28 aprile 2017. Nel bel mezzo di Piazza Vittorio, cuore multietnico della Capitale, si materializza il Duce in persona, risorto proprio nel giorno della sua morte. Dopo un breve smarrimento iniziale ("Sono a Roma o ad Addis Abeba?") Mussolini decide di riprendere in mano le redini del Paese, e invece di venire rinchiuso in un ospedale psichiatrico accanto al matto che si crede Napoleone viene "scoperto" da un aspirante documentarista, Andrea Canaletti, che lo crede un attore perfettamente in parte.
Da bambina, Alice è stata testimone della morte del fratellino sonnambulo, preda di strane visioni. Adesso Alice, felice madre di famiglia, è una dottoressa e si occupa di disturbi del sonno in un ospedale specializzato. Una famiglia molto turbata, i Morgan, viene a chiedere il suo aiuto professionale. Uno dei loro figli è morto nel sonno e un altro, Daniel, cammina e parla nel sonno, a volte urla. Ma tutta la famiglia, compresa la sorellina di Daniel, soffre di turbe del sonno.
No time for a whole movie? 10 Minutes or Less, a weekly updated selection of short videos featured right underneath the spotlight on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, makes it easy to dip in anytime and find a little something to watch. To give you a sense of what this new section offers, we’re sharing On the Nose, an investigation into one of Orson Welles’s favorite actorly aids: prosthetics. The piece, by visual effects artist Randall William Cook and critic and video essayist David Cairns, sniffs out the actor’s motivations for using “a false nose, usually as large as I can find,” to get into character for many of his most towering screen performances.
Fino a mercoledì 7, in v.o. con sottotitoli, il tragicomico affresco americano firmato dall'anglo-irlandese Martin McDonagh, fresco candidato a 7 Premi Oscar.
from Cineteca di Bologna http://ift.tt/2E44e5I
via Cinema Studi
This month, we’re bringing two essential Criterion editions to the United Kingdom: Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 debut feature, Ivan’s Childhood, a haunting depiction of World War II through the eyes of a young boy; and Delmer Daves’s 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma, a psychologically probing tale of a cattle rancher hired to watch over a captured outlaw.
Head over to Amazon to check out our full list of UK releases.
This year’s Skandies countdown has begun. Mike D’Angelo’s twenty-third annual survey of critics he knows and trusts is always one of most interesting of the many best-of-the-year lists to spend time with. There are nine categories, including best scene, which we often get to revisit as a clip, and each day, over period of twenty days, offers a new round. The countdown began on Monday with all the titles and names that have placed twentieth, for example; yesterday, nineteenth; and so it goes. What’s more, D’Angelo places each day’s results within the context of Skandies history.
“Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute), Albert Dupontel’s Au revoir là-haut, Mathieu Amalric’s Barbara, and Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache’s C’est la Vie lead the nominations for the César Awards, France’s equivalent of the Oscars,” reports Variety’s Elsa Keslassy. Have a look at the breakdown by category at Movie On.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has announced that it’ll bestow its “highest accolade,” a Fellowship, to Ridley Scott at the BAFTA awards ceremony on February 18.
For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow@CriterionDaily.
Il nuovo film dei registi di Quasi amici, ambientato durante l'organizzazione e lo svolgimento di una festa di matrimonio, arriva al cinema il 1 febbraio.
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2BGY4mO
Lontanissimo dalle tinte forti dell'Isola o di Moebius, Il prigioniero coreano di Kim Ki-duk parla del presente, parla di una nazione divisa e in perenne stato di guerra, utilizzando - ovviamente a modo suo - la grammatica del thriller. Un autentico thriller dell'anima che la Tucker Film porterà nei cinema italiani il 12 aprile e che trova nell'interpretazione di Ryoo Seung-bum (The Berlin File) tutta la potenza espressiva di cui ha bisogno.
"Fai attenzione: oggi la corrente va verso Sud", lo avvisa una sentinella, ma a fare attenzione, a farne sempre molta, il pescatore Nam Chul-woo ci è abituato. Del resto, non puoi permetterti distrazioni quando abiti in un villaggio della Corea del Nord e ti muovi ogni giorno sulla linea di confine. Confine d'acqua, nel caso di Nam, ed è proprio l'acqua a tradirlo: una delle reti, infatti, si aggroviglia attorno all'elica della sua piccola barca, il motore si blocca e la corrente che «va verso Sud» trascina lentamente (inesorabilmente) il povero Nam in zona nemica...
