier (Self-criticism of a Bourgeois Dog), João Pedro Rodrigues (The Ornithologist), Nele Wohlatz (The Future Perfect), and critics and programmers Ela Bittencourt, Nicole Brenez, Carlo Chatrian, Aaron Cutler, Jaime Grijalba, Robert Koehler, Adrian Martin, Cristina Nord, Michael Pattison, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Neil Young.
The top five, in order:
Editors and contributors at desistfilm have voted up two lists, features (#1: The Nothing Factory) and experimental (#1: Lois Patiño’s Fajr). And here are the ballots.
David Davidson has rounded up dozens of lists at the Toronto Film Review, including those from filmmakers Blake Williams (PROTOTYPE), Isiah Medina (88:88), and Kurt Walker (Hit 2 Pass), actress Deragh Campbell, and critics Adam Cook, Jordan Cronk, Vadim Rizov, and Niles Schwartz.
Cargo, the German-language journal of film, media, and culture has asked friends and contributors to look back on “what remains of the year.”
Contributors to the Stranger present an alphabetical, annotated top twenty—and it’s not the usual suspects.
The writers at In Review Online revisit fifteen films, and it’s Lawrence Garcia who writes about their #1: “Put simply, Nocturama is the most radical film of the year. Conceived in 2011, produced post-Charlie Hebdo, and released just months after the Bataclan attacks, Bertrand Bonello’s film is uniquely enfolded into the present moment; it’s a zeitgeist film in the truest (and most productive) sense.”
Best Picture: Get Out
Best Actor: Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
Best Actress: Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Best Director: Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk
Original Screenplay: Jordan Peele, Get Out
Adapted Screenplay: James Ivory, Call Me by Your Name
Best Documentary: Faces Places
Best Foreign Language Film: BPM (Beats Per Minute)
Best Supporting Actor: Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best Supporting Actress: Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
Best Animated Feature: Coco
Best Editing: Lee Smith, Dunkirk
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, Blade Runner 2049
Best Ensemble: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Breakout Star of the Year: Timothée Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name
Not only has the staff at the Film Society of Lincoln Center posted individual top tens, but Michael Koresky discusses the year in cinema with Rachel Allen, Jordan Raup, Dan Sullivan, and Madeline Whittle (45’55”).
INDIVIDUALS
“I enjoy keeping up with new releases but nothing matches the thrill of discovering a film made decades ago that still feels as exciting and relevant today, particularly when I have the opportunity to see it projected from a beautiful original print,” and Philip Concannon writes about fifty such experiences. #1: Seeing Med Hondo’s West Indies (1979) in Bologna this summer. As for 2017, he’s got lists of his favorite performances by lead actresses and actors and supporting actresses and actors.
#1 for Glenn Heath Jr. in the San Diego City Beat is Terrence Malick’s Song to Song: “It dares to be incomplete, and stubbornly off trend.”
The #1 Argentinian film for Diego Lerer is, of course, Zama; #2: Anahí Berneri’s Alanis.
ALSO . . .
“Tracy Letts is nobody’s newcomer,” writes Michael Phillips. “He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (August: Osage County) and a Tony Award-winning actor (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) with three decades of performance credits on Chicago stages, many at his artistic home, Steppenwolf Theatre Company.” But the Tribune is naming Letts Chicagoan of the Year in film for his work in Lady Bird, Azazel Jacobs’s The Lovers, and Steven Spielberg’s The Post.
You can watch Steve Erickson’s top fifteen music videos at DC’s, where he explains why he’s picked them.
Venerdì 29 dicembre 2017 al Teatro Arciliuto di Roma il noto chitarrista genovese Beppe Gambetta presenta in concerto il suo nuovo CD "Short Stories", pubblicato il 13 ottobre dall'etichetta canadese Borealis Records.
Short Stories è il tredicesimo lavoro del musicista genovese, ispirato sempre di più alla sua vita “on the road” a cavallo tra il vecchio e il nuovo continente a esplorare nuovi territori, ambienti, popoli e storie. La bellezza e la varietà di stili di "Short Stories" proviene dalla combinazione delle diverse passioni musicali di Beppe tra ricerca e creatività.
Il CD è un viaggio attraverso composizioni originali, trascrizioni inedite, canzoni d'autore con arrangiamenti innovativi in quattro lingue (inglese, tedesco, genovese e italiano) e una eccitante live performance dall' “Acoustic Night”, l'evento internazionale che Beppe organizza da 17 anni nella sua città natale, Genova. Beppe Gambetta è un ambasciatore internazionale della musica, convinto che l'arte possa allo stesso tempo intrattenere, valorizzare e rafforzare le relazioni umane. Il nuovo album lo cattura nel suo usuale percorso di ricerca artistica, viaggio e studio dove la comunicazione tra la gente è molto più importante del virtuosismo chitarristico per cui è anche conosciuto.
