Per un ragazzino riservato come Terry, trascorrere le vacanze estive nello straordinario parco divertimenti della nonna Mary era un'esperienza incredibile. Con la sua fervida immaginazione poteva viaggiare in terre incantate e incontrare personaggi psichedelici, alberi che camminano, palloncini parlanti, orchidee che bisbigliano e draghi pasticcioni. E chissà, magari anche qualche principessa... Ora però la nonna Mary non c'è più e il parco rischia di chiudere. Triste e sconsolato, Terry non riesce a staccarsi dal ricordo dei vecchi tempi e dei racconti strambi della nonna.
Every awards season, as nominees promote their films, it’s typical to hear the same stories and sound bytes repeated from interview to interview, an understandable result of the relentless publicity circuit that fuels major campaigns. But one discussion that stood out to us this year happened at an event gathering all five of the Directors Guild of America Award nominees for the organization’s own best-director award: Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), who went on to win; Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird); Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri); Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk); and Jordan Peele (Get Out). Clocking in at a leisurely and consistently engaging three hours, the video is a reminder of the craft, passion, and on-the-fly decision-making that goes into the direction of any movie, regardless of budget or scale.
Thanks to expert moderating from Emmy Award–winning director Jeremy Kagan, the conversation favors depth and detail over scope, digging into specific aesthetic choices and on-set preferences that distinguish one artist’s working style from another. The result is a must-see for any aspiring filmmaker, with generous helpings of inspiration and practical wisdom. To cap off the season, which winds down this Sunday with the ninetieth annual Academy Awards—all the panel participants are up for major Oscars—we’ve compiled just a few of the most illuminating and useful moments (slightly edited for your reading pleasure) from the discussion.
FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN
Martin McDonagh (00:18:22): When I’m writing the script, I’m not thinking about it in terms of visuals. It’s usually in terms of character and dialogue and plot. Once it’s finished, it’s a whole separate process to go away on my own and storyboard the whole thing—literally every scene . . . And [the storyboards are] really terrible, and everyone laughs at me, apart from the DP . . . It’s good shorthand for us both, because he’ll kind of know what I’m trying to get at. And he’ll come up with something that will save having to do something in three images when you can do it in one.
Guillermo del Toro (00:23:40): What I try to do is not write anything that cannot be proven by image or sound . . . Oftentimes you read screenplays that are written in a literary way and function on the page, but—how do I do this? . . . I try to be specific on the images and describe the objects . . . [The Shape of Water is] a 19.3 million dollar movie. I couldn’t do tank work, and I remembered—I used it once on Hellboy—an old theatrical technique called dry for wet, and I decided that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to puppeteer everything on the screen—wires for everything, open ceiling on the set—and I’m going to have ten to twelve puppeteers moving the objects in front of the camera.
Greta Gerwig (00:29:00): I would say my movie is almost entirely on the page. Even the cuts are on the page. I think it’s the way my mind works. I need to know what the rhythm is, in an editorial sense, on the page already. I don’t like finding it in the edit in the way that I think is a useful tool for someone else. I like to know how we’re going to cut from this to this and what that rhythmically will do to the words. For me, even though cinema is obviously a visual language, words matter a great deal, and the way they sound and the way they interact with the editing . . . I love in movies when it feels like the opening of the movie is the entire movie in a scene . . . I wanted the language, both visually and literally, to be simple and plain but also have the ability to be poetic in its own plainness.
Jordan Peele (00:36:37): An earlier draft of [the opening scene of Get Out] had a lot more going on. Originally, there was a white family having their dinner and having a conversation about Disneyland. And this incident happens outside their house that they never realize. I was basically trying to do too much. I was trying to start the movie with the protagonist that you expect a horror movie to start with, and then have the black guy who’s walking down the street—to hopefully put the audience in the position of fearing him first, before we realize that he’s the actual protagonist. I decided to strip it way down because I felt that the first scene in a movie is very important, and it’s important not to do too much. What you’re trying to get across is a feeling, and in the case of a thriller, you’re trying to offer the promise of what is to come. Ultimately it became much more important for the audience to be immersed in the experience of being a black man walking down the street in a white neighborhood. And I felt that out of the gate I could get everybody on that page and feel that feeling of, oh shit, we are the wrong person to be in this neighborhood that is, through other eyes, idyllic and welcoming.
Christopher Nolan (00:45:25): I started working in no-budget films—my first film [Following] cost 6,000 dollars—so I wrote only what I knew exactly how I could film, I wrote exactly what I had access to, I wrote to this apartment or this restaurant where I knew I could get a couple hours’ shooting time. And then as budgets got bigger and as I progressed as a director to larger things, there came a point when I started to think I have to not do that, I have to sit down and write things that I don’t know how to do. I have to write things that are going to challenge all my heads of department, that are going to challenge me.
THE ART OF CASTING
Christopher Nolan (01:00:48): On Dunkirk, we got to do it in a very old-fashioned way, because we were looking for unknowns in the leads. It was people who didn’t have agents. We were looking at thousands of people on tape and hundreds of people in the room . . . As we started to home in on our key choices, we’d bring them in in groups and have them read the scene together and then try different combinations of them, have them take different parts, look at that combination. And over a period of weeks we gradually settled on the combination that we liked . . . In the case of Dunkirk, you’re looking very specifically for a visual sense of empathy, you’re looking for a performer who you can immediately care about and worry about. When you see him for the first time in the film, when he’s getting shot at and is reacting to it, you have to understand immediately that this is not somebody who’s going to go out and win the war single-handedly. This is a human being, a kid, who you need to care about.
Jordan Peele (01:04:13): My [casting process] is very much focused on the comfort of the actor . . . Having been an actor and going to so many of these awful, brutal, sadomasochistic events [auditions], it’s very important to me to engage in an actor in such a way where even if they don’t get the role, they feel like this experience was worth something and that we both achieved something, even if it’s just in that room. I had the benefit on this film of allowing several auditions to go on longer than they probably should have . . . What I found for this movie is every character has a duality at play. So the thing I was looking for out of every performer was that they possessed both sides of that duality . . . We did this movie in twenty-three days, we had no time, but the whole illusion I like to present to actors is we have all the time in the world to get this right.
Greta Gerwig (01:14:13): A lot of the cast I worked on collecting was from New York, and I cast them early, and part of that was I wanted these opportunities to get everybody together, to get them to meet, to get them to exchange numbers, to be connected to each other . . . I think so much of acting work is laying down sediment, and your unconscious works on it a lot. Of course I like rehearsal but I also think there’s a way in which these things grow invisibly, so I tried to cast as much as possible early . . . I avoid auditions that feel like performances, because I don’t want to see all you’ve got. I want to see the beginning of what it will be. Because if you can give me all you’ve got right now, it’s not as interesting to me as if it’s a sketch, if it’s an opening gambit for what this relationship will be.
Guillermo del Toro (01:25:48): In the case of The Shape of Water, I wrote the parts for most of [the actors]. The work we do is symphonic, and one terrible note is one terrible note in the symphony—it doesn’t matter if it’s a part with three lines, it can actually ruin the experience of the movie. Mostly, I cast the eyes. We spend most of the time during a movie seeing a character see: see each other, see a thing. If you align the eyes of Octavia Spencer, Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, and Michael Shannon, you have a symphony of notes, completely different ways of looking at the world. Then the second thing I look for is listening. The misconception that exists somehow is that a great actor delivers great lines. But a great actor listens to great lines and looks at great acting . . . A really great actor can be really wrong for a part. So it’s not about their ability, it’s their suitability.
