4Feb10
For the past couple of months, critics and movie lovers have been madly assessing the first decade of film of the twenty-first century, offering lists of its best movies—and we’re happy to report that many of Criterion’s contemporary titles have been making the cut. Sight & Sound is the latest to join in the celebration, with a best-of-the-decade retrospective in its new February issue. Editor Nick James introduces the list—determined collaboratively by the S&S editorial team—by considering “the directors, the countries, the trends and technological changes that are shaping the new global cinema.” The final lineup of thirty films, featured along with excerpts of pieces on them from the magazine’s archives, includes the Criterion releases Colossal Youth (“Surely destined to have a resounding influence on the future of European independent filmmaking,” writes Jonathan Romney), In the Mood for Love (which Amy Taubin calls “exquisite, fragile”), and Yi Yi (Tony Rayns: “No narrative outline can hope to convey anything of the novelistic density of character and incident in Edward Yang’s wonderful film, or the richness”).
Wide-ranging decade wrap-up polls have also recently appeared in Film Comment (which mentioned, in addition to those above, The Royal Tenenbaums, In Vanda’s Room, Summer Hours, and Fat Girl) and on indieWIRE.com (vote-getters there also included A Christmas Tale, Hunger, George Washington, Ratcatcher, and Traffic). Meanwhile, the Cinematheque Ontario is holding an ongoing film series titled The Best of the Decade: An Alternative View. As chief curator James Quandt explains on the Cinematheque’s site, to arrive at the final program, “we surveyed a deluxe panel of over sixty film curators, historians, archivists, and programmers.” Unsurprisingly, these selections include In the Mood for Love, Colossal Youth, In Vanda’s Room, and Yi Yi. The series runs through February 23.
22Jan10
Following in the triumphant recent footsteps of Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze, Martin Scorsese is, according to reports in Variety and the Guardian, likely turning to children’s literature for his next movie. And we’re big fans of the source material: author-illustrator Brian Selznick’s fanciful Caldecott Medal–winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a dazzlingly drawn, 550-page (!) storybook about a young orphan’s relationship with the mysterious Georges Meliès in turn-of-the-century Paris. Its combination of fantasy and film history should certainly make for a nice fit with movie-mad Scorsese. Incidentally, Selznick wrote a lovely appreciation for Criterion of another magical child’s-eye view of Paris: The Red Balloon.
14Jan10
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has bestowed its annual career achievement award on French New Wave icon Jean-Paul Belmondo. The ceremony will be held on Saturday, January 16, and, according to Leonard Klady, awards committee member and Screen International journalist, Belmondo will be attending and “visiting Los Angeles for the first time in decades.” Writes Klady of his organization’s seventy-six-year-old honoree, “He is one of the great and certainly most versatile actors in the history of cinema . . . He’s tough, funny, passionate, organic, certainly charismatic, and always engaged.” Other recent recipients of LAFCA’s career achievement award include Sidney Lumet, Richard Widmark, and Robert Altman.
While in town, the actor will be dropping by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to introduce a special screening of Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid, being shown as part of the weekend salute Spotlight on Jean-Paul Belmondo, which will also feature Godard’s Pierrot le fou and Resnais’ Stavisky. Click here for time and ticket info.
11Jan10
He was a literature teacher, a novelist, a magazine editor, and a film critic, but Eric Rohmer, who has died at the age of eighty-nine, will be most remembered, of course, as a filmmaker. And the legacy that Rohmer the auteur leaves behind encompasses even more than just his own formidable body of work; the term Rohmer-esque has been unofficially part of the film lexicon for some time now, most often used to describe philosophical, spare, dialogue-driven films about relationships between men and women (Rohmer’s style can be seen in the work of directors from Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas to Woody Allen and Richard Linklater). His best-known films of this realist sort include those in the series Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons, although Rohmer was also a fascinating formalist when it came to period pieces, whether in his intentionally artificial interpretation of an Arthurian legend, Perceval (1978), or in his technically progressive take on the French Revolution, The Lady and the Duke (2001), an early film to utilize computer-generated imagery for its backdrops.
Rohmer’s career, which has woven its way from the French New Wave to the digital revolution, has brought joy to movie lovers for six decades, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. In this short clip from a 2006 interview, available as a supplement in Criterion’s Six Moral Tales box set, Rohmer discusses with Barbet Schroeder the unique philosophical sensibility he brought to world cinema.
