116 posts tagged with film and cinema (View popular tags)
Why do we spend so many precious hours of our lives watching films? What is it about cinema that it should occupy a place of such prominence in our lives? And why do we even need movies? It is as though we are trying to fill a gap in our lives - a void, an emptiness within ourselves. So to even begin on the path of our Truth Quest, we have to see the broader picture of how film correlates to life, and life to film. To find this higher perspective, it is helpful to look towards the other arts, as well as philosophy.
Cinema Seekers: Searching for truth in cinema and in life.
posted on Apr 21, 2008 - View this thread
High-Tech Noon. What makes a classic Western even more classic? Blasters and force-fields, that's what. (SLYT)
posted on Apr 21, 2008 - View this thread
The Makhmalbafs are an Iranian family of filmmakers, although Samira tends to get the most press.
posted on Apr 7, 2008 - View this thread
Roger Ebert to return to writing movie reviews. Love him, hate him, disagree with him, worship him, whatever, but Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic Roger Ebert, after several operations that have left him without the power of speech, will return to writing movie reviews shortly after his 10th Annual movie festival, Ebertfest.
Me, personally, I'm happy as heck about this.
posted on Apr 2, 2008 - View this thread
POSSESSED is a short documentary film that 'enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions'.
posted on Mar 7, 2008 - View this thread
American audiences remember Akira Kurosawa as the genius of the samurai epic, a past master who used the form both to revise and revive Western classics - Shakespeare with Ran and Throne of Blood, Dostoevsky with Red Beard and The Idiot, Gorky with The Lower Depths - and to give splendid and ultimately immortal life to new archetypes, as in The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo. But Kurosawa also made films of his own time. His masterpiece, in fact, was the quiet story of a gray Japanese bureaucrat dying in post-war Tokyo, and of his attempt to do something of lasting good before he leaves. The film is Ikiru ("To Live"; 1952).
posted on Jan 29, 2008 - View this thread
Trailers From Hell. Cult directors (and other industry types) introduce and comment on trailers for cult films. For instance, Allison Anders on Peeping Tom,
Rick Baker on The Man Of A Thousand Faces,
Joe Dante on Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman,
Jack Hill on White Heat, Dan Ireland on The Haunting, Mary Lambert on The Masque Of The Red Death and Edgar Wright on Carnage.
(Flash menu and intro unfortunately)
posted on Jan 28, 2008 - View this thread
Sex, drugs and sleaze! Were the bad old days really the good old days? Native New Yorkers who remember the City in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, speak up! Was the Big Apple better off then or now?
posted on Jan 23, 2008 - View this thread
Comprehensive profile, in the NY Times magazine, of the new crop of talented Romanian filmmakers. Be sure to check out the interactive component of the story, with clips and commentary on several recent films.
posted on Jan 21, 2008 - View this thread
"But, it's a post on film noir!" I told her. She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me. I knew that caving into my desires meant I might lose her. But I didn't care. I went out to the kitchen to make coffee -- yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. I knew she'd be back.
posted on Jan 11, 2008 - View this thread
The return of BIG acting. Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood
posted on Jan 5, 2008 - View this thread
Hammer films are back! ... The classic British horror film company has returned from the dead with the first new film in 20 years to be first broadcast in instalments via MySpace. This has allowed some news programs to camp it up just a little... See the trailer here. Behind the scenes.
posted on Dec 18, 2007 - View this thread
Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Alfred Hitchcock reflects on his career in movies, discussing among other things, the origin of the term "MacGuffin", his creative process and what his earliest fear was.
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - View this thread
The Unsung Joe: Where bit-part actors go when they die. Biographies of the most obscure micro-stars of 1940s and '50s cinema, all remarkably well-researched and richly illustrated.
posted on Dec 11, 2007 - View this thread
Though best known for his role as hunky Lance Rocke in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the actor/author was also distinguished by a career as a beefcake pin-up boy. Sadly, he has passed away at the age of 67.
posted on Dec 6, 2007 - View this thread
Enjoy some silent film this week: Battleship Potemkin. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The General. The Immigrant. Haxan. Intolerance (1, 2, 3). Nosferatu.
posted on Dec 2, 2007 - View this thread
Though not as commonly known, Alfred Hitchcock's late British period is nonetheless an intriguing look at what delights were to come from his later work.
Secret Agent (1936 | Wikipedia | Download)
Young and Innocent (1937 | Wikipedia | Download)
Jamaica Inn (1939 | Wikipedia | Download)
posted on Nov 25, 2007 - View this thread
Norman Bates and that oh, so famous shower scene...
posted on Nov 24, 2007 - View this thread
Jazz on the Screen "This searchable filmography documents the work of some 1,000 major jazz and blues figures in over 14,000 cinema, television and video productions."
posted on Oct 26, 2007 - View this thread
Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema - David Bordwell
posted on Oct 16, 2007 - View this thread
In 1974, Martin Scorsese interviewed his parents on film, prompting them to discuss their life together as well as their Sicilian ancestry. The resultant documentary was entitled Italianamerican. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
[Inspired by...]
posted on Sep 4, 2007 - View this thread
80 years of Found Footage Filmmaking...
1927-1967:
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, 1927.
Rose
Hobart, 1936.