Martin McDonagh (01:34:27): Sam Rockwell’s and Frances [McDormand’s] parts were written for them, and I think about six or seven of the actors I’d either worked with before or I really wanted to work with. So most of the casting for Three Billboards was in the much smaller roles. Frances’s daughter was a very tricky character because there’s only one scene in the movie. She was a character I didn’t want to paint as this perfect victim. It had to be someone who was a completely real teenager who fights with her mom all the time. We saw Kathryn [Newton], who’s in the film, and she was great, but I felt like there were a couple of other colors that I needed to see . . . She nailed completely the anger, and I guess I just wondered if there was a hint of something else. When I saw a couple of other actors who were all that, who were all the softness and the light, I went back and had a look at Kathryn again. I just hinted that there could be a touch of that, and she showed that brilliantly too. Even in a scene like that, it needed a touch of comedic timing.
SURPRISES, ACCIDENTS, AND COMPROMISES
Christopher Nolan (02:20:40): I make complicated, technical films, so they have to be carefully planned. But the structure that we’ve come up with is to plan the things that I have to plan quite carefully and then allow within that freedom for serendipity . . . We start at seven in the morning with just a rehearsal, and I don’t tell anyone where to stand or what to do. We just say let’s see what this is going to be. The challenge for me over the years has been to find a way to be able to always do that—because that’s how I started off, making films where you just have a 16 mm camera and some actors, and you wouldn’t know where you were going to shoot until the day before . . . I loved that, and I always wanted to carry on doing that. The bigger the film, the less people are willing to accept that as a working methodology. They see it as evasion . . . I let everybody know at the beginning of the film that we shoot whatever the weather. As a result I’ve developed a reputation for being very lucky with the weather. And I’m not—we’ve shot in some of the most appalling conditions. But everybody understands that upfront, that we shoot up to the point where the safety officer says the winds are too high, or there’s lightning and you have to shut down. Because something magical, visually, will come from that.
Jordan Peele (02:25:35): We were consistently thrown curveballs, and very early on I’d made this decision that the curveballs, the problems, the walls that get put up in front of my face, were gifts . . . Every time the forces that be tell me no, you can’t have this, is an opportunity to make a stronger choice than I originally had. You realize that you can’t have forty background performers at this party. I pictured this big party where you get lost—we probably ended up with something like sixteen. To me I’m like, how do I make that work to my advantage? So it becomes about placing [the actors] in a very choreographed way, so we get this uneasy sense that everybody who’s supposed to be just acting normal around the party is actually following some sort of script. If I immediately went, well shit, there’s the movie, and if I can’t have this huge party, that’s not what I pictured . . . I wouldn’t be open to this idea of this contrived placement of these people that ended up feeling very creepy and eerie—and indescribably so.
Greta Gerwig (02:27:53): It was a limited budget, so a lot of unexpected things happened just in pre-production. With smaller movies, there’s this feeling of let’s just get people shooting, because I’ve been part of so many movies that have just fallen apart. There were days when it was just me and the AD and my DP, and there was no one else driving the ship but us.You have to be a bit crazily relentless about it because there is no reason it should exist, on some level. I always think about the French word for director, réalisateur—it always felt to me to be a more accurate description. It’s not that it’s just in front of you and it’s waiting to be instructed; it must be realized. And it has to be realized by you . . . Once we were shooting there were unexpected things that happened, but getting up to that point where this train is moving, everything before that moment was “Oh God, we’ve just lost this,” or “This fell through.” Every day.
Guillermo del Toro (02:30:15): When you’ve been doing it for long enough, you understand that there are two levels of artistry in what we do. One of them is to create worlds that are color-coded, shape-coded . . . but the second half of our craft is orchestrating the accident. I often quote the Zen saying “The obstacle is a path.” You are the one who is holding all of the strands—narrative, financial, artistic, visual . . . [In one scene] I scouted the exterior of the theater. I wanted to do a crane. There was a lamppost that the city would refuse to move. We had only one night for everything, with very complicated cranes, and everything started going wrong. We had a drone shot, and the drone started flying away in the wind to the next city. We improvised the whole night, but the main point of improvisation came when Shannon, who is an amazing actor, neglected to tell us that he didn’t drive!
Martin McDonagh (02:36:24): This is more about me being a bastard with the script and [wanting to stick] to it, and when that didn’t happen once. There’s a little scene with Frances and Woody Harrelson where he coughs blood in her face. In the script he says sorry, and she says, “I know, I know,” and then goes out. But in one of the takes, because they were so connected and empathetic with each other, she said, “I know, baby.” She only did that once in a scene, and it was just purely a Frances moment, and it’s the only moment in the film where there’s a proper, gentle, humane connection between them.
A few days ago, we ran an essay here by Pico Iyer on Satyajit Ray’s The Hero (1966), followed by Meheli Sen’s comments on Uttam Kumar’s performance within the context of his stardom. Iyer has more to say and, writing for the New York Review of Books, he recalls the first time he saw Ray’s meditation on “the place of conscience.” The Hero “is anchored at every moment in Kumar’s performance, and to me it’s an astonishment. Everything about his soft hands as the film begins, his designer socks in two-tone shoes, his baby-faced insouciance, gives us a sense of spoiled entitlement; here is a man who thinks nothing of decorating his home with large, framed glossies of himself. Yet the beauty of Kumar’s Arindam Mukherjee is that he has the capacity to surprise us, again and again.”
With the retrospective Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group now on at MUBI in the U.S. and UK, Michael Sicinski suggests that it’s “possible that time and history have caught up with the Dziga Vertov Group, in the sense that two of the discourses that permeate the films—socialism and fascism—are now once again very much on the table. This is not to say that ‘Godardian pedagogy’ will find its rightful place as the aesthetic mode of the 21st century, but the films’ handmade, declamatory style does fit nicely with the age of rampant amateur media production and a younger generation for whom activism and technology are entirely coextensive.”
Also in the Notebook, Sean Gilman writes about “the busiest movie-going time in the Chinese-speaking world,” Lunar New Year week, which this year “was the biggest ever, almost doubling the box office take from last year.” He focuses on three blockbusters, Soi Cheang's The Monkey King 3, Raman Hui’s Monster Hunt 2, Chen Sicheng’s Detective Chinatown 2, and Dante Lam’s Operation Red Sea.
In his new “Queer & Now & Then” column for Film Comment,Michael Koresky turns to 1968 and Paul Newman’s feature debut as a director, Rachel, Rachel, starring his wife, Joanne Woodward. It’s “an American studio movie that takes a woman’s sexual liberation as its subject matter, still a rare focus fifty years later.”
For its February 1993 issue, Spin gave free reign to the writers, cast, and crew of Saturday Night Live. Twenty-five year’s later, the magazine has posted highlights from that issue, among them:
“I love Paula Clarke Bain’s regular look at the art of the comedy index,” writes Daniel Benneworth-Gray. “The latest, on Richard Ayoade’s The Grip of Film, is particularly good.”
INTERVIEWS
Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino “is somewhat similar to me in that he often uses cinema rather than reality as the point of departure for his inspiration,” Bernardo Bertolucci tells Variety’s Nick Vivarelli. “There are many directors who use reality as their basis. Luca’s reality is in the films that precede him, the cinema that he loves. So since he loves my body of work, it’s possible that he has taken it as the basis of his reality. For him, reality is cinema.”
Also in Variety,Henry Chu talks with Lina Wertmüller, who, in 1977, became the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for best direction for Seven Beauties (1975). “Although she once declared that ‘there’s no difference between male and female directors,’ Wertmüller admires the work of women like Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow, who eased her loneliness in the Oscar director nom club in 1994 and 2010, respectively. . . . Now nearly ninety and still wearing those white-rimmed glasses, Wertmüller expounds at length on her career, her pioneering nomination, the #MeToo movement and her most recent job: directing an opera.”