Note biografiche: Beppe Gambetta è chitarrista, cantante, ricercatore e compositore nato a Genova nel 1955. Dalle sue esperienze di viaggiatore curioso e instancabile è nato uno stile eclettico che porta la musica “roots” americana ed europea a dialogare con una unica voce. Nel suo stile personale, Beppe accosta “grooves” energici con melodie appassionate, sperimenta influenze contemporanee alle musiche della tradizione popolare, dà nuova vita a musiche provenienti da periodi e luoghi diversi. Nel corso della sua carriera si è ispirato ad artisti che attivamente hanno lavorato per fare del mondo un luogo migliore, includendo due grandi che ha avuto la fortuna di conoscere personalmente: Fabrizio De Andrè e Pete Seeger. Si è anche esibito con alcuni degli eroi della musica folk internazionale tra cui David Grisman, Gene Parsons, Doc Watson, Norman Blake, Tony Rice, Darrell Scott, e altri.
Ore 20,30 - Aperitivo Cena facoltativo Euro 10,00 (drink incluso)
Ore 21,30 - Concerto nella Sala Teatro, ingresso intero euro 15,00 - ridotto NewsLetter euro 12,00
Teatro ARCILIUTO
Piazza Montevecchio, 5 00186 Roma (Italy)
Tel. +39 06 6879419 (dalle ore 18,00 in poi)
mobile 333 8568464 (calls&sms)
info@arciliuto.it www.arciliuto.it/
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From C. Mason Wells comes word that Dan Talbot, founder of New Yorker Films (and pictured above in front of the New Yorker Theater with Alfred Hitchcock), has passed away. “Alongside his wife Toby, few did more for world cinema distribution and exhibition in this country,” writes Wells. “A crushing loss.”
As Jordan Hoffman writes in the Village Voice today, Dan and Toby Talbot had been “at the forefront of arthouse cinema since they opened the New Yorker Theater in 1960 (with a double bill of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon), followed by the Cinema Studio and the Metro. They ran the New Yorker Films distribution company, which released works by Bertolucci, Ozu, Godard, Bresson, Malle, Varda, Herzog, Merchant and Ivory, Sembène, Akerman, Mizoguchi, and more. They brought the nine-plus-hour documentary Shoah to theaters. What we talk about when we talk about ‘foreign films’ is in no small part defined by their curatorial instincts.”
In its Spring 2017 issue, Cineaste ran an article in which Talbot looked back on his years as a distributor and exhibitor. It’s not online, but Cynthia Rowell’s introduction to the piece is, and she notes that Talbot “started his illustrious career with words, not images: the 1959 publication of Film: An Anthology (a volume collecting invaluable essays on the art), and short-lived stints as an East Coast story editor for Warner Bros. and film critic at The Progressive. This literary interest would manifest itself in one of the New Yorker Theater’s defining qualities: the film program notes, often written by well-known authors.”
In 2009, Toby Talbot wrote a memoir, The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies, reviewed for Offscreen by Daniel Garrett: “Talbot’s book is a love story, for her husband, film, the theaters they have operated; and the love that is celebrated is a broadening, complex circle of connections. The Talbots knew Peter Bogdanovich and Jonas Mekas, as well as Morris Dickstein, Phillip Lopate, Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag, and Parker Tyler. At their theater, the Talbots began a film society, and people like Jules Feiffer and Terry Southern wrote program notes.”
When New Yorker Films was sold to Madstone Films in 2009, “the now-defunct entity that used portions of New Yorker’s library as collateral for a loan,” Anthony Kaufman spoke with Dan Talbot for Variety in 2009, noting that he took full responsibility for the demise of the company. But he also credited “the success of many of the company’s groundbreaking standouts (e.g., Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God) to a confluence of factors: The films of the French New Wave helped cultivate ‘a climate of excitement’; critics such as Vincent Canby and Andrew Sarris championed the films and kept them alive among the cognoscenti; more New York arthouses created an expanded environment for the films and sparked word of mouth; and audiences ‘were extremely literate, cultivated and traveled,’ he recalls. . . . Ultimately, however, Talbot says, he didn’t have a magic touch: ‘I’ve always maintained that the real distributor of a film is the film itself. There is something inside successful films that’s not definable that makes them work. The role of a distributor, seems to me, is to get behind the film and not get in front of it and fuck it up.’”
“Despite the loss of New Yorker Films—it took him years to get over it, he said—Mr. Talbot remains upbeat about the industry side of the art-film world,” noted the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis when she met him in Cannes in 2011. “The movie business (‘It’s not a business,’ he corrected me, ‘it’s a casino’) is more complicated now. ‘I don’t think it’s worse or better—it’s just different.’”