Si apre così Il prigioniero coreano, l'atteso ritorno di Kim Ki-duk alla narrazione politica. Un dramma che sviluppa e moltiplica il tema del doppio, così com'è doppia la Corea, raccontando intensamente una grande storia collettiva attraverso la storia (l'innocenza) di un singolo individuo. Riuscirà Nam, dopo pressanti interrogatori, a convincere le forze di sicurezza sudcoreane di non essere una spia? Ma soprattutto: riuscirà Nam, dopo il proprio faticoso rilascio, a convincere il potere nordcoreano della propria integrità?
In attesa di scoprire il film al cinema, ve ne mostriamo, in anteprima esclusiva, il poster ufficiale italiano:
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2DMZyhb
“Originality has never been a problem for documentarian Robert Greene, whose films Actress and Kate Plays Christine have freely crossed the lines between fly-on-the-wall realism and overt artificiality,” writes Noel Murray for the Week. “Bisbee ’17 is Greene's masterwork. Shot during one Arizona town’s commemoration of an infamous 1917 labor dispute, the film combines reenactments of the deadly miners’ strike with the wry observations and deeply entrenched political opinions of the townsfolk and actors (some of whom are one and the same). Bisbee ’17 is about what divides Americans, then and now, and also about the ghosts that keep haunting us whenever we default to enmity rather than empathy.”
In the Los Angeles Times,Justin Chang notes that an end was put to the 1917 standoff in Bisbee when a thousand “striking German and Mexican miners were shipped off at gunpoint and left for dead in the New Mexico desert. Greene doesn’t just revisit this traumatic event; he reinhabits it, not only conducting interviews with the town’s present-day residents but also staging a dramatic re-creation of the deportation. It’s a completely rigged, artificial conceit that—as with so many of the completely rigged, artificial conceits in Greene’s work—turns out to be a surprisingly direct route to the truth.”
“In effect,” writes the New Yorker’s Ricard Brody, “Greene is impersonating a Hollywood filmmaker of historical dramas, a Steven Spielberg or an Edward Zwick, in order to film a documentary about the town of Bisbee today and the still-powerful traces of its stifled history—to film a behind-the-scenes and making-of documentary about a film that he would make if he were such a filmmaker. . . . With microcosms of microcosms and reflections of reflections, Greene offers a passionately ambitious, patiently empathetic mapping of modern times.”
Bisbee ’17 “hits a lot of my aesthetic sweet spots,” writes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov: “there are Gerry-esque walking shots for days, and the widescreen framing perfectly fits the expansive landscape tableau. Where Greene’s previous work purposefully set about muddling the boundaries between straight documentary and ambiguous staged narrative, here the lines are clear: observational footage on one hand, completely staged reenactments on the other, including musical numbers.”
“Greene’s aesthetics prove not only arresting, but in sync with his larger depiction of a community wracked by dissonance and in search of unique ways to come to terms with its heritage,” writes Nick Schager for Variety. “Lawrence Everson’s soundtrack is marked by anxiously strident strings and thudding foot-stomping beats. Jarred Alterman’s cinematography, generates unease from gliding pans and interview set-ups that begin before the speaker starts talking and end long after they’ve finished. It’s a formally dexterous portrait of a municipality and its people, using both drama and documentary filmmaking to look in the mirror, and—by finally seeing, and confronting, an ugly truth—discovering a measure of healing and solidarity.”
This is “a singularly American riff on The Act of Killing,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “a fascinating and dream-like mosaic that’s less driven by residual anger than by cockeyed concern, less interested in exhuming the past than in revealing its value to the present.”
“Greene is not interested in streamlining anything,” writes Ben Umstead at ScreenAnarchy. “Just as he is with the residents of Bisbee, he is asking all of us to confront and challenge our notions of cinema, of story, of memory, both personal and collective, and of the very bone marrow of society itself.”
