17Nov09
From Austin to Australia, there’s a wealth of film retrospectives playing all over the globe this week, featuring Criterion titles on the big screen. So depending on where you are, you may want to check one out—or pick up some home-viewing tips.
Currently ongoing in Taiwan (through November 28), as part of Taipei’s annual Golden Horse Film Festival, which showcases new and classic international films, is a special sidebar devoted to the imagery of cinematographer Mark Ping-bing Lee. This world-class DP has shot such films as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South Goodbye and Flight of the Red Balloon and Anh Hung Tran’s The Vertical Ray of the Sun but is perhaps best known for his work on Wong Kar-wai’s lush In the Mood for Love. Moving south, the Queensland Art Gallery in South Brisbane, Australia, is running a series called Living in the ’70s: Counter Culture Remixes French Cinema (November 18–29), which pays tribute to the nonconformist cinema of that decade: post–French New Wave, progressive, often independently produced films. They’re showing Chantal Akerman’s Les rendez-vous d’Anna and Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, as well as works by Jacques Rivette, Alain Tanner, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Luc Godard.
Here in the United States, things are a little more traditionally auteur-oriented, as the Austin Film Society turns its eye on that fantastically grim Finn Aki Kaurismäki with its series The Chilly Humorist of Finland, running from November 17 to December 15, and featuring all the films in his Proletariat Trilogy, plus some others, including his most recent film, Lights in the Dusk. And the up-and-running Los Angeles County Museum of Art film programmers are giving viewers a treat: a series of eight thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock made between 1930 and 1939, before he came to Hollywood, including, of course, the masterpieces The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Hitchcock: The British Thrillers runs from November 20 to November 28.
12Nov09
Louis Malle’s shadowy Paris comes to our nation’s capital on November 12 and 19, when the HR-57 Center for the Preservation of Jazz & Blues in Washington, D.C., will host special live performances of Miles Davis’s evocative music for Malle’s moody 1957 noir, Elevator to the Gallows. The score, which was famously recorded in a single, impromptu session, will be played by the Thad Wilson Big Band (whose namesake is a mainstay in the city’s U Street jazz clubs). The performance will be accompanied by a screening of the film, which concerns an adulterous couple whose nefarious plans go very wrong. Visit HR-57’s website for pricing and showtime info.
2Nov09
Ang Lee has confirmed that his next film will be an adaptation of Yann Martel’s mammoth best-seller Life of Pi, the fanciful tale of a young boy from Pondicherry, India, who survives a shipwreck only to be stranded in a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger as his companion. The 2001 novel has been a hot Hollywood property since its publication; it first emerged in February that Lee had his sights set on it. As reported in the Guardian, the Ice Storm director is still in the scripting and casting stage, and it will likely take him at least two years to finish the film.
27Oct09
For Halloween week, the Museum of Modern Art is showcasing a different kind of horror film. John Cassavetes’s domestic meltdown epic A Woman Under the Influence (which Kent Jones calls “alternately soaring and gut-wrenching” in his Criterion essay) is playing until October 30, in a new, restored print inaugurating MoMA’s seventh annual international festival of film preservation, To Save
and Project. And even if you’re not in the New York area, you can read Keith Uhlich’s new interview with the scary-good Gena Rowlands in Time Out New York, in which the actress, whose disturbed protagonist Mabel is one of cinema’s most heartbreaking creations, provides a little insight into Cassavetes’s motivations for making the movie: “His feeling was that the world is set up to
drive women crazy.”
27Oct09
This month marks the centenary of Kinuyo Tanaka, one of Japan’s most prolific actors as well as a director in her own right. In honor of the occasion, Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art is holding a retrospective, and critic Chris Fujiwara has written a revealing new piece for Moving Image Source about this beloved star, whose career stretched from the early 1920s to the late 1970s. Even if you don’t know her by name, you have probably seen at least one of her movies—Tanaka worked most often with Kenji Mizoguchi (Women of the Night, Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff) but also appeared in films by Yasujiro Ozu (I Graduated, But . . ., Equinox Flower), Hiroshi Shimizu (Ornamental Hairpin), Mikio Naruse (Flowing), Keisuke Kinoshita (The Ballad of Narayama), and Akira Kurosawa (Red Beard). Fujiwara details not only her on-screen roles but also her three-month tour of the United States as a cultural goodwill ambassador in the late forties, a turning point in her life.
