Smart Words About Cinema
Contributor
“I have become an individual with a DV camera…it was DV that saved me, that allowed me to maintain a kind of personal relationship to documentary filmmaking, and made it far more than just an identity.” Inspired by a current MOMA retrospective, Aaron Cutler takes stock of 25 years of independent Chinese documentaries, a movement [...]
French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris 1923-1928 (Flicker Alley) presents of the stateside DVD debut of five silent classics from Film Albatros, a French studio founded by Russian artists: The Burning Crucible, Kean, The Late Mathias Pascal, Gribiche, and The New Gentlemen. Three of the films star Ivan Mosjoukine, the great Russian actor who fled [...]
R. Emmet Sweeney’s profile of William Witney goes beyond just signing on to Tarantino’s endorsement. He paints the picture of a young man lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time—when your coworkers could include Yakima Canutt, and a friendly visit to Busby Berkeley’s set could show you a whole new [...]
Leah Warshawski didn’t set out for a movie career. “I got into it because I worked on a boat in college,” recalls the co-director of Finding Hillywood, speaking by phone from a shoot in Idaho. She was studying Japanese at the University of Hawaii when the marine coordinator of the 2003 TV movie Baywatch: Hawaiian [...]
“Jubal” (Criterion) “3:10 to Yuma” (Criterion) Delmer Daves was a Hollywood pro with a long career and an impressive filmography. He established himself as a screenwriter with a series of light comedies and romantic melodramas (including the original 1939 Love Affair) before stepping behind the camera with the World War II adventure Destination Tokyo. Like [...]
As the story goes, Ray Harryhausen was inspired to explore the possibilities of stop-motion animation after seeing King Kong with his best friend. That said friend was Ray Bradbury makes the story irresistible. That Harryhausen went on to apprentice under Willis O’Brien, the very man who sculpted and animated the king of the jungle and [...]
There are several flippant ways to respond to Quentin Tarantino’s remarks about John Ford’s purported racism, from gruff dismissal to just tossing out Sergeant Rutledge and calling it a day. Kent Jones offers the thoughtful response, and it’s definitive. Also at Film Comment, subversion of a less haunted, more joyously playful sort, in Maitland McDonagh’s [...]
“That’s why I’m spending so much time talking to you about the business and the money, because this is the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies. I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too [...]
Ken Loach, that old British leftie director, keeps up his commitment to the poor and disenfranchised with The Angels’ Share, his latest collaboration with equally socially conscious screenwriter Paul Laverty. It’s set in the familiar Loach environs of troubled youth, the unemployed, and the eternal underclass—here specifically the slums of Glasgow. But after the political [...]
Ricky Jay is arguably the greatest master of sleight-of-hand and legerdemain in America today, but he’s more than an old-school magician with contemporary wit. He’s an actor, sure, a familiar presence in the films of David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson, yet he’s also a historian of magic and showbiz oddities, a collector of stories [...]
It’s back. The Seattle International Film Festival, the biggest, the longest, and the best attended film festival in America, opens on Thursday, May 16 with Joss Whendon’s Much Ado About Nothing. That was announced a few weeks and news that the director and much of his cast (drawn from various orbits of the Whedonverse) would [...]
Some marvelous audio finds from Cinephilia and Beyond. First, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman work out the bishop’s kidnapping from Family Plot, the screenwriter cautious to fit the scene in to the movie as a whole, the director with the cathedral already [...]
Physical perfection has been an ideal for as long as there has been civilization, celebrated in games and competitions, extolled in song and story, captured in paintings and, since the late 19th century, photographs and movies. That inspiration continues today. In Pain and Gain, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson pump iron to sculpt themselves into [...]
Pierre Etaix (Criterion) Circus acrobat, clown, cabaret star, artist, actor, and for a brief time director, Pierre Etaix (pronounced eh-TEX) is one of the great comedy treasures of France. It wasn’t meant to be a secret, but his relatively small body of work as a director—he made five features (four comedies and a documentary) and [...]
Jackie Chan’s landmark action spectacles “Police Story” and “Police Story 2″ debut on Blu-ray stateside this week on a double-feature disc (reviewed on Videodrone here). These films were blockbuster smashes in Hong Kong and international hits everywhere except the U.S., and they changes the course of Hong Kong film industry. If you like this brand [...]