Lauren Wissot interviews Greene for Filmmaker, where you’ll also find cinematographer Jarred Alterman talking about his experience: “Driving through the desert on our first scout, I realized how important the landscape was going to be for this picture. The psychedelic colors of the earth, the dramatic shifts of light and color temperature, turning mountains blue and sagauro cacti fluorescent green was awe inspiring (and terrifying.)”
“In what he describes as a ‘forward’ to this film, director Jan Svankmajer—talking straight to the camera and fluffing his lines repeatedly—admits that he doesn’t actually know what this, apparently his final picture, is about.” So begins Wendy Ide in Screen. “Insect, which was crowdfunded via Indiegogo, is the result of what the veteran animator and filmmaker describes as a process akin to ‘automatic writing,’ and brings a meta twist to the 1922 satirical work, The Insect Play, by the brothers Karel and Josef Capek.”
As Roberto Oggiano explains at Cineuropa, Insect “is a hybrid film that works on various levels: a theatrical company prepares a play with two endings—one is optimistic, the other is pessimistic, the making of the film and the making of the making of. . . . Every actor in the film plays three parts, and each actor is also an insect. No one is exempt from the continuous metamorphosis that we witness, while the film’s surrealism also has a palliative function, [even if] ridiculing power only serves to alleviate its crushing weight.”
“It’s not an adaptation of From the Life of the Insects [aka The Insect Play],” Svankmajer reiterates, talking to Martin Kudlac at Cineuropa. He’s “mentioned Franz Kafka mainly in terms of grasping the film imaginatively, contrary to the allegorical image conjured up by the Capek brothers. Metamorphosis occurs in the film when an actor embodies his or her character perfectly. I think the Capek brothers’ juvenile misanthropy is usable. They were attacked by critics at the time because of it, and they re-wrote the ending under pressure, eventually opting for a more optimistic outcome. I play on their meagerness in the film.”
For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow@CriterionDaily.
Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885–1967) is one of the least appreciated of the early directors. His films are much better known than he is; despite the fact that he made at least eight pictures of major significance, there have been only two book-length studies of his work in English, both of them now out of print—compare this with the masses of text on his Weimar-cinema contemporaries Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. And yet he brought Greta Garbo to international fame in her second starring role (TheJoyless Street, 1925), made a strange and evocative attempt to put Freud’s ideas into cinematic form (Secrets of a Soul, 1926), made Louise Brooks into an icon (with Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both 1929), and directed a raucously effective adaptation of The Threepenny Opera in 1931 (although the play’s author and composer, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, both sued him for his trouble).
He also made The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), which in its obsessive fascination with reflective surfaces is one of the most beautiful silent films—and which is also, thanks to its screenplay, one of the silliest. It’s hard to get a bead on Pabst. He made every sort of picture—fables, fantasies, historical reconstructions, spy thrillers, comedies, sex farces, literary adaptations, mountain sagas (he codirected the Leni Riefenstahl star vehicle TheWhite Hell of Pitz Palu, 1929)—and worked in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and even, briefly and bitterly, the United States (the widely derided A Modern Hero, 1934). Despite his international career, he made the fateful decision to return to the Axis states in 1938, ostensibly to take care of family business in Austria, which did not assist his reputation abroad (although he later tried to repair it by directing both the first Hitler-in-the-bunker drama, The Last Ten Days, and one of the first plot-against-Hitler movies, Jackboot Mutiny, both 1955).
Perhaps the trouble with Pabst was that he was a purely visual filmmaker. He was at his best in the silent era and made little of note after 1931. Even at his peak, he often seems to have given insufficient consideration to the quality of his screenplays, and by all accounts he was deaf to dialogue. He might be seen, therefore, as a directorial counterpart to those stars whose careers plummeted with the coming of sound, were it not for his first sound film, 1930’s Westfront 1918, along with 1931’s Kameradschaft (Comradeship), both of which employ the medium brilliantly. They use sound in ways that had no parallel at that time, in fact, since sound recorders on a set were then generally sealed in a booth, while Pabst insisted on using a mobile soundproof case; he and his colleagues also took an adventurous approach to verisimilitude in the sound editing. The results are often eerie: the blasts and the uncanny silence between them in Westfront 1918; the trapped miners frantically tapping on pipes in Kameradschaft. Pabst was fully in command of his senses; what he lacked, perhaps, was language.