Night and Fog 2 3 4 5 6 7, 1956.
1968-2007 inside...
posted on Aug 28, 2007 - View this thread
Women In Film, similar to the previously posted Women In Art
posted on Aug 14, 2007 - View this thread
Fred Astaire was a pimp.
posted on Aug 8, 2007 - View this thread
21-87 is a short film from Arthur Lipsett that has been discussed before.
posted on Aug 2, 2007 - View this thread
A mainstay of the old-timey cinema era, the Photoplayer was a pump organ designed for player piano rolls, sound effects and a human composer. [Courtesy of Huell Howser]
posted on Aug 1, 2007 - View this thread
Plotbot is a web-based collaborative screenwriting application where you can write a screenplay with as many or as few people as you like. Adopting the wiki approach to screenwriting, each element is editable by any member of a project. You can also comment on, delete or restore any element. For all of the "filmic storytellers" on MeFi.
posted on Jul 30, 2007 - View this thread
Kerwin Mathews, 1926-2007. The genre actor may be best remembered as the title character in one of my favorite movies, the classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
posted on Jul 18, 2007 - View this thread
NoMediaKings.org will tell you how to hand-bind books in a variety of ways. Then you can make the movie of the book. As a bonus: Time Management for Anarchists.
posted on Jul 8, 2007 - View this thread
"I'm a control freak-- but I was not in control." Lars von Trier made his latest movie without a cameraman. The Boss of It All (trailer), a comedy, was made with "Automavision", allowing a computer to decide when to tilt, pan, or zoom. The film also employs Lookey, a game that challenges the viewers to spot objects that don’t belong in a scene. The first viewer in Denmark to identify all the Lookeys correctly wins a cash prize and a chance to be an extra in von Trier’s next film.
posted on Jul 4, 2007 - View this thread
How to make a film like Hitchcock would have. Also, a sociological perspective on guilt and innocence in Hitchcock's work - rituals of liminality (pdf). (via)
posted on Jun 20, 2007 - View this thread
Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma was recently released on DVD.
posted on May 15, 2007 - View this thread
Roscoe Lee Browne, class act from beginning to end. The first time I ever noticed him was in The Cowboys, a western I've watched many times just to hear him speak.
posted on Apr 13, 2007 - View this thread
The most effective Surreality is that which is entirely Unintentional (15-minute Google video). A delightful balance between amusing & disturbing. Harvested from Doctor Macro's MGM Shorts page. Previously.
posted on Apr 1, 2007 - View this thread
Ryan Larkin [1943-2007]
posted on Feb 17, 2007 - View this thread
It seems apropos today to post about Bollywood and its style of romance and love. Songs are often the equivalent of a bedroom scene, a fact I didn't believe until it was pointed out to me that there were numerous instances of extremely suggestive songs followed by pregnancy. Bollywood also uses songs to arouse patriotic fervour, a trait that master music director A.R. Rahman takes to new heights with his release of the classics Vande Mataram [Motherland, I salute thee] and Jana Gana Mana [India's national anthem]. But even before him, there were classics of public service advertising such as "Mile sur tera hamara..." a fuzzy video but inspiring nonetheless of the myriads of voices and languages spoken in India. Other loves that hindi cinema celebrates through its songs is that of a mother for a child, god, love across cultural boundaries and what is politely termed as "conjugal love".
posted on Feb 14, 2007 - View this thread
Atlas Shrugged is again in the pipeline to be made into a movie. BACK in the 1970s Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of “The Godfather,” first approached Ayn Rand to make a movie of her novel “Atlas Shrugged.” But Rand, who had fled the Soviet Union and gone on to inspire capitalists and egoists everywhere, worried aloud, apparently in all seriousness, that the Soviets might try to take over Paramount to block the project.
posted on Jan 20, 2007 - View this thread
Anders als die Andern ("Different From the Others") [IMDB|Wikipedia] was one of a series of films on sexual issues directed by Richard Oswald in the late 1910s and sponsored by Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. The 1919 movie (photo reconstruction), "the first major gay-themed film ever made," and "the world's first homosexual emancipation film," was made in part to protest against Paragraph 175, which was added to Germany's Reich Penal Code in 1871 and prohibited sex acts "between persons of male sex."
[more inside]
posted on Dec 15, 2006 - View this thread
The most inspirational film ever has an underexamined dark side, including a 1947 FBI memo that branded the film as subversive and "a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers." The film's script was influenced by the liberal populism of the 1930s, used suicide as a plot point, and was criticized by a Christian Right website for "lax attitudes on alcohol and drunkenness." The film also inspired a feminist art project on "bad girl" Violet Bick and a dead-on parody of a right-wing Christian movie review. Meanwhile, Jimmy Stewart paid back Frank Capra for reviving his post-WWII career by spying on him for the FBI. The hidden backstory behind It's A Wonderful Life.
posted on Dec 15, 2006 - View this thread
Starting January 1st, the so-called 'Godfather' of avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas will podcast one short film per day, for a full year.
If you can't wait till January here are 2 of Mekas's films to tide you over: Zefiro Torna and Hare Krishna.