“It’s much easier to explode than implode, no?” asks Daniela Vega in the middle of Phil Concannon’s interview her, the star of Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, for Little White Lies.
Stephen Saito talks with Travis Wilkerson about Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? and about “the demands of telling such a deeply personal and painful history live and ultimately adapting it for a more traditional screen experience to the reaction to the project within his family and the conversations the film has started everywhere it’s played.”
BERLINALE 2018
Contributors to Sight & Sound look back on this year’s Berlinale and write a paragraph or so on a favorite film plus a few more words each on another handful.
At Filmmaker,Celluloid Liberation Front writes about Christian Petzold’s Transit, Ruth Beckerman’s Waldheims Walzer, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, André Gil Mata’s Drvo, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Infinite Football, Mitsuo Sato’s Yama – Attack to Attack, and Lola Arias’s Theatre of War.
Highlights for Bert Rebhandl, writing for frieze, include Transit, Morgan Fisher’s Another Movie,An Elephant Sitting Still, and Adina Pintilie’s Golden Bear-winner, Touch Me Not.
Film Comment’s posted two interviews, Jordan Cronk’s with Petzold and Yonca Tulu’s with Dovlatov director Alexey German Jr.
And writing for Another Gaze, Rebecca Liu argues that Yan Mingming’s debut feature, Girls Always Happy, premiering in the Panorama section, “offers a searing and unapologetic look into how women are habitually positioned into mutually contradictory roles, and how their resultant emotional, material, and even existential dependence on men—acutely felt in modern China—place them in constant competition amongst other women in a way that can engender pettiness, smallness, and jealousy.”
IN THE WORKS
Apple’s ordered up a ten-episode series, an as-yet-untitled half-hour psychological thriller, from M. Night Shyamalan, reports Nellie Andreeva.
And from Deadline’s Erik Pedersen comes word of an upcoming Netflix comedy special, Steve Martin and Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life.
OBITS
From Movie City News comes word of the passing of Hugo Santiago, who, at nineteen, moved from his home in Argentina to France, where he became an assistant director to Robert Bresson. Ten years later, in 1969, he made his first feature, Invasión, co-written with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges. They’d collaborate again on Les Aultres (1974). In 1979, he made Écoute voir . . . with Catherine Deneuve. Santiago appeared in Raúl Ruiz’s short film Colloque de chiens (1977) and narrated Ruiz’s Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983). Santiago was the “first filmmaker Gilles Deleuze wrote about,” notes George Clark. “I was fortunate to be able to meet him and talk about his work and cinema and his with Borges and Bioy-Casares in September 2008.” Hugo Santiago was seventy-eight.
Locarno artistic director Carlo Chatrian alerts us to the passing of Angela Ricci Lucchi. In 2014, the Harvard Film Archive presented an evening of her work with Yervant Gianikian, calling them “masters of the assemblage of found footage film, returning over and over again to images from the first decades of the 20th century, with a special attention to images of war and colonialism.”
MoMA presented a retrospective of their work in 2009: “The pair’s signature style often involves the manipulation of rare footage through re-photographing, selectively hand-tinting, and altering film speed to produce a final work of a distinctly otherworldly quality. The stunning visuals Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi create—and often enhance with original music—unravel ideologies and conflicts in a given moment in history.” And Marco Scotini wrote about their work for last year’s documenta 14: “De-archived and re-archived, history ends up liberating us from the imperium of time, from its univocal narrations, and from its dictates.”
“Cynthia Heimel, whose first book, Sex Tips for Girls, established her in the early 1980s as a fearlessly funny writer about men, feminism, female friendships, flirting, birth control and lingerie, died on Sunday in Los Angeles,” reports Richard Sandomir in the New York Times. “Do yourself a favor and read her eternal classic, ‘When in Doubt, Act Like Myrna Loy,’” advises Farran Smith Nehme. Heimel was seventy.
LISTENING
James Ellroy joins Mike White and guest co-hosts Richard Edwards and Eric Cohen in the Projection Booth (136’50”) to discuss Curtis Hanson’s 1997 adaptation of Ellroy’s 1990 novel L.A. Confidential.
On a new episode of The Rewatchables at the Ringer, Bill Simmons, Sean Fennessey, K. Austin Collins, and Wesley Morris revisit and discuss Jordan Peele’s Get Out (91’58”).
The distributor A24 has launched a new podcast with a conversation between Barry Jenkins and Greta Gerwig (40’49”).
As Hunter Harris notes at Vulture, Gerwig says she’d “like to make a total of four films that take place [in Sacramento]. I would like to do a quartet of Sacramento films. It’s inspired by the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan quartet—she wrote these four books that took place mainly in Naples. They’re so great. I thought, Oh I’d like to do that.”
Alex Garland (Ex Machina,Annihilation) is a guest on TIFF Long Take (33’07”), talking about “how J. G. Ballard and Stanley Kubrick got him hooked on science fiction, how he comes up with and researches such complex ideas, and why he doesn’t see his films as prescient, but rather catching up with the obvious.”
For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow@CriterionDaily.
Movie lovers hankering for a regular dose of that old Hollywood magic have a reason to celebrate this week, with the announcement that FilmStruck is expanding its library to include Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Singin’ in the Rain, and hundreds of other essential titles from the Warner Bros. library. Never before has the golden age of the dream factory been showcased so extensively on one streaming service. Adventurous aficionados and completists will have plenty to look forward to, starting with the complete Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and a treasure trove of deep cuts in the new twenty-three-film Bette Davis spotlight.
It’s been a little over a year since we launched FilmStruck with Turner Classic Movies—and if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, now’s the time. Over the coming months, the streaming library will grow to more than 1,800 titles, featuring the best in cinema from Hollywood and around the world, handpicked and programmed by the folks at Criterion and TCM. Follow FilmStruck (@filmstruck) and the Criterion Channel (@criterionchannl) on Twitter for regular updates on what’s playing on the service, and take a look at the below gallery for a taste of some of the great films that are now available to stream!
Le cinque donne che hanno ricevuto la nomination come miglior attrice protagonista erano candidate anche ai Golden Globes, tre di loro nella categoria dei film drammatici e due in quella commedia o musical. I Golden Globes di queste categorie sono stati effettivamente vinti da due di loro ma, come sappiamo, l'Oscar è uno soltanto. La più giovane ha 23 anni, la più matura 68. Tutte meriterebbero la statuetta dell'Academy per l'eccezionale lavoro svolto, ognuna sul proprio set, e il fatto di essere nella cinquina di quest'anno è già moralmente una vittoria (si dice sempre così, ma stavolta è proprio vero). Però c'è un'interpretazione che l'ha spuntata sulle altre in diverse cerimonie ed è la favorita anche per conquistare l'Oscar 2018.
Grazie ai Tre manifesti a Ebbing, Missouri che ha testardamente affisso chiedendo spiegazioni allo sceriffo sull'omicidio della figlia, la sessantenne attrice ottiene la quinta nomination in carriera. L'Oscar lo aveva vinto nel 1996 per il ruolo della poliziotta in Fargo, mentre in questo film alla polizia darebbe proprio fuoco se non dovessero arrivare le risposte che cerca. Se Tre manifesti a Ebbing, Missouri dovesse vincere qualche premio, e certamente sarà così, è molto molto molto probabile che uno di questi finisca nelle mani di Frances McDormand. Così come è successo per il Golden Globe nella categoria delle migliori attrici per un film drammatico.