Though New Yorker Films was gone, Dan and Toby Talbot were still running Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, “a temple of the art house movie scene in New York for thirty years,” as Dade Hayes called in a story for Deadline—reporting, sadly, on the theater’s imminent closing.
In 2004, the Independent Film Project presented its Gotham Award for Industry Lifetime Achievement to Talbot, and IndieWire ran his acceptance speech. He had stories to tell.
For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow@CriterionDaily.
I dati, aggiornati al 27 dicembre, indicano che Star Wars 8 Gli Ultimi Jedi ha già incassato 914.807.899 di dollari in tutto il mondo, metà dei quali nei soli Stati Uniti, dove la vendita dei biglietti dell'Episodio VIII di Star Wars ha già fruttato 445.207.899 di dollari. A meno di grosse sorprese il traguardo del miliardo è vicino e dovrebbe essere raggiunto nei prossimi gorni.
Sommando gli incassi del nuovo film di Rian Johnson a quelli di Episodio VII: Il Risveglio della Forza e a quelli Rogue One, la somma totale supera i 4 miliardi di dollari, ovvero quella pagata nel 2012 dalla Disney per acquistare la Lucasfilm di George Lucas.
Vista così, la Disney avrebbe dunque recuperato i soldi spesi ma ovviamente le cose non sono così semplici, come fa ben notare The Hollywood Reporter: oltre alla somma che non entrerà mai nelle casse di Topolino (vanno dedotti i profitti delle sale cinematografiche), bisogna prendere in considerazioni tutti i costi di produzione e di promozione dei tre film. D'altro canto, non sono da sottovalutare tutti gli introiti per la Disney derivanti dal merchandising e compagnia bella. Insomma i calcoli da fare sono tanti e complessi e non è certo questa la sede. Di sicuro c'è che quell'investimento è stato sicuramete un ottimo affare per la Disney, così come lo sono stato quelli del 2006 e del 2009 per comprare, rispettivamente, la Pixar e Marvel Entertainment. Bisognerà invece attendere per capire se lo stesso vale per il più recente degli acquisti, quello della 20th Century Fox per la faraonica somma di 52 miliardi di dollari.
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2C9p7wi
È normale, è inevitabile. Anche nel 2017 molte personalità del mondo dello spettacolo hanno lasciato la vita terrena. Alcuni di loro continueranno a vivere nella loro musica, come Chris Cornell, Chuck Berry e Johnny Hallyday, altri torneranno sullo schermo ogni volta che vedremo un loro film, come Bill Paxton, Roger Moore e Jeanne Moreau. Saremo sempre riconoscenti nei confronti di Jonathan Demme per averci dato Il silenzio degli innocenti e Philadelphia, di John G. Avildsen per Rocky e Karate Kid. Non smetteremo di ringraziare Gianni Boncompagni per aver rivoluzionato la TV italiana, né Aldo Biscardi per aver elevato le chiacchiere sul calcio ad arringhe solenni. Poi ci sono gli immortali Paolo Villaggio e Jerry Lewis che hanno lasciato solchi profondissimi nella nostra cultura.
In questo video tributo vogliamo ricordare queste e le altre celebrità che ci hanno lasciato nel 2017.
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2EfL6Pt
C'è una giovane donna, silenziosa e solitaria ai limiti della patologia, che trova lavoro al reparto controllo qualità di un macello di Budapest.
E c'è un uomo, il direttore finanziario dello stabilimento, solitario anche lui, ma non così tanto, che ha un braccio atrofizzato in seguito a un vecchio incidente.
I due si studiano da lontano, e poi più da vicino quando scoprono, in maniera quasi casuale, di fare entrambi gli stessi identici sogni. Che cosa vorrà dire questa coincidenza?
Sono i protagonisti di Corpo e anima, un film che ha vinto, meritatamente, l'Orso d'Oro per il miglior film al Festival di Berlino 2017, diretto da Ildikó Enyedi, che uscirà nelle nostre sale il prossimo 4 gennaio distribuito da Movies Inspired.
È un film sospeso tra dramma, commedia e surrealismo, che merita tutta la vostra attenzione (leggetela, la nostra recensione di Corpo e anima, se non ci credete) e di cui cui vi proponiamo ora una clip in anteprima esclusiva:
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2lpJhah
We open a round of holiday listening and viewing with Bill Simmons and Sean Fennessey’s conversation (99’38”) at the Ringer with Paul Thomas Anderson about Phantom Thread, the few brief clashes he had with Burt Reynolds on the set of Boogie Nights (1997), working with Adam Sandler on Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and the intense shoot of The Master (2012).