Or see the 40 short films being shown at a gallery in New York. [Via this NPR report, which, if you're already familiar with Mekas and his work, is likely the most interesting link here.]
posted on Nov 6, 2006 - View this thread
Peter Greenaway speaks (what follows are short Youtube excerpts of a lecture by Greenaway): on the tyranny of celebrities; on Martin Scorcese; on airport bookshops and culture; on notions of media; on his belief that Bill Viola is worth ten Scorceses; on why he goes on making films; on the notion of the frame in theater and cinema; on Dutch producer Kees Kasander; on why we have to get rid of the camera: "There's a way in which a camera is essentially a mimetic tool which tells us how the world exists, and what it tells us is always going to be less interesting than what's really happening out there. Also: interview about 8 1/2 Women.
posted on Oct 30, 2006 - View this thread
Snakes on Film — at last, a definitive resource for moving-picture snake identification and serpentine fact-checking! Care of our very own mcwetboy! [via mefi projects]
posted on Sep 27, 2006 - View this thread
"I would like to do better, to be better than I am". He's the French New Wave maverick and Academy Award winner (at 26, for his first short) who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "the greatest film ever made", duly censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "the first modern film of sound cinema", shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "to stop death in its tracks" (French language link), only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of la bande dessinée who learnt English by reading comic books and in the Seventies dreamed (French language link) of making "Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the MGM old-school musical and operetta nut so in love with design that "half of the fashion photography of the past 40 years owes a debt" to him. Now, Alain Resnais' new work, just shown at the Venice Film Festival where his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film inspired by an English play with 54 short scenes, music by the X-Files's Mark Snow. (more inside)
posted on Sep 8, 2006 - View this thread
Norman McLaren's Masterpiece with music by Oscar Peterson. Each frame of this short was scratched directly onto the film in order to be in perfect synch with the pre-recorded soundtrack. This has been discussed before here and more generally here but I haven't seen this online until now. More on Norman McLaren.
posted on Sep 6, 2006 - View this thread
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)
posted on Aug 27, 2006 - View this thread
Perfection and Eraserhead. Discussing Singing in the Rain and Goodfellas with prisoners. The link between Pasolini, Blind Willie Johnson and Carl Sagan. If you like hanging out at the corner of Film and Word, you might enjoy spending time in the archives at Your Humble Viewer, a wide-ranging, well-written, funny and literate film blog.
posted on Jul 31, 2006 - View this thread
Tulse Luper Update: Twice before we’ve discussed Peter Greenaway’s “upcoming” multimedia project The Tulse Luper Suitcases: three movies, two books, a VJ tour (.wmv interview about a similar project, Nightwatching, to give you some idea of what a VJ tour is), and more. With the recent launch of the online multiplayer game, The Tulse Luper Journey , perhaps the project is no longer upcoming at all. The story centers on 92 suitcases related to the life of Greenaway’s alter ego Tulse Luper. Discovered in various locations around the globe, the suitcases illustrate the history of Uranium (and by extension the history of the 20th century). Read Greenaway’s lecture on the project here, hear an interview focused on the VJ performance here, or read stories attributed to Tulse Luper here. [More Inside]
posted on Jun 6, 2006 - View this thread
The Room: The Movie. Triple-threat (actor/writer/director) Tommy Wiseau made his cinematic debut in 2003 with the The Room (see trailer and various scenes), "a blend between a
softcore porn flick and a Tennessee Williams stageplay." Wiseau ("who's not just one of the most unusual looking and sounding-with
an unidentifiable Eastern European accent-leading men ever to
grace the screen, but a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" seem
the apotheosis of cinematic self-restraint...may be something of a first: A movie that
prompts most of its viewers to ask for their money back-before even
30 minutes have passed." - Variety), allegedly raised $6 million outside Hollywood to cover production and marketing costs of the self-described "black comedy about love, passion, betrayal and lies" (see various rough dress rehersals).
Audience members, including comedian
David Cross, have been "marveling at the bizarre editing, bad bluescreen, uncomfortably explicit
sex scenes and, of course, the enigma of Wiseau himself" as the film
played monthly for years in Los Angeles. Available on
DVD, diehard "roomies" swear by the
theatrical experience,
shout out their own commentary, hurl spoons at the screen and singalong to the soundtrack. Some call it "The Rocky Horror of the New Millenium" and stage "Room"
parties. If you look at the marketing campaign or survived a screening you might see The Room as "a seminar on how
NOT to make a movie." [Inspired by
Boing Boing]
posted on Jun 1, 2006 - View this thread
«The silent queen of all that is snowy and pure» (.pdf) I will never forget the first time I saw Giovanni Pastrone’s
extraordinary Cabiria... I wasn’t quite
prepared for the sheer scope and beauty of this film. And I was
completely unprepared for having my sense of film history re-aligned. There are so many elements that we took for granted
as American inventions – the long-form historical epic, the
moving camera, diffused light. Suddenly, here they were in a
picture made two years before Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
-- Martin Scorsese
It was the first film to be over three hours long, the first to use a moving camera, the first to cost 20 times the average cost of a motion picture; Pastrone took several elephants and hundreds of extras to the Alps, in the dead of winter, to film scenes that only lasted a couple of minutes
onscreen. He hired an ex-dockworker and turned him into one of the first action movie heroes, Maciste. And, he also created the first international marketing campaign of the history of cinema. The Americans were so impressed that Cabiria became the first film to be ever shown on White House grounds. Last week, at the Cannes Film Festival, a beautiful, painstakingly restored version of this forgotten masterpiece has just been shown to the public.