Non ha ancora compiuto 24 anni e quest'anno colleziona la sua terza nomination all'Oscar. La prima risale a dieci anni fa quando fu candidata per un ruolo da non protagonista in Espiazione, la seconda l'ha ottenuta da protagonista per il film Brooklyn del 2015. Quest'anno il film che ha beneficiato della sua partecipazione è Lady Bird di Greta Gerwig (candidata anche lei due volte, tra i migliori registi e tra i migliori sceneggiatori). Saoirse Ronan qualche chance di vincere ce l'ha, ma attualmente è la seconda favorita. In ogni caso la giovane interprete può consolarsi con il Golden Globe assegnatole per la categoria migliori attrici per un film commedia o musicale.
Australiana 27enne, poteva essere penalizzata per la sconvolgente avvenenza che madre natura le ha donato. Invece in ogni ruolo che ha interpretato ha dimostrato di avere le potenzialità e la versatilità necessarie per costruirsi una solida carriera a Hollywood. Da The Wolf of Wall Street che le ha aperto le porte, alla comedy-thriller Focus fino al fantastico personaggio di Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, Margot Robbie ha guadagnato credibilità nella community del cinema americano e con l'interpretazione in Tonya ha fatto il salto di qualità. Non vincerà l'Oscar, ma avrà molte altre occasioni in futuro di dimostrare il suo talento. E se le potrà scegliere.
Con un diploma teatrale in curriculum, ha messo piede su un set cinematografico per la prima volta come comparsa. Il film era Star Wars - La minaccia fantasma del 1999. Poi a farla scendere dai palcoscenici è stato il regista Mike Leigh, con cui ha lavorato tre volte. Poco per volta, con una timidezza e una puntigliosità che vediamo spesso nei suoi personaggi, si è fatta strada fino alla prima nomination come attrice non protagonista per Blue Jasmine di Woody Allen del 2013. Grazie a Guillermo del Toro che le ha dato il ruolo di un'inserviente muta in La forma dell'acqua, Sally Hawkins ci ha regalato una delle migliori performance della stagione. Basterà per vincere l'Oscar?
E con questa il conto arriva a 21 nomination in carriera. "È vero che ho vinto tre Oscar, ma è anche vero che ne ho persi molti di più" dice Meryl Streep con ironia. La verità è che c'è poco da dire su una delle migliori attrici di tutti i tempi. È quasi ininfluente che riceva o meno una nomination, ogni sua partecipazione a un film, ogni sua prova è una lezione di recitazione per attori di qualunque età. Talento e devozione stavolta sono stati da lei messi a disposizione di Steven Spielberg per The Post. Un Oscar sarà sempre un Oscar, ma Meryl è sempre Meryl.
New York.Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema opens tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Sunday. Writing for the Notebook, Ela Bittencourt points out that “a number of films stand out for either their carefully crafted characters and attention to social context or for their formal playfulness.” And she writes about Anahí Berneri’s Alanis, Alejo Moguillansky's The Little Match Girl, Niles Atallah’s Rey, and Pablo Escoto’s Ruinas tu reino.
Robert Smithson called Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) “the best and most tragic artist movie ever made,” notes Elisa Wouk Almino at Hyperallergic. On Sunday at the Metrograph, artist Amy Sillman will introduce a screening “with personal, painterly insights of her own. She will also be signing copies of her new book, The ALL-OVER, which surveys her large-scale abstractions, animations, and more.”
On Friday, Filmmakers Coop presents work by Phil Weisman, co-founder of the Collective for Living Cinema.
Los Angeles. “Founded by curator Erin Christovale and filmmaker Amir George, Black Radical Imagination is a touring program of short experimental films, video art, and new media that aims to expand the boundaries that have historically limited people of color in cinema,” writes Matt Stromberg at Hyperallergic. “This year’s program, titled Fugitive Trajectories and curated by Jheanelle Brown and Darol Olu Kae, looks at ways in which black people cope with and overcome historical and contemporary traumas.” This free program will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art tomorrow evening.
Vivienne Dick will be at REDCAT on Monday to present a program of her work.
“According to Oscar-winning Doctor Dolittle composer/writer Leslie Bricusse, the 1967 musical fantasy was initially conceived as a reunion of the My Fair Lady Broadway team: star Rex Harrison, lyricist and book writer Alan Jay Lerner, composer Frederick Loewe, and director Moss Hart.” Susan King previews Saturday’s presentation of a new 4K restoration at the Aero Theatre, which will be followed by a discussion with Bricusse and actress Samantha Eggar.
Portland. Starting Friday, and throughout the weekend, the Portland International Film Festival will present a selection of encore screenings.
Austin. Starting Sunday, the Film Society will spotlight the work of Olivier Assayas, who’ll be on hand for the premiere of Janus Films’ new restoration of Cold Water (1994). “The director will also be present at the screenings of Something in the Air [2012] and Paris Awakens [1991].”
London. On Sunday, Carl Davis will conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra as his own scores accompany screenings of Fred Niblo’s The Mysterious Lady (1928) with Greta Garbo and the only surviving reel of The Divine Woman (1928). The former is “one of my favorite Hollywood romances,” writes Pamela Hutchinson, “filled with glamour, lavish sets and smoldering passion from the two sultry leads,” Garbo and Conrad Nagel. The Divine Woman is “a drama based loosely on the life of Sarah Bernhardt and directed by Victor Sjöström.”
Edge of Frame Weekend 2018, a “three-day celebration of experimental animation,” happens from Friday through Sunday at various locations.
And on Friday, Close-Up will present Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967).
On Sunday at the London Review Bookshop, Gareth Evans will host a screening of Maria Saakyan’s “elegiac, semi-autobiographical drama” The Lighthouse (2006), followed by a discussion with Second Run DVD founder and director Mehelli Modi and So Mayer, author of Political Animals: the New Feminist Cinema.
Paris.Cinéma du réel has announced the competition lineups for its 2018 edition, running from March 23 through April 1 and featuring work by, among others, Jean-Marie Straub, Deborah Stratman, James Benning, Corneliu Porumboiu, Karim Aïnouz, and Heinz Emigholz.
Hong Kong. The Hong Kong International Film Festival, whose 2018 edition will run from March 19 through April 5, “will host two debut features, drama Omotenashi by Jay Chern, and mystery Xiao Mei by Maren Hwang as its opening gala titles,” reports Patrick Frater for Variety. “Christian Petzold’s recent Berlin competition title Transit will play as the HKIFF’s awards gala film. And the festival will close with veteran Japanese director Yoji Yamada’s What A Wonderful Family! 3: My Wife, My Life.”
For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow@CriterionDaily.
Il regista di Mute confessa un suo sogno, ma dice che il problema è trovare i finanziamenti e convincere il pubblico a vedere un genere di cui sembra essersi disamorato.