Such was the pace of Pabst’s production that although Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft were made in adjacent years, they were separated by The Threepenny Opera as well as a picture called Scandalous Eva. You could nevertheless see them as twins; if they were the only two films by Pabst you ever saw, you would have a fairly clear notion of his auteurial stamp: men in groups; societies in stress; tight, enclosed spaces; bitter, foolish, ordinary heroism. That he nevertheless doesn’t seem to have ever made another film quite like them further strengthens the idea that they are paired, one idea in two parts. One of them is a war picture, the other a mining-disaster story, but both involve the two warring sides of Germany and France. Since the war in question is the First World War, fought in the trenches, it follows that both films contain digging, explosions, buckling walls and collapsing ceilings, chest-deep pools of muddy water. Since the stories are about group efforts, the movies are ensemble productions and their actors are character players; these are not star vehicles. And they are action pictures: the dialogue is minimal and instrumental, and social relations are summarily accounted for, often wordlessly.
Westfront 1918 came out almost simultaneously with Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which it resembles in many outward particulars: it is set on the German side; it focuses on a tight unit; it is structured so that a character’s furlough falls halfway through the film and separates everything into before and after; it kills or maims all its principals by the end. The differences between the two films, meanwhile, are instructive. Milestone’s picture, a huge international hit, had Hollywood financing and Hollywood equipment; its cast, including extras, ran to the hundreds, whereas that of Westfront 1918 is in the dozens. Furthermore, All Quiet serves up moral lessons and engages its characters in philosophical discussions. There are no discussions of much moment in Westfront 1918, and its only formulated message comes in its very last shot. And Pabst’s movie is much smaller-scale, having disturbed maybe a couple of acres of ground and demanded only three or four sets to be built, yet its setting is more viscerally credible than that of the Milestone picture, perhaps because it is that much more intimate. And, unlike a Hollywood movie rigged with moments of comedy and romance to appeal to the broadest swath of viewers, it does not let up for long from its bleak intensity of purpose.
That is to say, it includes both romance and comedy, although neither of them takes up much time or ends up being much fun. Westfront 1918 allows only fleeting instances of ordinary human emotion to point toward hope before summarily obliterating them. The major one of these emotions is fellowship—the film’s title could just as easily also be Kameradschaft. The unit’s composition follows the now-familiar principle, then perhaps in its infancy, of apparent ill assortment: thrown together by large impersonal forces, characters who might have been taken from all four corners of the potential audience find themselves drawn by battle into a bond that is nearly familial in its adhesive strength. Thus we have the wide-eyed student (Hans-Joachim Moebis), the crusty but good-hearted prole known as the Bavarian (Fritz Kampers, who appeared in more than 250 movies between 1913 and his death in 1950), the cleft-chinned unwilling hero Karl (Gustav Diessl, a Pabst standby), and the lieutenant (Claus Clausen), who struggles all through the picture to keep his agreeable, rubber-mouthed comedian’s face in a cast of Nordic severity. They each wear the outward signs of their dramatic and social rank, until such nuances are dissolved by the leveling imminence of death.
The characters’ four arcs proceed differently: The student loses his virginity both literally and, in the trenches, figuratively. Karl, the everyman who is accorded an actual name, is also accorded an actual, ongoing life—a spouse, a mother, and a Berlin apartment—outside the war, but the strain and privation of that life destroy him even before bullets finish him off. The Bavarian, who is perhaps a career grunt, needs no more than a song and a laugh to preserve his emotional balance in the midst of devastation, but that of course proves insufficient. The lieutenant, who for most of the picture appears to be less a person than a military rank, unleashes all his bottled-up humanity when he finally goes floridly to pieces at the close. None of their ends is explicitly foreshadowed, and yet we know early on that nothing will turn out well. Even before the student’s fate is sealed by his night of love, Pabst, to make doubly certain that we get it, has him walk past an improvised sawmill where soldiers are turning out wooden crosses for graves by the hundreds.
Westfront 1918 alternates fleeting pleasure with durable horror in a rhythm that gradually abbreviates the former and extends the latter. The strangest interlude occurs a bit past a third of the way through, when suddenly the picture takes leave of the action for an entire music-hall performance at the soldiers’ canteen, including a short-skirted chanteuse, musical clowns, and a military band, an extravaganza that occupies a mere seven minutes of screen time but feels much longer. None of this is presented to us from any particular point of view. We are simply there, in the audience, taking in the tawdry, cheerless professionalism of the routines as if the bit were a simple entr’acte, devoid of authorial signposting—as if we were soldiers who needed a break, whatever form that break might assume.