On the new episode of Switchblade Sisters (46’07”), April Wolfe talks with Anna Biller (The Love Witch) about Joan Crawford’s work in David Miller’s Sudden Fear (1992) and “dissect the masterful screenplay, written by famed female screenwriter, Lenore Coffee.”
For Episode 453 of Filmwax Radio (82’60”), Adam Schartoff meets up with Abel Ferrara to “discuss his having transplanted to Rome and his enjoying a family life there” as well as his latest documentary, Piazza Vittorio, and with Matthew Heineman to talk about City of Ghosts, shortlisted for the Oscar for best documentary.
“My mentor Stuart Rosenberg always said you have to make them laugh, cry, or scare the shit out of ’em,” mother! director Darren Aronofsky tells Chris O’Falt on the new episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast (27’35”).
Peter Labuza, host of The Cinephiliacs, talks with Mark Toscano, a film preservationist at the Academy Film Archive, about “his road from the George Eastman House to Canyon Cinema to the Academy, and some of the unique questions and relationships he builds as the canon of experimental cinema continue to expand under his purview. Finally, the two dive into the complex and wondrous world of Chick Strand in Soft Fiction, whose detailing of the sexual experiences and desires of women under her lyrical eye has gained complexity in today's discussions of sex and power.” (113’20”).
“Sleepover, or, The Comfort of Movies” is the theme of the conversation between Andrew Chan, Nellie Killian, Violet Lucca, and Michael Koresky on the latest Film Comment Podcast (71’29”).
On the latest episode of the Projection Booth (236’57”), Beth Accomando and Mike White discuss John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) with guests Karen Fang, Kenneth E. Hall, and Barna William Donovan.
VIEWING
Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin introduce their latest audiovisual essay for the Notebook (17’53”): “In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963) there is an early scene, set in the villa garden of the movie producer Prokosch (Jack Palance), which encapsulates the feeling that the film sits nervously, but knowingly, astride eras—on the one side, the classical era of mise en scène, especially as it had evolved with color and widescreen in the 1950s (say, in the films of Vincente Minnelli); and, on the other side, the modernist era of which Godard himself was such a prominent figurehead. . . . But our analysis of such a rich film should not be a rigid, either/or proposition. It remains for us, almost fifty-five years on from Contempt’s initial release, to fully grasp Godard’s modernist gestures, poised between a fullness of mythic and classical meaning, and the possibilities of a newly fragmented universe of signs.”
And “Moon, Waterfall, Tree, Stream” is the title of the latest entry in Álvarez López and Martin’s series of audiovisual essays for De Filmkrant, “The Thinking Machine” (6’02”).
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” (6’05”) is Philip Brubaker’s essay on Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man (2009).
One of cinema’s great anarchic works celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its release this week, and we’re featuring it on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck. In his scathing 1967 satire Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard follows a bourgeois couple as they travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society reverting to savagery, and—according to the credits—the end of cinema itself. Among the supplemental features accompanying the film on the Channel are a video essay by writer and filmmaker Kent Jones and archival interviews with cast and crew.
Also up this week: two eccentric found-footage works and one of Billy Wilder’s greatest films, paired with the classic romance that influenced it.
If you haven’t tried out FilmStruck, sign up now for your free 14-day trial. And if you’re a student, find out about our special academic discount!
Tuesday’s Short + Feature: Light Is Calling and My Winnipeg
These two films, both beautifully tactile experiments with film form, make brilliant use of found footage. In his eight-minute film Light Is Calling (2004), Bill Morrison cedes the frame to a scene from a 1926 silent film as it appears on a decomposing film reel, in the process crafting a haunting meditation on the ravages of time; in his beguiling “docu-fantasia” My Winnipeg (2007), Guy Maddin mixes archival footage with his own expressionistic black-and-white material to evoke the weird and wonderful world of his hometown.
*****
Friday Night Double Feature: The Apartment and Brief Encounter
With 2018 just around the corner, take a look back at a Hollywood classic whose climax takes place on New Year’s Eve, along with the movie that inspired it. David Lean reached his first great peak with Brief Encounter (1945), starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as refined middle-class lovers who fail to consummate their affair in a borrowed flat when the owner unexpectedly barges in on them. Billy Wilder loved the film but wondered—who’s the guy who owns the apartment? The result: Wilder’s five-time Oscar winner The Apartment (1960), which casts Jack Lemmon as the shlemiel who gives his key to his superiors for their trysts, and Shirley MacLaine as the elevator girl and executive’s mistress he unexpectedly falls in love with.
Dal liceo a una giungla videoludica, quattro ragazzi sono costretti ancora una volta a vincere a Jumanji!
A sneak peek at what we’re working on for 2018.