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2BWmcWv
“Nella Medea di Seneca, non c'è niente di realistico. Tutto ciò che in Euripide è concreto, familiare, realistico, in Seneca è totalmente mentale”. Seguendo questo incipit drammaturgico, il regista Walter Pagliaro torna al Teatro Palladium di Roma – dopo il successo de “Il Pellicano” di Strindberg dello scorso anno per proporre una nuova versione di “Medea”, tragedia su cui lavora da oltre vent'anni, precedentemente messa in scena al teatro della Villa di Roma, a Tindari e all'Olimpico di Vicenza, in un importante spettacolo prodotto dall'Associazione Teatro dei Due Mari. Sempre più mi convinco – afferma Pagliaro - che la sua genialità non sia nell'azione scenica, ma nella spettacolarità del pensiero e della parola. Questa nuova versione, che andrà in scena dall'1 al 3 marzo e sarà interpretata da un cast composto da Micaela Esdra, Blas Roca Rey, Marina Zanchi, Riccardo Zini, Fabrizio Amicucci, Michele Ferlito – musiche di Germano Mazzocchetti - verrà proposta in forma di oratorio drammatico: davanti a vuoti leggii, gli attori rivivranno infatti una storia mostruosa che da tempo conoscono ma di cui fanno fatica a prendere coscienza. Medea, nel prologo del dramma, invoca le forze infere perché l'aiutino a realizzare un crimine straordinariamente empio per vendicarsi di Giasone, che l'ha abbandonata e tradita per sposare la figlia di Creonte. Il più mostruoso dei delitti, lei lo ha già concepito; ma per realizzarlo ha bisogno che esso lambisca la sua razionalità, emergendo dagli strati più oscuri di una caotica personalità. La “Medea” di Seneca – continua Pagliaro - diventa così un lungo travaglio per portare alla luce una decisione che è già nell'istinto dell'eroina. La tragedia realizza, in modo sorprendentemente moderno, l'evoluzione di un pensiero che, non senza sofferenza, si chiarisce nella sua efferata crudeltà. L'uccisione dei figli, un crimine contro-natura, si fa strada nella testa di Medea, fra cedimenti e impennate di furore, pentimenti e sdoppiamenti di identità, finché il brivido della consapevolezza porta l'eroina a disconoscere paranoicamente quei figli, come non suoi ma della rivale, facendosi travolgere da una delirante allucinazione. “Medea nunc sum”, al verso 940, infine, sancisce con disperata modernità quanto ormai il gesto di Medea sia alla portata della quotidianità.
Lo spettacolo è realizzato in collaborazione e col sostegno dell'Associazione Gianni Santuccio.
Walter Pagliaro
Dopo il diploma come regista all'Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica e dopo la laurea in Architettura all'Università di Firenze, inizia la sua lunga e importante carriera come assistente di Giorgio Strehler. In seguito, è per anni tra i registi di punta del Piccolo Teatro di Milano, dove, grazie alle sue raffinate messinscene, si afferma come uno dei più sofisticati e originali artisti del teatro italiano. Come regista ha diretto importanti rappresentazioni di autori classici e moderni al Teatro Stabile di Genova, Teatro greco di Siracusa, Teatro Stabile di Torino, Teatro Stabile dell'Umbria, tra i molti teatri che lo hanno visto protagonista. Ha un'interessante carriera artistica anche come regista d'opera. Da molti anni è impegnato come docente in molte scuole di teatro in Italia e all'estero.
Micaela Esdra
Cresciuta alla scuola di Rina Morelli, è stata diretta in carriera da registi di primaria importanza come Giorgio Strehler e Luchino Visconti. Ha poi recitato con la direzione di Antonio Calenda e con Luca Ronconi, Massimo Castri e Guido De Monticelli interpretando intensamente autori come Sofocle, Euripide, Seneca, Racine, Cechov, Ibsen, Pirandello, Schnitzer. Attrice di cinema con diversi film all'attivo, ha doppiato attrici fra cui Kim Basinger, Sigourney Weaver, Jessica Lange, Melanie Griffith, Sharon Stone, Sandra Bullock e Jacqueline Bisset. In televisione ha preso parte a numerosi sceneggiati tra cui Incantesimo.
La pianista Antonija Pacek, già nota per il suo tocco neoclassico espresso in due album (Soul Colours e Life Stories) e definito dalla stampa europea “a female response to Einaudi”, si rivolge ora alla musica pop!
Il nuovo singolo ECSTASY, di cui Antonija ha scritto testi e musiche, è frutto della collaborazione con il dj Roberto Bedross, noto per il suo remix de Una mattina di Ludovico Einaudi per il quale ha ottenuto due milioni e mezzo di visualizzazioni su youtube. Ecstasy è cantato da Barbara Kier ed è già entrato nella top 10 della EDM charts in Polonia. Del brano è stato anche realizzato un video molto popolare, prodotto da Chiwa Media.
Ecco il video della canzone:
from Close-Up.it - storie della visione http://ift.tt/2BXAvu2
Al Teatro Ghione di Roma dal 27 febbraio fino all'11 marzo “L'Idea di Ucciderti” un thriller sull'amore come trappola mortale.
Scritto e diretto da Giancarlo Marinelli con Fabio Sartor, Caterina Murino e con Paolo Lorimer con Francesco Maccarinelli, Francesca Annunziata e la partecipazione straordinaria di Paila Pavese.
L'orrore di un femminicidio raccontato come un puzzle da ricomporre per scoprire la verità al di là di qualsiasi preconcetto.
Giancarlo Marinelli, autore del testo e regista dello spettacolo, così commenta questa storia di una passione bruciante, amore, mistero e morte in un noir che lascia con il fiato sospeso: “Mi sono ispirato a una storia vera. Vera non nella tragedia qui scritta. Ma nei presupposti che avrebbero potuto condurre a quella tragedia. Nella realtà nessuno ha ucciso nessuno. Almeno non fisicamente. E però, fuori da ogni ipocrisia, lo devo ammettere: ascoltando chi me l'ha raccontata, per un attimo, mi è balenato lo spettro. Che è il titolo di questo lavoro. L'idea di uccidere. Sono un uomo “femminista” dalla nascita: adoro le donne; mi sveglio la mattina, per incontrare una donna; scrivo e dirigo pensando sempre alle donne. Non ho mai alzato un dito contro una donna. E mai lo farò. Eppure, immedesimandomi nel protagonista di questa storia, quello spettro è affiorato. Capiterà anche al pubblico che assisterà allo spettacolo. E mi odierà, e si odierà per questo.
In verità, non intendevo scrivere un testo sul “femminicidio” al contrario, o, peggio, sul “maschicidio”. Volevo raccontare una storia sull'amore come arma di distruzione di massa. Sull'amore come trappola mortale. Sull'amore che dovrebbe essere la negazione di ogni luogo comune. E che invece diventa il più comunemente letale dei luoghi comuni.
Volevo mettere in scena una storia capace di spaventare il pubblico come quando si legge in un giornale di una possibile epidemia, di un virus che potrebbe colpire tutti: “E se capitasse anche a me?”.
La risposta non c'è. Non può esserci. Ché il Teatro non si occupa mai del vaccino. Ma solo del contagio.
from Close-Up.it - storie della visione http://ift.tt/2BRTIND
Grande serata di emozioni all'evento organizzato dal Ministero per lo Sport, il CONI, la Federazione Pugilistica Italiana e l'OPI 82 del "Campionato Mondiale per la Pace WBC" che ha avuto luogo venerdì 23 febbraio alle 19:00 al Palazzo dello Sport di Roma in Piazza Apollodoro 10 e che ha visto l'italiano Emiliano Marsili sfidare il messicano Victor Betancourt. Il grande campione,,amato da tutti ed anche da molti artisti ed amici tra cui numerosi presenti accolti da Francesca Piggianelli e Michela Pellegrini, citiamo la band MOTEL NOIRE,FEDERICO ZAMPAGLIONE,GIGLIA MARRA,CINZIA TH TORRINI,RALPH PALKA,la regista MANUELA TEMPESTA,Giovanni Maria Buzzatti,il grande regista americano ELIAS ACOSTA ,FABRIZIO PACIFICI,FABRIZIO BORNI,ANTONIO FLAMINI,ALESSIO FIORUCCI,il regista del documentario Tizzo,storia di un grande campione che uscirà a fine aprile, ALESSIO DI COSIMO, il dirett.della fotografia SANDRO CHESSA,il compositore PAOLO COSTA,ENIO DROVANDI e tanti altri,i pugili storici BENVENUTI,PETRIGLIA,DURAN.Numerose le ISTITUZIONI presenti. I fondi raccolti attraverso la campagna sociale dedicata e durante la serata saranno devoluti al progetto "Fighting for the Peace" creato dalla Scholas Foundation e dal programma BoxVal del World Boxing Council.