posted on May 29, 2006 - View this thread
The Ingmar Bergman site is now available in English. I find the 'Universe' section (examining repeated themes) is particularly interesting.
posted on May 22, 2006 - View this thread
Deviation (embedded video); a Machinima film hits the mainstream festival circuit. (previous forays into Machinima)
posted on May 14, 2006 - View this thread
Drama is impossible today. I don't know of any. Drama used to be the belief in guilt, and in a higher order. This absolutely cruel didactic is impossible, unacceptable for us moderns. But melodrama has kept it. You are caged. In melodrama you have human, earthly prisons rather than godly creations. Every Greek tragedy ends with the chorus — "those are strange happenings. Those are the ways of the gods". And so it always is in melodrama.
His career as a film director lasted more than 40 years, but Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is remembered for the melodramas he made for Universal in Hollywood between 1954 and 1959, his "divine wallow": Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1958, William Faulkner considered it the best screen adaptation of one of his novels), Imitation of Life (1959) -- all considered for decades little more than a camp oddity. Now audiences are beginning to look deeper at the films of Douglas Sirk, at how, in megafan Todd Haynes' words, they are "almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths". Now, lucky Chicagoans can enjoy "Douglas Sirk at Universal", matinees at the Music Box. More inside.
posted on Apr 29, 2006 - View this thread
Never ever borrow a friend's mobile, trust hitch hikers or strangers in furry costumes, never get distracted, worry about the first time or about your young son not being manly enough, and most of all never, ever forget stuff. Also, remember to always be nice to your enemies, your granny and policemen, but don't be too nice to your neighbours, and don't forget to get the car washed. Lots more brilliant short films viewable online from UK's Channel 4 Film (Real/WM streams).
posted on Mar 31, 2006 - View this thread
It's still about the means of production, you see — but in the overdeveloped world, at least, it's not about the production of goods and services anymore. Today's virtual revolutionary is happy to leave all that to capitalists. The virtual revolutionary wants to control the production of meaning — representations of herself and her world as she wants them to seem. Or be. Or whatever.
That's all she asks.
Or, rather, takes.
Thomas de Zengotita welcomes the big world of the small screen. Peter Bogdanovich, instead, still mourns that last picture show.
posted on Mar 26, 2006 - View this thread
“It was only natural that one day I should decide to toss my film into a dank corner of my garden. After a hot, humid summer, I came to gather up the film(Embedded Quicktime), which over the course of the summer I'd entirely forgotten. The colors remained very pure and intense, but had departed from their previous form. Indeed, they were laying themselves down upon the old action film to form veritable mosaics of color, remarkably like the stained glass of church windows. This was a really pleasurable experience.” – Jurgen Reble, on his art
posted on Mar 22, 2006 - View this thread
The Tribeca Film Festival announced its 2006 lineup last week. Among the films in competition is the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. Filmmaker Jack Smith (a major influence on later filmmakers, from Warhol to Waters(NSFW)) is perhaps best known for his 1963 film Flaming Creatures, was shot on expired army surplus film, and banned soon after its release (with some help from Strom Thurmond). New controversies surround his work. See also Smith’s Scotch Tape (YouTube), from the same year.
posted on Mar 21, 2006 - View this thread
The first clip (QuickTime movie, 15 MB) from The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry's new film, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg (set photos), out later this year and hailed by reviewers at Sundance as a "a glorious mess", "loaded with gags and gimmicks and spectacularly beautiful and memorable images", a "wild visual phantasmagoria... and a lot of fun".
posted on Mar 16, 2006 - View this thread
Jerry Lewis at 80 (more inside)
posted on Mar 13, 2006 - View this thread
I first read "Ask the Dust" in 1971 when I was doing research for "Chinatown". I was concerned about the way people really sounded when they talked, and I was dissatisfied with everything else I had read that was written during the '30s. I wanted the real thing, as Henry James would say. When I picked up Fante's "Ask the Dust," I just knew that was the way those kids talked to each other—the rhythms, cadences, racism.
Robert Towne on adapting John Fante's novel for the big screen. More inside.
posted on Mar 4, 2006 - View this thread
Hamlet on the Ramparts is a public website designed and maintained by the MIT Shakespeare Project in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library and other institutions. It aims to provide free access to an evolving collection of texts, images, and film relevant to Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost. More inside.
posted on Feb 28, 2006 - View this thread
Piero Scaruffi is a normal person. Like so many others, he ponders knowledge, language, and art from time to time. When he travels, he takes pictures. Just like everyone else. Sure, he has his thoughts about politics and world affairs, who doesn't? And when he's done with all of this he just wants to rock. Exactly like you. See?
posted on Feb 23, 2006 - View this thread
"He was someone who acted out our psyches ... He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them on-screen... the history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that's grotesque, that the world will turn away from."