5Jan10
The holidays are finally over, but a different winter celebration is just beginning in London. This week, BFI Southbank is beginning its Yasujiro Ozu “season,” made up of two parallel sections: a complete retrospective of the surviving work of the Japanese filmmaker, whose poetic style has come to typify Japanese cinema for many international viewers, running from January 5 to February 27—and featuring all the long-established masterpieces (Tokyo Story, Floating Weeds) alongside some hard-to-find early genre titles (Dragnet Girl, Walk Cheerfully); and Ozu and His Influence, a showcase of films from around the world that pay homage to the master’s work, including titles from Claire Denis, Hou Hsaio-hsien, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, Ang Lee, and Wim Wenders—this series begins January 7 and concludes February 28. For more information on these retrospectives, check out introductions on the BFI website by Tony Rayns and Geoff Andrew. Meanwhile, Time Out London has taken a slightly less reverent approach to the series in its new online feature “The A–Z of Ozu,” which it calls a “bluffer’s guide” to the director’s career. And, of course, you can also explore the films of Ozu right here in the Criterion Collection.
27Dec09
London’s BFI Southbank will be celebrating Viennese-born visionary Josef von Sternberg in a five-film program, running December 27–30 and featuring some rarities from the director’s body of work, including his elusive final film, The Saga of Anatahan (1953). For the occasion, critic David Thompson has written a captivating career retrospective for the new issue of Sight and Sound, in which he argues that, whether working in Hollywood or Germany, Sternberg, “a man who always saw the medium as a vehicle for self-expression,” was a true auteur avant la lettre. Thompson looks at the filmmaker’s output, from Underworld and The Last Command (“subsequently credited as the first ‘gangster’ picture”) to his iconic works with Marlene Dietrich, including The Blue Angel, Morocco, and The Scarlet Empress, the last of which he calls “a censor-baiting cocktail of sensual excess and riotous design.”
23Dec09
He created some of film’s most dramatic moments, and his own experiences are about to become the stuff of drama. A series based on the life and career of Ingmar Bergman is currently in development for Swedish television, to be scripted by Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, one of the world’s best-selling authors. Mankell’s screenplay will focus on the darkest as well as lighter periods in the auteur’s life, and will follow him from his work in the theater to his many years on the remote island of Fårö, according to Screen Daily. Mankell told the magazine, “What fascinates me is the price Bergman had to pay for his uncompromising creativity—it darkened many aspects of the rest of his life.” The series is being planned as four one-hour episodes and will be broadcast in 2011.
22Dec09
March will officially mark Akira Kurosawa’s centennial, but tributes have already been popping up. Following hot on the heels of the release of the Criterion Collection’s mega collector’s set AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa, New York’s Film Forum will begin a twenty-nine-film retrospective on January 6. But first, Hong Kong is showing its Kurosawa spirit: it is currently hosting the AK 100 World Tour, a monthlong celebration commemorating the director’s major achievements. Included in this mammoth anniversary party will be screenings; photography exhibits; displays of costumes, props, and scripts used in Kurosawa’s films, such as Ran and Kagemusha; Kurosawa’s own notebooks and storyboards, including those from his famously unfinished Hollywood venture, Tora! Tora! Tora!; an exhibit of the calligraphy of Ryosetsu Imai, who designed the titles of many of Kurosawa’s films; and a concert of music from the films, performed by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Tomomi Nishimoto. The event began on December 19 and runs until January 17, after which it will travel to other cities around the world; for specific information on venues and times, read more here.
14Dec09
Almost sixty years ago, George Bernard Shaw died at age ninety-four, leaving behind an unfinished play. Tonight, in New York, that final work from the Pygmalion writer, Why She Would Not, will be presented in a reading by the Gingold Theatrical Group—and, in an irreverent twist a devoted Shavian might appreciate, the group’s founder, David Staller, has commissioned five possible endings to the play, from playwright Israel Horovitz and theater critics Michael Feingold, David Cote, Jeremy McCarter, and Robert Simonson. This event is the last in a long series (it’s been going on since January 2006) called Project Shaw, for which the Gingold Group has performed all of Shaw’s plays (including sketches and one-acts) at the Players club, near Manhattan’s Gramercy Park. To read more about this endeavor, and about Why She Would Not (a play about—what else?—class, money, and love), read David Belcher’s feature in the New York Times. Look out for Criterion’s Eclipse Series 20: George Bernard Shaw on Film in February.
10Dec09
British visual artist turned narrative filmmaker Steve McQueen is getting back in the director’s chair following the success of his award-winning Hunger. Variety announced this week that McQueen will be joining forces with Focus Features to make a biopic about Nigerian musician and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti (also, coincidentally, the subject of the high-profile new Broadway musical Fela!, produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith). Since Fela’s death in 1997, the influence of Afrobeat, the fusion of American jazz, funk, and West African drums that he is credited with creating, has been widely acknowledged. McQueen, along with Biyi Bandele, will adapt the script from Michael Veal’s book Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon. Focus’s James Schamus tells Variety, “Fela was a revolutionary figure in world culture, and Steve is an artist who had a strong vision of politics and the world even before he made his first film. They are kindred spirits.”
