Smart Words About Cinema
Marrow screens at Northwest Film Forum for two nights, on Tuesday, January 24 and Wednesday, January 25. See the NWFF website for showtimes and ticket information. I’ve known filmmakers Matt Wilkins and Eliza Fox for almost eight years. I met them when their first film, Buffalo Bill’s Defunct, had its local premiere at SIFF in [...]
Marrow, the second feature from Seattle filmmaker Matt Wilkins, screens at Northwest Film Forum for two nights, on Tuesday, January 24 and Wednesday, January 25, with director Wilkins in attendance. I wrote a profile of Wilkins and his film for the film’s local debut at SIFF 2011. I reprint the feature, originally published in Seattle [...]
Back in 2007, in conjunction with the release of Inland Empire, I had the opportunity to interview David Lynch twice in the same year. This is the second of the two interviews, conducted over the phone and focused on the DVD release of Inland Empire, which he produced and distributed independently through his company Absurda. [...]
[originally published on Greencine, August 2007] David Lynch, the once boyish maverick of such dark, demanding, and confounding films as Blue Velvet and Lost Highway (not to mention the gentle, G-rated slice of slightly askew Americana, The Straight Story), is 60 now. You can see his age in has face and his graying hair (still [...]
Quentin Tarantino developed a reputation not simply for unconventional storytelling and inventive writing, but for inspired casting. Reservoir Dogs introduced Lawrence Tierney to a new generation of crime movie fans. Pulp Fiction revived the faltering career of John Travolta. And Jackie Brown, his first film based on someone else’s story, he cast as his leads [...]
Jackie Brown may not Quentin Tarantino’s best film, but it should be. With grown up, lived-in characters, Tarantino broke through the jacked-up, smart talking pulp adolescents that populate his (admittedly ingenious and inventive) reference-riddled earlier films to tell the stories of a pair of middle-aged survivors. For those key roles, Tarantino cast a couple of [...]
Road to Nowhere is Monte Hellman’s first feature in 21 years. The director of The Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop, a resolutely personal director who turned out drive-in pictures for Roger Corman and spent his career largely transforming work-for-hire productions into distinctive and mysterious films, spent years taking jobs as editor and second-unit director while one [...]
by Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson [Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] Howard Winchester Hawks was home the afternoon of July 12, 1976. For some time there, it looked as if it wouldn’t happen. Kathleen Murphy had finally taken the leap and declared Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition [...]
By Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy [Originally published in Movietone News 55, September 1977] Robert Altman visited Seattle late last year in connection with the world premiere of Welcome to L.A. at the Harvard Exit. The directorial debut of his sometime assistant director and—on Buffalo Bill and the Indians—co-screenwriter Alan Rudolph, Welcome also marked [...]
By E. Steven Fried One of the great pleasures of SIFF 2004 was the opportunity to see Thom Andersen’s 169- minute video essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself. Utilizing hundreds of unauthorized clips of obscure and well-known films [you will never see this on DVD] Andersen poses the question:why is the most filmed city in the [...]
Jacki Weaver won her first Australian Film Institute Award in 1971 and has been a mainstay in Australian theater and television for decades. And now “Animal Kingdom” has made her a debutante all over again. Her performance as Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody, the mother of a brutal crime family in Melbourne, has earned accolades and awards [...]
As for quiet revelations in cinema, witness the exemplary case of Alamar (d. Pedro González-Rubio), in which a beautiful Mayan fisherman in Mexico’s Banco Chinchorro reef gets temporary custody of his 5 year-old son Natan, born to an Italian mother, and together they fish, eat, play and take notice of the natural wonders around them. [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] September 30, 1976 Could you tell me what Kings of the Road is about and how you came to make it? It’s a film about two men and they’re making a journey across, along the border of East Germany from the North to the South, which is [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] The Lacemaker (La Dentellière) was shown in the 1977 New York Film Festival. Claude Goretta, the director, and Isabelle Huppert, who costarred with Yves Beneyton, were interviewed before the film had opened commercially. The Lacemaker is the story of a young girl, employed at a beauty parlor, [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979] Sam Peckinpah visited Seattle for several days in July, 1978, under the joint auspices of the Seattle Film Society and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On the evening of July 19 he appeared at the Seattle Concert Theatre to talk with an audience that [...]