A Valentine for Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces. (BugMeNot for the first link; more inside)
posted on Feb 18, 2006 - View this thread
"The German invasion of Britain took place in July 1940, after the British retreat from Dunkirk". We see, documentary-style, members of the Wehrmacht trooping past Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral, lounging in the parks, having their jackboots shined by old cockneys, and appreciatively visiting the shrine of that good German, Prince Albert, in Kensington Gardens. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's film "It Happened Here", with its cast of hundreds (.pdf), imagines what a Nazi occupation might have been like — complete with underground resistance, civilian massacres, civil strife, torch-lit rallies, Jewish ghettos, and organized euthanasia. Shot on weekends, eight years in production, made for about $20,000 with nonactors and borrowed equipment and Stanley Kubrick's help, "It Happened Here" was originally envisioned by Brownlow as a sort of Hammer horror flick about a Nazi Britain. Thanks in part to Mollo's fanatical concern with historical accuracy, however, it became something else. The most remarkable thing about this account of everyday fascism is that it has no period footage. Brownlow's 1968 book about the film's production, "How It Happened Here", has recently been republished. More inside.
posted on Feb 12, 2006 - View this thread
The Man With The Magnétoscope. "How marvelous to be able to look at what you cannot see... cinema, like Christianity, is not founded on historical truth. It supplies us with a story and says: Believe — believe come what may."
Jean Luc Godard's 'Histoire(s) du Cinéma' at UCLA.
posted on Feb 7, 2006 - View this thread
Hitchcock Gallery. Stills from Sir Alfred's movies: Hitchcock blondes. Mothers in Hitchcock movies. Dangling and falling. Eyes in Hitchcock movies. Match cuts. 'Tunnel' shots.
'Pieta' shots. How to throw a punch. Also: Hitchcock & Psychoanalysis. (homepage)
posted on Feb 2, 2006 - View this thread
And suddenly, in my memory, everything turns real: the summer breeze of Izu, the lazy sun of an early afternoon, the stale smell of water standing in the rice fields. For a moment it is that day in 1956, 37 years ago, and I am standing there, 33 years old myself. See—just to the left of the camera, just out of range. Here comes Mifune running, and there stands my younger ghost, right of that pillar, just off screen... And the summer sun beats down and the fresh breeze of Izu bathes my face, and then the story continues and the film ends and the lights go up and the students open their notebooks and I stand up and began talking about the influence of the Noh.
Donald Richie (previous post), the worldwide authority on Japanese film, shares his movie memories.
posted on Feb 1, 2006 - View this thread
Hollywood fights back: is this the year Hollywood finally nails its political colours to the mast, or are we seeing just the latest salvo in a battle for the political heart of the industry? [NYT registration required.]
In the red corner, "uninformed, misleading, money-hungry, two-faced, elitists" making films about gays, feminists and commies. In the blue corner, "towering intellectuals, hard-core conservatives, supermen and superwomen, and just good common people" making films about god, democracy and family values.
And if you wonder what difference it makes anyway, just ask eBay founder Jeff Skoll. He thinks films have the power to shape public opinion, and has launched a website to galvanise support for social change.
posted on Jan 20, 2006 - View this thread
"One could go on, and one will -- praising (...) the National Center for Jewish Film for releasing all four of Edgar Ulmer's Yiddish films in restored editions. But the DVD player is beckoning, and I think it is time for me to get back to the couch".
The National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) is a unique nonprofit motion picture archive, distributor and resource center housing the largest, most comprehensive collection of Jewish-theme film and video in the world. In their archives you can discover the works of Leo Fuchs, the "Yiddish Fred Astaire", restored gems (scroll down) like "Motl the Operator" and re-releases like "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg". (More on Greenberg, the Jewish kid who challenged Babe Ruth’s homerun record here, more on the NCJF inside).
posted on Jan 9, 2006 - View this thread
King Kong's Post Production Diary - videos of weekly progress, on all aspects of filmmaking, starting from the first day of post-production, upto the premiere.
posted on Dec 19, 2005 - View this thread
"... 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 on Nov 18, 2005 - View this thread
The Emperor's Bunker. "The Japanese, with sadness and irony, stressed that Hirohito couldn't even speak properly. This was partly to do with the fact that he didn't have to speak - people spoke in his name and he was isolated from real life".
"The Sun", the third part in Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's 'Men of Power' tetralogy after the gloom of Moloch (1999), about Hitler and Eva Braun, and the despairing tones of "Taurus" (2001), focused on the wheelchair-bound Lenin in his death throes, "The Sun" seems almost upbeat. This, after all, is a film about reconciliation. More inside.
posted on Sep 13, 2005 - View this thread
Truman Capote's Blood Work Two soon-to-be released films on Truman Capote's life, Capote and Have You Heard? begin as the novelist drops into rural Kansas to begin work on what became "In Cold Blood". More inside.
posted on Aug 18, 2005 - View this thread
"It has always been as if I carry chaos with me the way others carry typhoid. My purpose in writing is to transcend my existence by illuminating it."