FOTO DI MARCO BONANNI
from Close-Up.it - storie della visione http://ift.tt/2EY1OXw
Often considered a French companion to Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front and G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918, Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses is one of the most shattering cinematic accounts of the horrors of battle during World War I. In addition to its vividly realistic look at life in the trenches, achieved with a lavish budget and extraordinary production values, the film is also notable for the subtlety of its techniques. For this month’s episode of Observations on Film Art, now streaming on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, film-studies scholar Kristin Thompson examines how Wooden Crosses distinguishes itself from other war dramas of its era through its lyrical style, which serves as a powerful counterpoint to its brutal depictions of combat. Watch the above excerpt to find out what the film’s title signified for audiences who had lived through the war, then head to the Channel to view the full episode along with Bernard’s masterpiece.
When Henry Fielding’s vast comic satire The History of Tom Jones,a Foundling was published in 1749, it was widely admired as a landmark in the form of the English novel, innovatory in its technique, unsurpassed in the ingenuity of its structure, and unprecedented in the breadth and variety of its characterization and social scope. Nevertheless, its risqué tale of the sexual adventures of its hero, from his discovery as an infant foundling to his appearance at Tyburn gallows as an accused thief and murderer, did not meet with universal approval. The age’s most formidable arbiter of literary taste, Samuel Johnson, pronounced it “so vicious a book . . . I scarcely know a more corrupt work,” and the bishop of London thought its publication was partially responsible for two earthquakes that rocked the capital the following year.
Cut to 1963 and the opening at the London Pavilion cinema of Tony Richardson’s film Tom Jones. Despite a mixed critical reception in both the United Kingdom and the United States (one review, in the London Times, declared that “there is nothing in this film that could give any member of the audience one moment of enjoyment”), the film, like its literary forebear, proved wildly popular among viewers. It broke box-office records and won four Oscars (for best picture, director, adapted screenplay, and original score), as well as three British Academy Film Awards. “Nothing . . . had prepared the cinema world for the earth-shattering Tom Jones,” wrote the great cameraman Oswald Morris, wistfully recalling that he had turned down the chance to photograph the film because he did not feel it was his style. The movie was something of a departure for Richardson’s production company, Woodfall, whose track record at that time consisted of such powerful contributions to the British New Wave as Richardson’s Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). When Richardson approached the head of Bryanston Films, Sir Michael Balcon, for additional funding for Tom Jones, Balcon hesitated to give his immediate support, because the projected cost was already above the sort of budgets he had been working with. During this period of indecision, United Artists stepped in with the financing, which would yield a profit twenty times the size of its investment. Reflecting ruefully later on the film that had slipped through his fingers and could have rescued Bryanston, which was purchased by the television company Associated-Rediffusion in 1965, Balcon wrote: “No doubt Tom Jones is engraved on my heart.”
Yet Balcon’s caution was understandable. For all his status as a major novelist, Henry Fielding could hardly claim the same level of popularity or public recognition as a Charles Dickens or a Jane Austen. Also, Richardson’s résumé did not offer many clues as to how the venture might turn out. His reputation at that time was solidly built on gritty realism, not satirical comedy, and stories set in the present, not the past. How would he tackle a period film in color, something quite outside his experience? The answer was: with gusto. He and his screenwriter, the playwright John Osborne, agreed there was only one way to approach an irreverent novel like Tom Jones: that is, irreverently. Their adaptation performs wonders in compressing Fielding’s nine-hundred-page opus into a film lasting a little over two hours, while ensuring that not only are the major incidents all there but also the main themes: the contrast between country and city; the criticism of social snobbery and religious hypocrisy; and the protest against parental and patriarchal oppression. The filmmakers’ inclusion of an elaborate stag-hunting scene (only briefly alluded to in the novel) supplies both spectacle and a reminder of how close to the surface of human affairs violence lurks—a truth Tom will encounter again later in the film. As Osborne noted in his published screenplay, “the hunt is no pretty Christmas calendar affair but a thumping dangerous vicious business,” and Richardson reinforces this with shots of the riders using their whips, their spurs cutting into the flesh of the horses, the hounds tearing into the deer.
“This is our holiday film,” Richardson declared to the cast and crew in the seaside resort of Weymouth, at the beginning of shooting, in the summer of 1962. Like most holidays, it was not without its mishaps. The Welsh actor Hugh Griffith threw himself into the role of the rambunctious, hedonistic Squire Western, who treasures his hounds above any humans, with a reckless abandon that was occasionally alarming. There is a moment when the squire yanks back the head of his beloved mare Miss Slouch so sharply that the horse falls backward on top of him; it is totally in character and funny in context, but it was entirely unplanned. A consummate professional, Edith Evans channeled her occasional exasperation with her spirited (and frequently inebriated) costar into an astute characterization of Squire Western’s sister, who, appropriately enough, constantly upbraids her brother for his loutish behavior. Her delivery of one particular rebuke—“Wake up, you country stewpot! . . . Rouse yourself from this pastoral torpor!”—carries such magisterial force that one is fleetingly reminded of her definitive stage and screen performances as Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. In his memoir, TheLong-Distance Runner, Richardson also recalled problems with what was to become the film’s most celebrated scene, one between Albert Finney’s Tom Jones and Joyce Redman’s Mrs. Waters in which the consumption of a gigantic eighteenth-century meal develops into a metaphor for ravenous desire. Apparently, it took only around three hours to film, during which the actors had to munch through an assortment of lobster claws, chicken wishbones, roast ribs, oysters, and pears, but “the physical effect on the two of them lasted for days.”
Finney has said he never liked the title role, feeling that Tom was too passive a character to allow him the opportunity for much real acting. Yet that passivity is important, for it is a facet of Tom’s sensitivity. He is a lover, not a lecher, and never proceeds with sexual advances without invitation. Indeed, in Tom’s scenes with the predatory Molly Seagrim (Diane Cilento at her most alluring), the film perfectly captures the feeling implicit in Fielding’s comment that “Jones had more regard for her virtue than she herself.” And for all Finney’s qualms, it is hard to imagine another young English actor of that time who could have conveyed Tom’s good nature so robustly, for it is essential to the moral scheme of the tale that, for all his sexual susceptibility, Tom’s generosity of heart is infinitely to be preferred to the ostensible virtue but secret malevolence of Squire Allworthy’s nephew, Blifil (a suitably sinister David Warner).
