The French romantic thriller “Diva” dashes along with a pellmell gracefulness, and it doesn’t take long to see that the images and visual gags and homages all fit together and reverberate back and forth. It’s a glittering toy of a movie... This one is by a new director, Jean-Jacques Beineix... who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience. - Pauline Kael, 1982
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posted by Trurl
on Sep 16, 2011 -
33 comments
Nigel Kneale's adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four was
one of the most controversial television programmes of its time. Broadcast live, it made "
unusually extensive and imaginative use of filmed inserts (14 in total). These sequences bought time for the more elaborate costume changes or scene set-ups, but also served to 'open out' the action." And now you can watch it too! The full version
is currently on Youtube. Short of the John Hurt film released in 1984 being posted online, the 1954 BBC TV adaptation is about as doubleplusgood as it gets for now.
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posted by Effigy2000
on Dec 12, 2010 -
12 comments
Three years after the failure of his recklessly ambitious Marxist epic
1900, Bernardo Bertolucci returned to directing with
La Luna - a story of opera and
incest featuring a Golden Globe-nominated performance by Jill Clayburgh, then at the height of her late 70s fame. [Also appearing in small roles were Fred Gwynne and an up-and-coming Roberto Benigni.] Writing in The New York Times,
Vincent Canby described it as "one of the most sublimely foolish movies ever made by a director of Mr. Bertolucci's acknowledged talents."
Roger Ebert wrote, "Bertolucci has sprung his gourd this time."
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posted by Joe Beese
on May 30, 2009 -
4 comments
"... we are sweeping everything under the carpet, but the oddness is cropping up all over the place. And then, the carpet starts to move…".
Michael Haneke, "le manipulateur" who introduced his latest film,
Caché, at Cannes with a half-amused “
I wish you a disturbing evening”, is the proponent of a "
cinema of disturbance". A cinema of
loving self-mutilation, where
time is non-linear and everything happens in
long take shots; in Haneke's world, guilt destroys lives
decades after the original sin. All his male characters are "Georges" and his female characters are either "Evas" or "Annas", "
because I lack fantasy". Unsurprisingly, he is a
Bresson and Tarkovsky fan. He'll direct
"Don Giovanni" at the Paris Opera in early 2006: "In 20 years of working in the theater, I only staged one comedy, and that was my single failure".
posted by matteo
on Nov 18, 2005 -
19 comments
