Oscar, Oscar, Oscar...- Between the newly inflated Best Picture category, the battle-of-the-sexes banter, the joy from fanboydom, the shenanigans of an over-zealous producer, and the feigned ex-spousal rivalry drummed up by the media, the Interweb has been all ablaze with Oscar-related stories at a rate that far exceeds previous years, or so it seems. (I guess it's a distraction from discussing economic genocide.)
Few of the films I cared about in 2009 are represented among the nominees, and those that are stand l... (more)
- I, For Film
- Well, it's not quite the long-promised return to blogging (which, as Buddha is my witness, will happen in the near future) but I did want to mention that besides my occasional stint at Time Out New York, or getting beat-up over at Salon.com, the fine folks at across the pond at Eye For Film have asked me to contribute to their fine site, and my first review for them, The Ghost Writer (directed by some Polish guy) has just been posted.
... (more)
- Other Posters, Other Films 2000-2009
- Inspired by my good friend Adrian Curry, whose Movie Posters of the Decade post over at The Auteurs led critic (and Twitter fiend) Roger Ebert to issue forth a "bleh" (and then respond with his own choices), I thought I'd join in on the fun and put together a post on posters as well.
Yet rather than "best" or "favorite" I decided to focus on films and/or posters that aren't as well known here in the States -- things I saw at film festivals, or in a P... (more)
- Chaos Reigns! - The Unofficial Soundtrack to the 2009 New York Film Festival
- After a two month unplanned hiatus, Like Anna Karina's Sweater is back, and with a new look to boot. It was never my intention to stay away for so long, but matters both personal and professional consumed nearly all of my waking hours. Running a small business in this economic climate, and specifically a DVD business -- well, let's just say that the money isn't pouring in. Still, there are some very exciting developments with Benten/Watchmaker that will be announced in the coming wee... (more)
- Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 19 - We Have a Winner!
- The extra-long all-opening-credits round of the Filmbrain Screen Capture Quiz is finally over!
Regular contestant Max G. was the lone voice in the wind this week as he (somehow!) recognized the blue curtain and moon behind it from the opening of Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart, a desert-island movie if ever there was one.
This is the film that drove Coppola into bankruptcy, and forced him to take on studio fare such as the truly awful Jack. But you know what? It was... (more)
- Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 19 - Tiebreaker 1
- A quick correction to last week's post. There are in fact four people with perfect scores, not three as I had reported.
Here's the first of the tiebreaker quizzes. Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!
... (more)
- Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 19 - We (Don't) Have a Winner!
- A day (or two) late and a dollar short. Wednesday came and went, as did Thursday. It was only late last night that I found the time to tally up the entries for the round. It appears there are three people who managed to get all sixteen correct, and as a result a tie-breaker round (or rounds) will be needed. I'll have to spend some time this weekend thinking and searching for additional interesting title sequences. Check back on Wednesday for the first tie-breaker.[Update: Forgot to inclu... (more)
- Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 19, Week 16
- A variation of the 20th Century Fox logo on a Los Angeles billboard appears at the beginning of Mel Brooks' triumphant experiment, Silent Movie, from 1976. There were some pretty far-out guesses (Aliens?) but most managed to work it out.I wrote a primer of sorts this week on the films of Sion Sono (Love Exposure, Suicide Club) over at Greencine Daily. It was meant to be peppered with quotes, but my allotted interview time with him was cut severely short. Very frustrating. I also participated... (more)
- Today SXSW '10 PODCAST: Jonah Hill
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Superbad and Knocked Up star Jonah Hill has primarily been known for stealing laughs, but in the charming new dramedy Cyrusâmaking a regional premiere at SXSWâHill shows surprising depth in an idiosyncratic role that allows him room to stretch:
With John's (John C. Reilly) social life at a standstill and his ex-wife (Catherine Keener) about to get remarried, a down-on-his-luck divorcee finally meets the woman of his dreams (Marisa Tomei), only to discover she has another man in... (more)
- 3 days SXSW â10: Putty Hill, Mars, Cold Weather
- by Vadim Rizov
Putty Hill begins with brisk, no-nonsense establishing shots
from the rural parts of Baltimoreâa house, a hillâand then the
opening credits pause everything before it's started. We're looking at
a wall: the light's mid-day but diffuse, red is coming from somewhere,
and you can hear a cello warming up its scales and arpeggios. It's a
startlingly atmospheric, non-naturalistic opening for what should be
quotidian social realism, and indicative of where Putty Hill
is head... (more)
- SFIAAFF '10: The Housemaid
- by Adam Hartzell
Before the Korean New Wave (represented by such international film festival faves as Lee Chang-dong, Hong Sang-soo and Kim Ki-duk) and long before homegrown productions like Shiri, Oldboy, and The Host began dominating the Seoul box office, there was a "Golden Age" of South Korean cinema, and the landmark that started that cine-luminous era was the late Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960, a/k/a Hanyo). Bay Area audiences will finally have a chance to view this classic in ... (more)
- Oscars Live Chat 2010
- GreenCine's Oscar Live Blog
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- Shorts? Sweet!