“I have shot it all as if it were happening today,” Richardson told Life magazine. Throwing caution—and the rule book for reverential adaptation—to the wind, he deployed a gallimaufry of gleefully obtrusive devices to galvanize the narrative. The tone is set by a madcap opening that covers the first two chapters of the novel in about five minutes of screen time, rendering the mysterious circumstances of Tom’s birth in the style of silent comedy, all accompanied by John Addison’s jaunty, harpsichord-dominated score, which will throughout contribute much to the film’s sense of gaiety and mischief. A double vertical wipe tactfully draws a veil over Tom’s seductive encounter with Molly in the woods; a freeze-frame impales Tom’s hypocritical tutor Square (John Moffatt), identifying him as the real father of Molly’s child when the blanket concealing his presence collapses; stop-motion photography highlights the playfulness of the relationship between Tom and Squire Western’s daughter, Sophie (Susannah York), before it blossoms into love; an iris shot of Dowling the lawyer gives particular emphasis to the moment when he hands the letter to Blifil that contains the truth about Tom’s parentage; the farcical collision of characters at the inn at Upton is shot in accelerated motion in the style of the Keystone Kops; and so on. In borrowing techniques from early cinema, Richardson was only emulating Fielding’s own formal experimentation with a new literary genre. In the same spirit, the film’s droll narrator (Micheál MacLiammóir) is the analogue of Fielding’s overt authorial presence, sometimes delicately withdrawing from a scene of sexual dalliance (“It shall be our custom to leave such scenes where taste, decorum, and the censor dictate”) and at other points making a sympathetic plea for understanding on the hero’s behalf. Fielding was well aware that the liberties he was taking with the novel genre would not please everyone, but, in justifying his digressions in chapter 2, he insisted: “I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever. And here I must desire all those critics to mind their own business, and not to intermeddle with affairs, or works, which no ways concern them.” Richardson would heartily have endorsed those sentiments.
Yet the runaway success of the film was due not to its skill in capturing the spirit of a 1749 classic but to its felicity in catching the mood of 1963. With the soaring popularity of the Beatles, the sixties had started to swing, and Tom Jones became part of the revolution. It brought a colorful and joyous exuberance back into British cinema. Tom Jones himself seemed an oddly modern figure, a hero who cheerfully exemplified the possibilities of social mobility and did so without a class chip on his shoulder. He could also be seen as a sort of rural James Bond, the depiction of his amorous appetites exemplifying the trend of saucy screen comedy reflecting the decade’s sexual emancipation. “The whole world loves TomJones!” proclaimed the film’s poster, and, for a while, it seemed to. This was even acknowledged in a New Yorker cartoon from the time in which a morose patient asks his psychiatrist: “Doctor, what’s my problem? Tom Jones depressed me.”
Although it would be an overstatement to say that Richardson was depressed by Tom Jones, he did come to feel its success was not wholly justified. He was grateful that its substantial profits enabled him to initiate a number of new projects for Woodfall, but he considered it, as he put it in his memoir, “incomplete and botched in much of its execution.” In 1989, he took the opportunity to reedit the film, cutting it by seven minutes and supervising a stereo soundtrack mix. Presumably, this version is closer to his original intention, although one has the sense that he still felt that Tom Jones loomed larger in his reputation than he would have liked. Nowadays, it is perhaps more common to see The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) cited as Richardson’s masterpiece, though it is somehow typical of his contrariness that he forbade any official press showing of that film in the UK out of anger at the way he perceived British film critics as having treated his work in the past, including Tom Jones. He was to spend much of the latter part of his career in America, making occasionally distinguished films (for example, a fine rendering of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance for the American Film Theatre in 1973) and thoughtful television dramas (such as 1978’s A Death in Canaan, which movingly explored an imminent miscarriage of justice). He died in 1991, some time before the delayed release of his final film, Blue Sky (1994),which turned out to be one of his best, with Jessica Lange winning an Oscar for her performance. Nevertheless, if Tom Jones was a film of and for its time, it merits celebration as the work of a fine artist who, deservedly and unexpectedly, for once struck gold. He would surely have been entitled at that point to rejoice in the narrator’s final words in the film, quoting from a translation of Horace by the seventeenth-century English poet John Dryden, as Tom is united at last with Sophie:
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Neil Sinyard is emeritus professor of film studies at the University of Hull in the UK. He has published twenty-five books on the cinema, including studies of such directors as Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Zinnemann, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Richard Lester, and Jack Clayton. He has also contributed to the Criterion releases of Ace in the Hole and This Sporting Life, among others. He is currently finishing a book on the films of George Stevens.
Da giovedì 1° marzo, in versione originale con sottotitoli, la magnifica commedia di formazione indie di Greta Gerwig trionfatrice ai Golden Globes e candidata a cinque Premi Oscar.
from Cineteca di Bologna http://ift.tt/2EWtagQ
via Cinema Studi
Un thriller psicologico avvolgente tutto sussurri, intuizioni, suggestioni e sospetti. Da giovedì 1° marzo in Sala Cervi, in versione originale con sottotitoli, l'ultimo film di Roman Polanski.
from Cineteca di Bologna http://ift.tt/2BV2n1J
via Cinema Studi
“Orson Welles, a boy from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was one of the most audacious Shakespearians who ever lived,” writes Robert Horton. “He recited soliloquies as a child, wrote a book on the plays as a teenager, and at age seventeen roamed across Ireland before brazenly (and successfully) presenting himself at the Abbey Theatre as a distinguished American actor. Welles also created three of the most ambitious Shakespeare films. As an American pretender, a colonial presuming to re-interpret the greatest British writer, Welles approached Shakespeare with a mix of bravado and insecurity.” Parallax View presents a paper that “explores how Welles’s American nature informs these roles and, especially, his final Shakespeare film, Chimes at Midnight (1965).”
Travis Wilkerson’s Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? is beginning its rollout into theaters, starting with New York’s Film Forum tomorrow. Grasshopper Film has asked Wilkerson to list his ten favorite films of the past ten years. And he does, though most of them weren’t made in the past decade.
If Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, “submerged in the stylized muck of underworld suffering, comprises a condemnation of our libidinal urges towards demented violence and blind contempt,” writes Justin Hong for Subtitle, “I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK [2006] is the pastel balm—a story about the possibilities of compassion untethered to the strict moral categories and scientific discourses of modern society.”
Writing for Artforum,Travis Jeppesen looks back on this year’s Berlinale and declares it to be “the worst program in the entire sixty-eight year history of the festival.” He also argues that “the obvious failures of the Berlinale have their roots in the ossified structure of Germany’s cultural bureaucracy, which also accounts for the dismal state of the country’s filmmaking industry, wherein lifelong—or otherwise contractually inflated—jobs are rewarded through nepotism, rather than for talent and vision.”
“Packing at least a feature film’s worth of action into a sleek and compulsively rewatchable nine minutes, Accidence is a witty new short from Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety, where she’s posted this video:
GOINGS ON
New York.Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema opens tomorrow at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through March 4. For Gay City News,Steve Erickson writes about Anahi Berneri’s Alanis, which “serves up a few very difficult days in a sex worker’s life,” Alejo Moguillansky’s The Little Match Girl, which “has a charm akin to his gay compatriot Matias Piñeiro’s films,” and Niles Atallah’s Rey, whose “political statements about colonial racism stick with one less than its bizarre and imaginative imagery.”
“Stewed Angels: Caroliner on Tour is a double-bill of concert footage from the micro-legendary performing group, formed thirty-five years ago in San Francisco during the heyday of art school punk and Subterranean Records,” writes Tyler Maxin. Tonight at Spectacle.
“Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams’s 2000 documentary Gaea Girls, on Japan’s now-defunct pro-wrestling club of the same name, is a slap in the face to conceptions of modern womanhood, and made all the more raw, exhausting, and difficult to watch for the simple reason that it is all true,” writes Jeva Lange, also at Screen Slate. Thursday at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn.
Chicago. The DOC10 Film Festival has announced the lineup for its third edition, running from April 5 through 8.
