Donald Richie , American author, journalist, critic and expert on Japan, dies at 88.
Smilingly excluded here in Japan, politely stigmatised, I can from my angle attempt only objectivity, since my subjective self will not fit the space I am allotted . . . how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right – I can see the peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.
-- from The Japan Journals, 1947-2004
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posted by Ice Cream Socialist
on Feb 19, 2013 -
23 comments
The Q&A With Jeff Goldsmith is an irregularly released podcast where Mr. Goldsmith interviews, at length (each episode runs an hour or more), working Hollywood and foreign screenwriters. The most recent episode is a panel conversation with the year's Oscar-nominated screenwriters. You can listen to the podcasts on his site or subscribe in iTunes or on Android.
Goldsmith is also the publisher of the terrific screenwriting magazine
Backstory--currently only available for the iPad but coming (eventually) to the web and Android. You can download the first issue (which is wonderful, and contains full length scripts along with the interviews and stories) for free.
posted by dobbs
on Feb 7, 2013 -
5 comments
At a time when the Lord of the Rings didn't exist as a film
or a book trilogy, Fritz Lang created the 5-hour-long film
Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs, 1924), based on the 13th-century poem Die Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs). A short clip of
Siegfried slaying the dragon was used as a trailer for the restored edition of the film.
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posted by ersatz
on Feb 3, 2013 -
28 comments
"There are reasons why this film is obscure. It is, in the most charitable possible evaluation, a mess: Bowie has described it as "my 32 Elvis films rolled into one." And yet life on that ever-dwindling island of not-on-region-one DVD films is a harsh fate for any film and particularly for this one, which is at least as interesting as its cast suggests and a good deal more. You don't need to dig out the VHS player to watch Mick Jagger run an agency of gigolos in The Man From Elysian Fields—you shouldn't have to do so to watch Bowie play one. "
David Bowie's Lost 70s-era Weimar Berlin Movie: Just a Gigalo.
posted by The Whelk
on Feb 2, 2013 -
17 comments
Between Peter Jackson’s penchant for cartoonish unserious gore and Bob McCarron’s off-screen makeup effects manipulations, Braindead
achieves something that approaches inspired genius in the heretofore unknown artform of human carnage. The film is filled with moments of joyous slapstick tableaux... And then there is that moment where Braindead
finally breaks through to achieve a transcendentally surreal glory of excess where Tim Balme wades into battle against the zombies armed with a lawnmower, drenching an entire room in showers of blood. (Braindead
holds the record for the greatest amount of artificial blood ever used in a film). The film is a work of perverse genius. -
Richard Scheib
posted by Egg Shen
on Dec 8, 2012 -
41 comments
The Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Review YouTube channel has a lot of videos of film reviews from the livestream of their
BBC radio show and podcast, going back about five years. They are sorted by
genre, film rating, geographic origin and one special category,
Classic Kermodean Rants, which includes his reviews of
Transformers: Dark of the Moon,
Sex and the City 2, in which he ends up sing-shouting The Internationale, and
Angels and Demons, which woke a
man from a coma (mp3, story starts at 5:10, and it is followed up
here, beginning at 5:30).
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 10, 2012 -
32 comments
During the Golden Age of Hollywood and until 1967, mainstream movie studios were
banned by the Production Code from depicting taboo topics like drug addiction, explicit murder and venereal disease, or even showing explicit nudity. But in the 1930's and 1940's, films marketed as "educational" could and did fly under the radar, and three of the best known 'educational' propaganda exploitation films are:
Sex Madness (1935),
Reefer Madness (1936) and
The Cocaine Fiends (1938).
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posted by zarq
on Oct 15, 2012 -
30 comments
His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm — which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action [Star Wars] movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics.
posted by Egg Shen
on Sep 27, 2012 -
65 comments
[all links may contain SPOILERS] Antonioni's unique style works beautifully in The Passenger
. The dream-like long takes, especially the final seven minute one where the dusty town square is seen through the barred window of Locke's hotel room—evokes a world that he is barred from. There is nothing romantic or sentimental about the space that we see, but it conveys a sense of an ongoing life that Locke has chosen to retreat from. There is also Antonioni's eye for aesthetic detail-for whitewashed walls of buildings, and vividly colored backgrounds like yellow doors and red car seats. He is a director of great formal rigor and beauty, whose style effortlessly suits his vision. The slow rhythm of the film may put off some viewers, but it forces them to be more observant, and understand there is nothing accidental in the images that Antonioni constructs. -
Leonard Quart [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Sep 9, 2012 -
8 comments
Once Upon A Time In America [auto-play audio] is the last of a string of films about the past and future of a country [Sergio Leone] knew first and best from the B-movies and yellowing paperbacks America sent abroad. For this 1984 swan song, Leone broke a directing hiatus that stretched back a decade, and turned away from Westerns toward another quintessentially American genre. His fantasia of gangland themes and images barely works by the standards of a gangster film, but succeeds brilliantly by those of epic poetry. -
Keith Phipps [all links may contain spoilers] [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Aug 25, 2012 -
19 comments
...
Buckaroo Banzai is paradoxically decades ahead of its time and yet completely of its time; it’s profoundly a movie by, for, and of geeks and nerds at a time before geek/nerd culture was mainstreamed, and a movie whose pre-CG special effects and pre-Computer Age production design were an essential part of its good-natured enthusiasm. What at the time was a hip, modern take on classic SF is now, almost thirty years later, almost indistinguishable from the SF cinema that inspired it in terms of the appeal to modern viewers: the charmingly old-fashioned special effects, and the comparatively innocent earnestness of its tone. -
Danny Bowes [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Aug 19, 2012 -
119 comments
