Mitchum, Rivette, and More

“The gaffers and grips, the electricians and sound men, all the technicians begin to mill about briskly on the thick-sodded grass adjacent to the ice-rimed children’s wading pool. Even the park’s casual strollers, walking their diarrheic poodles and mastiffs, begin to form small, excited queues, because word has it that Robert Mitchum . . . fabled wild boy of the road, myth-dripping bete noir of more than a hundred movies . . . is arising . . . and coming to the location site . . . before noon.” That’s from Grover Lewis’s “Robert Mitchum: The Last Celluloid Desperado,” a report from the set of The Friends of Eddie Coyle that ran in Rolling Stone in March 1973. Via Movie City News.

L’amour fou (1969) “is the missing link in Rivette’s filmography, in many respects the key to unlocking and better understanding Out 1’s myriad mysteries,” writes Matt Thrift for Little White Lies. “Not that the earlier film represents a work-in-progress en route to the latter. If anything, it’s the more hermetic of the two works, and certainly the more emotionally direct. It’s also, for my money at least, the director’s greatest film.”

Celluloid Liberation Front writes about the cinema of Steve Bannon for Sight & Sound: “Far from being a marginal recrudescence of world cinema, his documentaries are the repressed demons of a documentary practice struggling to relate to reality or at least chronicle its disappearance from our screens. That Bannon’s toxic narratives have self-validated themselves says more about the tragic lack of counter-narratives than it does about their original effectiveness.”

A new issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room is up, and RogerEbert.com is running Katherine Webb’s piece on Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2013).

Interviews

For Slant, Clayton Dillard talks with Bertrand Bonello “about the contradictions at the heart of contemporary life in France, the intersection between pop culture and terrorism, and how Dawn of the Dead provides a mirror for the events in Nocturama.”

For Vulture, Carl Swanson meets Josh and Benny Safdie and their star, Robert Pattinson, to talk about Good Time. As Swanson notes, the film is “part of a larger project, or experiment, for Pattinson, now 31, to redefine his career, and himself, to use his supernatural fame for something good—or interesting to him, anyway. ‘What he wanted,’ says Benny, ‘was, as he said, to disappear into something, to make something where he is not himself. And we thought: Let’s take him at his word.’”

“When you make the list of the best movies of all time, you’re always going to put Airplane! on it,” Judd Apatow tells David Marchese at Vulture. “If someone made a movie as funny as Airplane! right now it would make a billion dollars. Occasionally people try; most of the time they fail.”

At RogerEbert.com, Nick Allen has no doubt that Whose Streets?, a documentary that “tells the story of Ferguson from the community's perspective,” will be “one of the most important and most emotional you'll see this year.” He talks with directors Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis.

Interview’s Emma Brown talks with Taylor Sheridan about Wind River.

Mike Ryan chats with Jeff Bridges for Uproxx.

In Other News

“Netflix has marked its first ever acquisition by buying Millarworld, the publishing outfit founded by Mark Millar, who created the Kingsman and Kick-Ass franchises,” reports Screen’s Tom Grater. “Millarworld will continue to create new character franchises and evolve its current properties through feature films and series, which will exclusively be available to Netflix subscribers.”

“Cinema Guild has acquired all U.S. distribution rights to Valeska Grisebach’s thriller Western, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival,” reports Variety’s Dave McNary.

In the Works

Cate Blanchett will star as Lucille Ball in Lucy and Desi, a drama written by Aaron Sorkin and just picked up by Amazon Studios, reports Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr.

Ruth Negga is joining Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones in James Gray’s sci-fi project Astra. According to the Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Ford and Borys Kit, the film “is described as an adventure film about one man’s journey across a lawless and unforgiving solar system to find his missing father, a renegade scientist who poses a threat to all of mankind.”

Rebecca Thomas, who “has the unique distinction of being one of only two people outside the Duffer brothers and Shawn Levy to direct an episode of Netflix’s Stranger Things, the other being Wall-E director Andrew Stanton,” will direct Malignant, “a sci-fi action-thriller that James Wan is producing.” THR’s Borys Kit has more.

On Broadway, Amy Schumer and Keegan-Michael Key will star in Steve Martin’s play Meteor Shower.Austin Elias-de Jesus has more at Slate.

Obits

“Haruo Nakajima, who wore the Godzilla bodysuit for every Godzilla film from the original to 1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan, has died,” reports Erin Nyren for Variety. Nakajima was eighty-eight.

“Except for a few brief notices in the trades, the death of Italian actor Paolo Villaggio on July 3 went virtually unnoticed outside of his native country,” writes Giovanni Vimercati for Film Comment. “In Italy, news of his passing sent shockwaves through the national conscious with a magnitude that is in itself revealing. An unofficial national day of mourning was observed with quasi-religious devotion in a country notoriously split on pretty much everything. . . . Practically everyone spared a heartfelt moment for one of the most unflattering national icon one could imagine (short of Mr. Bean).”

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