22Oct09
Starting today, Paris is catching Fellini fever. The Cinémathèque française, the Jeu de Paume museum, and the Italian Cultural Institute of Paris are joining forces to pay an extended tribute to the Italian maestro. The Jeu de Paume exposition, Fellini, la grand parade, will look back on the director’s career and creative process via a multimedia mix of moving and still images—including hundreds of photographs, original sketches, magazine coverage of his films, and more—that will be on view until January 17. Meanwhile, the Italian Cultural Institute of Paris will feature lectures and discussions about the filmmaker from October to December.
The centerpiece of the celebration will be Tutto Fellini!, two months of screenings at the Cinémathèque—fifty-seven in total, including not only a complete retrospective of Fellini’s features and shorts but also films from screenplays written by him and directed by others, including Roberto Rossellini, Pietro Germi, and Alberto Lattuada; documentaries made about Fellini, including Gideon Bachmann’s Ciao! Federico; and some idiosyncratic choices, such as films that are inspired by his work (Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, based on Nights of Cabiria) or that feature rare on-screen appearances from the filmmaker (Alberto Sordi’s 1983 comedy The Taxi Driver). The Cinémathèque will also feature an opening-night round-table discussion with Fellini Foundation director Vittorio Boarini and such collaborators as Anouk Aimée, Claudia Cardinale, and Magali Noël. La dolce vita indeed!
21Oct09
It’s been only four years since the last film in his Death Trilogy, but Gus Van Sant is already journeying back to the land of the dead. Variety reports that the director will be teaming up with Bret Easton Ellis on a screenplay about the lives and 2007 double suicide of writer and video-game artist Theresa Duncan and digital painter Jeremy Blake (whose kaleidoscopic works were incorporated into Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love). They will adapt their story from Nancy Jo Sales’s Vanity Fair article “The Golden Suicides,” which asserts that the lovers’ downward spiral was partly the result of their paranoia that they were being targeted by agents of the Church of Scientology. The film will be a coproduction of PalmStar Entertainment, Celluloid Dreams, and K5 Film. Van Sant has not committed to directing the film himself.
9Oct09
If you’ve been wondering how on earth Lars von Trier would follow up Antichrist, it may not surprise you that for his next movie, he may be leaving Earth behind altogether. The Danish bad boy made an official announcement today that he would be turning to science fiction for Planet Melancholia, to be shot next summer in Germany and Sweden for von Trier’s production company, Zentropa (named, of course, after his 1991 World War II thriller). The only clue von Trier offered about the plot of the space movie, which according to the Hollywood Reporter is a “psychological disaster film,” is “No more happy endings!” This will come as a relief to everyone turned off by those giddy charmers Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, and Antichrist.
8Oct09
Louis Malle’s noirish French New Wave forerunner Elevator to the Gallows is getting a surprising new lift. The Japanese producer and distributor Kadokawa Pictures (once upon a time known as Daiei Motion Picture Company) is currently in production on a remake of the shadowy, stylish thriller, which originally starred Maurice Ronet and, in a breakout role, Jeanne Moreau. Their parts will now be filled by Hiroshi Abe (the star of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking) and Michiko Kichise. According to Screen Daily, the project has received the blessing of Malle’s son, producer Manuel Cuotemoc Malle. Principal photography on the film, directed by Akira Ogata, will wrap at the end of October.
2Oct09
As an annual showcase of approximately thirty new international films, the New York Film Festival may not be the world’s biggest movie gathering, but it has a special place in our hearts—and not just because we’re New Yorkers. The Film Society of Lincoln Center event has always been an occasion to see new works by filmmakers we know and love. And the relationship has gone the other way as well, with many past festival selections going on to become special Criterion editions (The Ice Storm, Ratcatcher, In the Mood for Love, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fat Girl, Brand upon the Brain!, A Christmas Tale).
This year’s festival, the forty-seventh, has already brought us Wild Grass, from eighty-seven-year-old Last Year at Marienbad magician Alain Resnais, and Vincere, from Fists in the Pocket’s onetime enfant terrible Marco Bellocchio. And there are more Criterion-approved auteurs to come between now and the festival’s end on October 11, including three with North American premieres: Andrzej Wajda (Sweet Rush), Pedro Costa (Ne change rien), and Catherine Breillat (Bluebeard). Of course, no 2009 festival would be complete without Lars von Trier’s Cannes cause célèbre Antichrist, which New Yorkers can see this weekend. And we can’t forget Henri-Georges Clouzot—he may be long passed, but he’s got a new film of sorts: Serge Bromberg’s documentary on his incomplete L’enfer, which we reported on from last month’s Toronto Film Festival. Get ticket information here.