Death, when it arrives, is incidental and almost low-key. The claustrophobia of the trenches, with their rivers of mud and cascades of dirt; the intensity of the shelling, which might come from any direction (our heroes are besieged early on by friendly fire); the suddenness of the appearance of French helmets from over the top or from the rear—these are dramatic and unsettling but ultimately have nothing on the single rifle shot that arrives invisibly. The focus through most of the picture is relentlessly on the up-close and immediate, perhaps to counter the effects of the martial and patriotic rhetoric that by 1930 veiled official memory of the war in Germany. Pabst limits his forays into symbolism to the very end of Westfront 1918, when an improvised field hospital in a church supplies it all: a man who realizes he is blind, another man who finds that he has no legs, a toppled crucifix the Christ figure on which looks like all the other bodies, a collective admission of guilt voiced by one of the four leads, an invasion of the soundtrack by organ notes.
Westfront 1918 does a signal job of conveying the fear, monotony, dirt, and exhaustion of the trenches, the boredom and uncertainty so poisonous that men would risk their lives just to leave the holes in which they were stuck. The camera is stationary in the trenches but runs wobbling along the surface up top with the soldiers. You see the blackout at night and the whiteout in daytime, hear the unsettling clicks and whirs that fill the silences between blasts. The process takes its toll on the viewer, who has been accorded ninety-six grimly visceral minutes of the outward signs of war. What the movie does not do is take any larger view. The men at the front are being butchered on both sides; at home, the people starve. No one, apparently, is to blame. War is a natural disaster, an act of God, though perhaps it could be alleviated if only we learned to love one another.
Luc Sante’s most recent book is The Other Paris. He is also the author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings.
Anche se lo vedremo apparire in Avengers: Infinity War, al 25 aprile al cinema, il ritorno da protagonista di Ant Man nei cinema italiani è previsto tra 7 mesi, nel mese di agosto 2018. Ma già da oggi è posibile vedere le prime immagini del nuovo cinecomic con Paul Rudd nei panni del più piccolo dei supereoi Marvel.
Ecco, infatti, il primissimo trailer in italiano di Ant-Man and The Wasp.
Il sequel diretto nuovamente da Peyton Reed, vede tra i suoi altri protagonisti Michael Douglas (che ritorna nei panni del Dr. Hank Pym), Evangeline Lilly, in quelli di The Wasp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Walton Goggins, Judy Greer, Michael Peña e Laurence Fishburne.
Ecco la trama ufficiale del film:
Dall'universo cinematografico Marvel arriva Ant-Man and The Wasp, nuovo capitolo con protagonista l'eroe con la sorprendente capacità di rimpicciolirsi. Dopo le vicende di Captain America: Civil War, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) deve affrontare le conseguenze della sua scelta di essere un supereroe ma anche un padre. Mentre si dà da fare per conciliare la sua vita famigliare con le sue responsabilità da Ant Man, deve confrontarsi con Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) e Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) su una nuova missione della massima urgenza. Scott deve indossare nuovamente la sua tuta, imparare a volare con The Wasp e insieme scoprire un segreto del loro passato.
Ecco il teaser trailer del film anche nella sua versione originale:
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2rMXiVI
Si chiama Hereditary ed è un film horror diretto da Ari Aster che è stato presentato al Sundance che si è concluso da pochi giorni. Esattamente come avvenuto tre anni fa con The Witch, anche quello prodotto dalla A24, se ne parla come di un capolavoro del genere, di un horror che segnerà un'epoca e farà scuola.
Interpretato da Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd e Gabriel Byrne, Hereditary racconta la storia di una donna che, con la sua famiglia, inizia a scoprire terrificanti segreti riguardanti la sua famigli dopo la morte della madre. Quelli della A24 hanno deciso di diffondere in fretta un trailer che, secondo noi, fa sperare assai bene per tutto il film. Reggetevi forte.