Crime novelist Edward Bunker, who died last Tuesday at age 71 (LATimes obit), became at 17 the youngest inmate at San Quentin after he stabbed a prison guard at a youth detention facility. It was during his 18 years of incarceration for robbery, check forgery and other crimes that Bunker learned to write. In 1973, while still in prison, he made his literary debut with "No Beast So Fierce", a novel about a paroled thief James Ellroy called "quite simply one of the great crime novels of the past 30 years" and that was made into the movie "Straight Time" starring Dustin Hoffman. Also a screenwriter ("Runaway Train"), Bunker appeared as an actor in nearly two dozen roles, most notably as Mr. Blue in "Reservoir Dogs." (more inside)
posted on Jul 25, 2005 - View this thread
'I haven't seen a porno film in 20 years or more. No need to. I got my wife'. Harry Reems tells about his struggle to survive Deep Throat.
posted on May 22, 2005 - View this thread
"When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off". "21-87" is an experimental film made in 1964 by Canadian avant-garde director Arthur Lipsett ,who committed suicide in 1986.
"George" is George Lucas, who was obsessed by underground movies until "a little movie called Star Wars lured him to the dark side". (more inside)
posted on May 2, 2005 - View this thread
I don't know what "independent film" means. At a time when the Weinsteins are trying to extricate themselves from Disney, it seems an appropriate question to ask. There are Indie films (non-industry money) that are
supposed to imitate fancy hollywood films, there are new studios being opened outside of LA by Wealthy Christians in Denver hoping to convert through CS Lewis movies and there are Garden State, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine etc. which are like other Hollywood films: have stars, and studio money but are marketed as "Independent Films." What makes these independent? Finally, and seemingly too infrequently, there are privately financed and self-distributed unusual films like
Assisted Living which despite their obvious merits and the critic's adoration are presumably ignored by the studios, blasted by the brain-numbing EW and distributed instead by the two young first-time filmmakers
Why can't we see more non-hollywood and non-hollywood espousing independent ART on the screen? Why do we let every other multi-million dollar romantic comedy be sold to us as "indy" just because it has a quirky soundtrack or aesthetic sensibility. What can we do about it? I'm going to the movies. You?
posted on Apr 15, 2005 - View this thread
Better known for their modernist take on contemporary furniture design, Minneapolis furniture studio Blu Dot has just introduced a series of film shorts entitled Blu Dot Shorts. Their first short film, Seven Twenty (embedded Quicktime warning), was directed by Christopher Arcella (Flash warning). While is is not earth shattering conceptually, it is a jaunty and fun little piece of cinema.
posted on Apr 6, 2005 - View this thread
The Cheerful Transgressive Ever since 1971, when Larry Clark published Tulsa, an austere series chronicling his meth-shooting pals in sixties Oklahoma, Clark has made it his mission to document teenagers at their most deviant, their most vulnerable, their most sexually unhinged (possibly NSFW). And now “Larry Clark” the first American retrospective of Clark’s work, currently on display at the International Center of Photography, demonstrates the richness with which he’s mined this single subject (NSFW). More inside.
posted on Mar 31, 2005 - View this thread
“The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.” In "Tout Va Bien", just released on Criterion DVD, four years after May '68 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin examine the wreckage: fading workers' empowerment (page with sound), media fatuity, capitalist sprawl, global imperialist mayhem, interpersonal disconnections.
"Tout Va Bien" is the story of a strike at a factory as witnessed by an American reporter (Jane Fonda) and her has-been New Wave film director husband (Yves Montand).
Included on the DVD is also Letter to Jane (1972), a short film in which Godard and Gorin spend an hour examining the semiotics of a single, hypnotizing photograph of Fonda as she shares feelings with a Vietnamese villager. More inside.
posted on Mar 8, 2005 - View this thread
Eastwood wins. Clint Eastwood got the double dipper tonight with Best Pic and Director. Not that Scorsese isn't badly due one, but the fact is, The Aviator is not one of Marty's top five films, while Million Dollar Babies is top five among Eastwood's pics. It's that simple.
My thought: I think this film and Mystic River proves, once and for all and without argument, that Eastwood is among the top American directors ever, up there with Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, and the others. (He's actually better than Allen). I think all of the critics like Pauline Kael who dissed Clint without thinking over the years have to eat it and eat it hard.
posted on Feb 27, 2005 - View this thread
The End Of Sexual Taboos: Erotic and Pornographic Cinema. Not safe for work.
posted on Feb 26, 2005 - View this thread
Ten best film list a critique of the U.S? The venerable [some say notorious] French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema unveiled their ten best films of 2004 list recently.
Other than their list typically leaning toward films by auteurs - such as Ingmar Bergman and Hou Hsiao-hsien [and Tarantino] - they also included The Village by M. Night Shyamalan. With that choice are they rewarding the artistic merits of the film [which most critics view as minimal] or are they making a statement about The United States? In short do they view the U.S. like the characters in the film - an isolated bunch of paranoid [Puritan] villagers living and acting off of their fears? Or is there some other reason they would choose the film as one of the year's best?
posted on Feb 24, 2005 - View this thread
"You can fool everybody, but landie dearie me, you can't fool a cat. They seem to know who's not right". The psychoanalyst calmly explains to his patient that her idea that she is turning into a member of the cat family is a fantasy; she silences him with fang and talon.
Val Lewton made his name as a producer with the horror film Cat People, produced for RKO on a minuscule budget and directed by Jacques Tourneur. The star? French actress Simone Simon, who died today in Paris aged 93. More inside.
posted on Feb 23, 2005 - View this thread
Call her Madame. Among the old-timers, the story went like this: a woman known to everyone as Madame came to California from Kentucky with her children and her husband. But once they were in the Gold Rush State, her husband left her. Desperate to find work, she introduced herself to a movie director named D. W. Griffith. He not only cast her in his movie, but the two became friends for life. And with this woman, called Madame Sul-Te-Wan, what we now call Black Hollywood began -- as a new book by historian Donald Bogle explains.