Dublin. Paul Duane’s While You Live, Shine, a documentary about musicologist Chris King and the music of Epirus in northern Greece, sees its world premiere tomorrow at the Dublin International Film Festival, currently running through Sunday. “I basically didn’t have a clue what I was getting into, which, God knows why, I always find an exciting prospect,” Duane writes at MostlyFilm. “My roadmap out of this situation was the Criterion box set Always For Pleasure, the collected films of the late American documentarian Les Blank. Watching them, I realised that what you need to make a documentary is interesting people doing interesting things. In theory, if you’ve chosen your subject well, everything else will follow.”
IN THE WORKS
Denis Côté has begun production on his adaptation of Laurence Olivier’s novel, Répertoire des villes disparues, reports Ioncinema’s Eric Lavallée. Robert Naylor, Josée Deschênes, Jean-Michel Anctil, Larissa Corriveau, Diane Lavallée, and Rémi Goulet have been cast in the story of the aftermath in a small town in Quebec of a car crash that’s left a young man dead.
Also, “child actor Thomas Gioria has been cast in the lead role in the final installment of Fabrice Du Welz’s Ardennes trilogy. Happy End’s Fantine Harduin was identified last November as the new Gloria (a thematic triptych character) with an impeccable cast of Beatrice Dalle, Emmanuelle Beart, Benoit Poelvoorde and Peter Van de Begin on board as supporting players.” Adoration “will explore the boundaries of a maddening, destructive love, but this time: between two children.”
“Antoine Fuqua and Universal Pictures are back in conversations about Scarface, a new version of the classic outlaw tale,” reports Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. “The new film borrows the immigrant rags-to-riches story but presents it in contemporary Los Angeles. The most recent script is by David Ayer, Jonathan Herman and Joel and Ethan Coen.”
Also, Bobby Cannavale and Dallas Roberts are joining Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Alec Baldwin, Leslie Mann, and Michael K. Williams in Edward Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.
“Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez has signed on to star in and produce Someone Great, a romantic comedy that Jennifer Kaytin Robinson is directing for Netflix.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit: “Written by Robinson, the story tells of a woman who, after a heart-wrenching break-up, decides to seek adventure in New York City with her two best friends before she moves across the country for her dream job.”
Jennifer Lawrence has “let it slip that she has partnered with former E! News anchor Catt Sadler on a series project.” Chris Gardner and Sam Reed for the Hollywood Reporter: “One source says Lawrence and Sadler are developing a series inspired by #MeToo, Time's Up and gender wage gap conversations in Hollywood.”
OBIT
Lewis Gilbert, who directed You Only Live Twice (1967), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and Moonraker (1979), has died at the age of ninety-seven. “Starting out as a child actor, in 1933’s Dick Turpin, he served as an assistant on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 thriller Jamaica Inn,” writes Deadline’s Peter White. “After directing a number of war novel adaptations, Gilbert directed Michael Caine’s Alfie, which was was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture.”
For the Notebook, Clare Nina Norelli writes about Jon Brion’s score for Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)—and posts a few samples.
VIEWING
David Bordwell notes that there’s a new, thirteen-minute installment of the Observations on Film Art series at FilmStruck in which Kristin Thompson discusses Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses (1932), an “intense World War I drama” that “boasts scenes of Fuller-like frenzy.” Bordwell’s also celebrating the new addition of 600 classic films to the collection and the launch of FilmStruck UK. “I sometimes wonder how I’d have turned out if I’d had so wide and deep an access to films during the 60s.”
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Stasera alle 18 presso la sede della Universal e il 6 marzo, presso il Liceo Amaldi di Tor Bella Monaca, proiezioni riservate ai ragazzi che seguono i percorsi educational di Alice nella città.
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2FyrWW5
La Cineteca di Bologna bandisce il concorso nazionale di composizione per le immagini ‘Il Cinema Ritrovato. Cinque concerti per film silenziosi in luoghi inattesi'. Scade il 18 aprile.
from Cineteca di Bologna http://ift.tt/2CLUsR0
via Cinema Studi
"Un paio d'anni fa, mi sono guardato attorno, a quello che succedeva nel mondo, e mi è sembrato il momento ideale per un'interpretazione moderna del romanzo di Ray Bradbury."
Così ha detto il regista Ramin Bahrani, che si è imbarcato nell'impresa di adattare nuovamente "Fahrenheit 451" e, di conseguenza, di confrontarsi a distanza con il François Truffaut che nel 1966 lo aveva già fatto, girando il suo primo e unico film in lingua inglese con protagonisti Julie Christie e Oscar Werner.
Confronti a parte, non ci sentiamo certo di dargli torto, circa l'attualità di una storia che racconta un sistema mediatico che vuole sedare gli animi, la presunzione di riscrivere la storia e la voglia di bruciare i libri, e quindi annientare cultura e pensiero critico.
Il Fahrenheit 451 di Bahrani, che è prodotto dalla HBO ed è previsto debuttare in maggio - dopo una prima mondiale al Festival di Cannes, sostengono i sempre bene informati - vede invece i protagonisti Michael B. JordaneMichael Shannon: il primo nel ruolo del pompiere-brucialibri ribelle Montag, il secondo in quelli del suo inflessibile capitano Beatty. A completare il cast ci sono anche Sofia Boutella (che sarà Clarissa), Keir Dullea, Martin Donovan e Laura Harrier.
La sceneggiatura è stata scritta dallo stesso Bahrani.
Tenetevi forte, perché questo è il primo trailer del nuovo Fahrenheit 451.
from ComingSoon.it - Le notizie sui film e le star http://ift.tt/2ERJHT8
First, the latest installment of our Observations on Film Art series has dropped, as the kids (and now the grownups) say. It features Kristin on unconventional lighting (including darkness) in the great early French sound film Wooden Crosses (1932). This intense World War I drama boasts scenes of Fuller-like frenzy, mixed with somber passages. It’s by Raymond Bernard, a director who was a bit obscure for a while, but who gained great prominence with the rediscovery of his remarkable Miracle of the Wolves (1924).While that film doesn’t seem to be available on US video, several other Bernard films are streaming on the Criterion Channel of FilmStruck.
The arrival of Kristin’s entry tallies with the new and expanded FilmStruck. To the 1200 or so features already in the channel’s library, TCM has added 600 classics from MGM, Warners, RKO, and other studios. Many of these titles, including Citizen Kane and The Thin Man, have never been available on streaming before.
The price remains the same: $6.99 per month for vanilla FilmStruck, $10.99 for it and the Criterion Channel (which nearly all subscribers take). You can get the whole package on a yearly basis for $99.00. Yes, I bought a subscription.
Third, but no less big a deal, we just learned that FilmStruck has launched in the UK as well.
The choice of titles is smaller, partly because some films are held by other licensees in Europe, but there’s still a vast array. Cost is again very reasonable: £5.99 per month, £59.90 for a year and two free months. We think Observations installments will be available on the UK site.
I sometimes wonder how I’d have turned out if I’d had so wide and deep an access to films during the 60s. Would I have read books or listened to music? Maybe all that kept me balanced was limited access to movies. Then again, I spent a lot of time ferreting out finds–time that could have been spent watching them. I grew up in a film culture devoted to seeking whispered-about rarities and traveling to see them. Kristin and I once went to a screening of L’Age d’or supplied by a protective collector who brought the nearly unseeable film with him on the plane. Now, in the wild spiral from scarcity to superabundance, all it takes to see Buñuel’s masterpiece is pressing your remote or clicking your trackpad and paying your credit-card bill.
Life is a trade-off, but still….pretty nice to have choices. Speaking of which, our earlier installments on the Criterion Channel are here.
As usual, thanks to the Criterion team: Peter Becker, Kim Hendrickson, Grant Delin, and their colleagues. They not only make nice movies available, they make nice movies about them.