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2Gwr5W6
With Phantom Thread opening in the UK on Friday, Screen’s Andreas Wiseman gets Daniel Day-Lewis talking about working with Paul Thomas Anderson. “There’s nothing mad you can do that he won’t encourage you to be madder. I love that. You are always so close to the line of chaos, which you have to be for it to be alive. There’s so much misunderstanding about preparation. You prepare for a long time, of course, if you are lucky, but the only reason you prepare is so that you don’t have a clue what you’re doing when you start, and to have the confidence not to have a clue what’s going to happen. I think Paul loves that element of risk.”
Talking to Anderson for Little White Lies,Adam Woodward brings up Day-Lewis’s retirement. “My take is just to embrace whatever it is he feels he needs to do,” says Anderson, “but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t secretly have something in the back of my mind hoping that we’ll do something else together.” As for himself, “I fucking love doing this. I can’t see myself losing that love. I feel so fulfilled by it. There’s only two places I want to be and that’s with my family or making a movie.”
Earlier this month, Anderson went on “an online publicity tour, dropping into Reddit for an AMA” and “fielding Twitter questions under the #AskPTA hashtag, and generally giving ordinary moviegoers a chance to ask one of the most obsessively studied American filmmakers of his generation whatever they want,” wrote Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the A.V. Club, noting that “there are some minor insights scattered throughout Anderson’s terse, good-sport answers, from his favorite characters in his own films (Magnolia’s Claudia Wilson Gator and Jim Kurring, Punch-Drunk Love’s Barry Egan, The Master’s Freddie Quell and Peggy Dodd) to his preferred lenses for close-ups (between 50 mm and 85 mm with spherical lenses, either a 75 mm or a 100 mm with anamorphics) to his memories of the young David Foster Wallace, who was Anderson’s English professor before he found fame as a writer. (‘He looked at us like we were all failing him . . . sweetly.’).”
MORE INTERVIEWS
The Guardian’s launched a new podcast, The Start, in which artists discuss their beginnings. The first guest is Sofia Coppola, who talks about her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides (1999): “I remember my Dad telling me that your movie’s never as good as the dailies—everything shot that day—and never as terrible as the first rough cut. When I saw the first rough cut, I thought: ‘Oh no, this is terrible, what have I done? I’ve talked all these people into letting me make a movie and it’s terrible.’ Then, little by little, we pieced it together and made it into a film.”
Earlier this month, John Boorman turned eighty-five, and for Little White Lies,Matt Thrift talks with him about working with Lee Marvin on Point Blank (1967), with Toshiro Mifune on Hell in the Pacific (1968), and with Marcello Mastroianni on Leo the Last (1970), about making Deliverance (1972), his friendship with Stanley Kubrick (“He was so cut off”), and about why Excalibur (1981) resonates with him so deeply and personally.
“This year, two of the finest performances by women were not recognized in many of the awards shows at all,” Meryl Streep tells Tribeca’s Matthew Eng, “and either of them merited walking away with every prize out there: Annette Bening in Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool and Cynthia Nixon in A Quiet Passion. Incomparable performances, right up there with the ones that are winning everything. Sometimes momentum trumps everything, and life and show business are never entirely fair.”
Quincy Jones’s life has been “punctuated by so many disparate encounters and achievements and circumstances that it is hard to believe they are the experiences of a single man,” writes Chris Heath at the top of his interview for GQ. “There is a lot of talking to do. . . . He tells me about all the celebrations planned for his eighty-fifth year: a Netflix documentary, a prospective ten-part TV biopic he hopes will star Donald Glover, a star-studded TV event on CBS that he tells me Oprah will host.” But first, a look back. To breakfasts with Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra’s pasta, downthumbing Spielberg’s first prototype for E.T., dinners with Elon Musk, and that’s before the conversation turns to music.
“I love South Park,” legendary producer Norman Lear tells Vulture’s Matt Zoller Seitz, who, hearing this from “one of the most important sitcom creators in TV history,” seems a bit surprised: “Those guys are kind of libertarian anarchists with some reactionary tendencies,” says Seitz. “Politically, it’s diametrically opposed to what you believe.” Lear: “It’s doing what All in the Family did in the sense that it’s letting characters express these inappropriate thoughts that people can then argue about.”