(more inside)
posted on Feb 7, 2005 - View this thread
"Unsatisfactory movie viewing can only be attributed to human error." The Denver Post examines the way technology can help viewers find their next favorite movie.
posted on Jan 30, 2005 - View this thread
Remember the Noir Genius Exam? Wanna know the the answers?
posted on Jan 7, 2005 - View this thread
Josie Hayes' Great Moments in Film History. "Being a series of pictorial essays on some of the defining moments in cinema...at least the way I see it." [Not unsafe for work, but perhaps unwise]
posted on Jan 5, 2005 - View this thread
Discovering Japan. As a perennial outsider at loose in Japan, writer Donald Richie captures the joyous freedom of being foreign. The foreign observer is likely to be happy only if he sees his foreignness as an adventure, and recognizes that he has given up a sense of belonging for a sense of freedom, traded the luxury of being understood for that of being permanently interested.
Richie, the philosopher-king of expats in Asia for the past half-century, arrived in Tokyo in 1947 as a typist with the U.S. government and never really left, writing dozens of books , on Japanese movies, temples, history and fashion, while enjoying himself as an actor, musician, filmmaker and painter. The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 is a monument to the pleasures of displacement. Richie watchers can observe, more intimately than ever, a man who is generally happiest observing. More inside.
posted on Nov 9, 2004 - View this thread
Detailing the impossible. Louis Feuillade made more than 800 films covering almost every contemporary genre: historical drama, comedy, realist drama, melodrama, religious films. However, he was most famous, or infamous, for his crime serials: Fantômas (1913-14), Les Vampires, Judex (1916), La Nouvelle Mission de Judex (1917), Tih-Minh (1918) and Barrabas (1919).
Critics panned his crime films, often savagely, because the preoccupation of French critics and film-makers in the 1910s and 20s was to elevate cinema -– and, ironically, back then the French saw their own films as lacking the artistry and sophistication of American ones, by Griffith or DeMille – to the level of art. It was years before Feuillade's films escaped the label of aesthetic backwardness. Now, critics have realized that what Feuillade has done is to offer us an alternative cinematic mode to Griffiths', one that continues in updated variants throughout cinema. It is predicated on a principle of uncertainty, that questions our understanding of the real. It is as fluid and elusive a tradition as a cat burglar, dressed in black on a night-time rooftop.
posted on Nov 8, 2004 - View this thread
Movie Mistakes. A truly massive and comprehensive site by and for movie enthusiasts, not just the fussy ones either.(via Something Like That)
posted on Oct 18, 2004 - View this thread
Dazed and Sued. Three Huntsville residents who say they went to high school with Austin film director Richard Linklater accused him of using them as the basis for the girl-chasing, drug-taking characters in his film "Dazed and Confused" in a lawsuit filed last week, 11 years after the movie was released
(Universal Studios, also included in the suit, is scheduled to release a special edition DVD of the movie Nov. 2.) More inside.
posted on Oct 12, 2004 - View this thread
cin-o-matic, it's a tool to help people decide what movies to go see or rent. The interface is simple and is growing on me, the url is hard to share by word of mouth, and it integrates with netfilx. [by and via dack]
posted on Aug 9, 2004 - View this thread
Check that random selection of classic screenplays. I'd like to thank that other girl.
posted on Aug 7, 2004 - View this thread
Just in time, you’ve found me just in time. Richard Linklater, like Wong Kar-wai, is a lyrical and elegiac filmmaker. In many of his films, as in many of Wong's (and as in Ming-liang Tsai's What Time Is It There?), the subject is time -- the romance and poetry of moments ticking by, the wonder and anguish of living through and then remembering an hour or a day.
In 1995 Linklater made Before Sunrise, the story of the chance encounter of two strangers (an American young man and a French young woman) on a European train and their sleepless night in Vienna. Now ten years have passed, and they meet again in Paris: they -- and the audience -- only have 80 minutes to make up for the time they lost, Before Sunset. Linklater's new film, shot in uncut Steadycam takes (the longest clocks in at 11 minutes), in a sense is about how we create selves just by talking. But it’s also about how we become prisoners of time.
Towards the end of the movie, Celine, sitting in the backseat of a car with Jesse, starts to caress his head while he isn't looking, then suddenly pulls back, and that simple curtailed gesture carries in it a sense of tragedy, the consequence of the weight of time... (more inside, with Nina Simone)
posted on Jul 20, 2004 - View this thread
The poet of nightfall Twentyfive years ago, film director Nicholas Ray died in New York. Like Jacques Tati and Samuel Fuller, Ray did a lot of living before he ever got around to filmmaking: he was of part of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship, a devotee of southern folk music, an avant-garde theatre director. He had made Rebel Without a Cause and survived James Dean, and the title of the film seemed to dramatise his terrible, self-destructive battles with Hollywood. His films (They Live By Night, In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, Johnny Guitar, The Savage Innocents, King of Kings) were in love with imprisoned life, but the dark edge of mourning was always there, too. He was idolised by the young Cahiers du Cinema critics who would become the directors of the New Wave. François Truffaut once noted: "There are no Ray films that do not have a scene at the close of day; he is the poet of nightfall, and of course everything is permitted in Hollywood except poetry." Contrasting Ray and Howard Hawks, he added: "But anyone who rejects either should never go to the movies again, never see any more films". Jean-Luc Godard offered another sweeping panegyric: "There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And cinema is Nicholas Ray. These days, lucky Chicagoans can admire one of Ray's greatest works, Bitter Victory -- the film about the dangerous games men play with macho self-images... (more inside)
posted on Jun 18, 2004 - View this thread
AP reports that Michael Moore's upcoming film "Fahrenheit 9/11" was given an 'R' rating today by the MPAA. The same MPAA that says violence is much more acceptable than sex. The same MPAA that has close ties to the FCC, running roughshod over First Ammendment freedoms. The same MPAA headed by Jack Valenti who played himself in Freakazoid! a cooky cartoon about superheroes that save Washington D.C. Email him if you disagree at jvalenti@mpaa.org or call the MPAA 818-995-6600 x396.
posted on Jun 14, 2004 - View this thread
TCM is playing tribute this month to Archie Leach, better known to the world as Cary Grant. The range of films, the types of roles, the co-stars. Makes you long for another era of american film-making. Of interest to you architect types might be Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House of 1948, with the fabulous
One of the most interesting items to come out of the TCM documentary is Cary's embracing LSD in the early pre-illegal tests of it.
posted on Jun 1, 2004 - View this thread
"Whadyawant, motherf*ck?" These are the first words Charles Bukowski speaks in John Dullaghan's documentary about the poet and novelist, famous for his writing and infamous for his drinking and brawling and screwing. The audience member might respond, "To hear your story, Hank, that's what I want."
The movie opens with friends (Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, Bono) and colleagues and lovers and fans recounting the myth; theirs are stories of blades pulled on the maitre d' of the swanky Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, of dangling dicks revealed in public, of a drunk who'd just as soon crack his bottle over your head than share its contents. (more inside)
posted on May 28, 2004 - View this thread
In the Mood for Rapture. "Forget the completion anxiety that attended Wong Kar-wai's new film 2046 — four years in the gestating, with scenes still being shot a few weeks ago — what 2046 makes unavoidably clear, is that Wong Kar-wai is the most romantic filmmaker in the world.
Love, the playwright Terry Johnson wrote, is something you fall in. Wong's films make art out of that vertiginous feeling. They soar as their characters plummet". It is a sequel of sorts to Wong's In the Mood for Love. It is the story of a writer: in his novel, a mysterious train left for 2046 every once in a while. Everyone who went there had the same intention: to recapture their lost memories. (more inside)
posted on May 24, 2004 - View this thread
Silent Movies.
posted on May 18, 2004 - View this thread
The Face That Launched A Thousand Ships Just in time for "Troy Story", a lyrical evocation of the Iliad.
posted on May 11, 2004 - View this thread
Done Deal: Script and Pitch Sales. Find out which scripts are being scooped up these days. Read the site and anxiosly await Krakatoa:
During the 1883 volcanic explosion off the coast of Java, social, political and cultural orders were also in major turmoil. But during all this turbulence, a romance is able to develop.It's like Pearl Harbor and Volcanon, but with a twist!
Masters of Cinema is a film blog 'for discerning cineastes the world over,' with news on directors, films, dvd releases, aspect ratio controversies, and many links to director tribute sites. They also have sites dedicated to Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Ozu Yasujiro, and Andrei Tarkovsky. (The last two previously posted by hama7 and I, but it's nice to see everything together)
posted on Mar 8, 2004 - View this thread
The Alias Men.
posted on Dec 28, 2003 - View this thread
Skinema. It's not what you think.
posted on Jul 17, 2003 - View this thread
Pre-cinema devices & diversions - before film, multimedia amusements ranged from zoetropes and magic lantern shows to praxinoscopes and kinetescopes. Whether you're a film buff or a photographer or simply just prone to nostalgia for a day when the world seemed less jaded, you will love this site - take the time to take the tour.
posted on Mar 4, 2003 - View this thread
Nuclear war on film The Los Angeles Times [registration required] reviews the potrayal of nuclear war in the movies.
posted on Jun 23, 2002 - View this thread
Cannes film sickens audience It proved so shocking that 250 people walked out, some needing medical attention. Good lord.
posted on May 26, 2002 - View this thread
Turner Classic Movies programs Harold Lloyd tribute. I've seen stills from "Safety Last" for years, but have never been able to track down the movie. Is it as good as all the critics say? I'm looking forward to finding out.
What other old movies have you been wanting to see for years? (I keep meaning to get around to renting "The Bank Dick.")
Along the same lines, what do you wish would be available on VHS/DVD?
posted on May 25, 2002 - View this thread
Here's Entertainment Weekly's Top 5 Surprisingly Romantic Films for Valentine's Day. (Star Man!?) This begs the question: who actually reads Entertainment Weekly? Oh, and what are YOUR Top 5 Romantic Films for Valentine's Day?
posted on Feb 11, 2002 - View this thread