Maureen Ryan introduces a roundtable for Variety: “On a sunny day in Beverly Hills almost exactly a decade after the show’s debut, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan met up with Peter Gould, Thomas Schnauz, Moira Walley-Beckett, Sam Catlin, George Mastras and Gennifer Hutchison, the core team of writers who cooked up the saga of Walt, Jesse and their memorable friends, families and criminal associates. During an hour-long conversation, they shared memories of the show’s early days, its characters’ intense journeys and how it all came together in that spectacular final season.” And the conversation’s laced with video clips.
“I remember reading this classic phrase, ‘after all, the human brain is just a computer made of meat,’” Don Hertzfeldt tells Sonia Shechet Epstein at Sloan Science & Film, “and whether or not that’s even remotely accurate, it’s spooky and interesting enough to have really stuck with me over the years. So much of World of Tomorrow is that one little weird theory, and a few others, taken to really over-the-top places. Non-fiction is usually where I find the best little threads of inspiration like that–you don’t need very much.”
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Charlotte Rampling tells Screen’s Geoffrey Macnab that her experiences working with Luchino Visconti and Woody Allen were quite positive—and that she’s still proud of her work on Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), a film of “great beauty” and a “tortured, strange, decadent love story.”
“When I was younger, I’d made fewer films but I had a lot of advice to give other people,” Paolo Sorrentino tells Bénédicte Prot at Cineuropa. “Now that I’ve made more films, I’m less certain. Over time, you have more of a desire to make films than to talk about them.”
“I was on an airplane and Ethan [Coen] was sitting behind me,” Michael Shannon tells Anna Peele in GQ. “He said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said, ‘I’m shooting Waco.’ And he’s like, ‘And playing Koresh?’ I’m like, ‘Damn! Why does everybody always ask me if I’m playing Koresh?’ I forgot for a second I was talking to Ethan Coen.” Peele: “Waco is launching the Paramount Network. Do you care about stuff like that?” Shannon: “Yes. I hope to launch several networks before I die. Look what it did for Rupert Murdoch.”
“Everything I am doing creatively right now seems to point to the awareness of a lack of self,” Jim Carrey tells Rüdiger Sturm at the Talks. “What are we? Why are we here? And the answer to both of those questions is: nothing, no reason, as far as I am concerned.”
For the New York Times,Michael Cooper talks with Jane Birkin about living and working with Serge Gainsbourg and singing the songs he wrote for her even after she’d left him.
In the third and final part of their conversation at Vague Visages, Adam Nayman, talking with Manuela Lazic, brings up the question of “whether or not a critic’s role is to ‘solve’ works—to use writing as a skeleton key to open them up and then, after taking inventory, lock the door behind us.” But “it seems like a contradiction that the things I love most about cinema—sensations of being unnerved, surprised, made helpless, manipulated, taken out of one’s own immediate reality—are the same ones I’m compelled to try to ‘explain’ in my own work, out of respect, of course, for the intelligent design that went into generating them.”
FilmStruck has six questions for Justine Bateman: “I was really weaned on metaphor-heavy, conceptual films and honestly, it’s the only type of film I truly enjoy watching.”
“What Secret Cinema really represents for me is an exploration of how we can use storytelling as a way of reimagining reality.” Fabien Riggall is the founder and creative director of Secret Cinema, and Lucy Marx has interviewed him for Bright Lights Film Journal.
LISTENING
On the new episode of The Director’s Cut, Michael Mann (Heat,Blackhat) talks with Ridley Scott about All the Money in the World (36’16”).
WTF host Marc Maron gets Rita Moreno talking “about the ups and downs of her seventy-year career as a singer, dancer, and actor, from the highs of working with people like Jack Nicholson and Gene Kelly to the lows of racial typecasting and sexual harassment. They also talk about relief work in Puerto Rico and why Norman Lear's reboot of One Day at a Time is Rita's dream project.” (73’12”).
We’ve got two episodes of Filmwax Radio to catch up with. On the first (77’50”), Adam Schartoff talks with Mark Webber and his mother, Cheri Honkala, about the film he directed and she features in, Flesh and Blood; and with Joe Purdy and Amber Rubarth, singer-songwriters who appear in David Heinz’s American Folk. And on the second (58’19”), Schartoff spends the entire hour with Henry Jaglom.
Preparatevi: dopo 80 anni lui è ancora tra noi