- by Amy Monaghan
[A reminder to Academy Awards watchers worldwide: please join GreenCine and a quick-witted panel of critics and bloggers for our Oscars Live Chat on Sunday night, beginning at 7:30pm EST.]
An astonishing number of cartoons are nominated for Academy Awards this yearâUp, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Avatar, Meryl Streep's mawkish turn as Julia Childâbut only five are in contention for Best Animated Short Film.
Oscar's recognition of animated shorts da... (more)
- CONTEST: Win a STINGRAY SAM DVD and Soundtrack
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"Stingray Sam is not a hero..." but musician-filmmaker Cory McAbee's drolly inventive sci-fi/western/musical has made a heroic self-distributed leap to DVD. [Official site here.] From my original review last year:
Rocketing through another monochrome corner of the gently surreal, weird-humored universe shared by his lovely, Lynchian 2001 intergalactic musical The American Astronaut (any film with characters named "The Blueberry Pirate" and "The Boy Who Actually Saw a Female Breast" m... (more)
- DVD OF THE WEEK: The September Issue
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The September Issue
Directed by R.J. Cutler
2009, 90 minutes, USA
Cutler's luxuriant pop doc takes a fly-on-the-wall peek at how one of the titular editions of Vogue magazine (colloquially known in the fashion industry as "The Bible") is produced, and 2007's Sienna Miller-covered 840-pager was clearly a dishy ish to document. Editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, the Prada-clad devil herself, inexplicably allowed Cutler intimate access to her daily wheeling, dealing and notorious ice-queeny disap... (more)
- Return to Oz: A History of Australian Cinema (1969-1989)
- by Roderick Heath
Part Two: 1969-19891. Engines of Change
Continued from Part One
Few explanations for the almost unprecedented resuscitation of Australian cinema between 1969 and 1975 are immediately satisfying. Perhaps the most important changes were the most difficult to quantify, but it is easy to see that 1968 was one of the most important years in contemporary Australian history. A popular referendum gave equal citizenship to indigenous Australians after decades of excision from the c... (more)
- Today A.I.
- Kubrick – It would be easy to give Spielberg the light and Kubrick the dark sides of A.I., and there are several instances where this is true: the film’s sex-and-murder urban settings are heavily influenced by Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, while the character of David’s mother, Monica, is more sympathetic than any female in a Kubrick film. Yet to do so would also ignore Kubrick’s hippie mysticism, which emerges in A.I.’s last part, just as it would i... (more)
- 3 days Eyes Wide Shut
- Kubrick – Expecting Kubrick to do for the erotic thriller what he had already done for science fiction, the war film, the period piece, and the horror movie, spectators were instead greeted with a film of no determinate genre. Maddeningly deliberate in its pace, and adapted (sometimes verbatim) from a largely unknown 1926 Viennese novel, Eyes Wide Shut struck many as outdated in its sexual mores, questionable in the authenticity of its authorship, and even socially conservative i... (more)
- Full Metal Jacket
- Kubrick – Full Metal Jacket is Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie. Period. It’s no less idiosyncratic than his other conceptions of pure genre, and as such exhibits his sensibilities with perhaps greater transparency than his other films. This is to say that Full Metal Jacket is a menacing, incendiary picture, so calculated in its brutality that you’re more prone to endure its depictions of suffering than you are to enjoy it.... (more)
- The Shining
- Kubrick – Stanley Kubrick’s fascination with the male ego continues with The Shining. We’ve witnessed Humbert Humbert’s masochistic, self-induced humiliation at the hands of a nymphet, General Jack D. Ripper’s quest to preserve male bodily fluids, and later, Dr. Bill Harford’s emasculation at his wife’s mere contemplation of an affair. Whatever one’s complaints may be about Kubrick in regards to his underwritten female characters, the men... (more)
- Barry Lyndon
- Kubrick – Barry is a rogue and will garner little sympathy from most viewers—the easiest viewpoint to take is that he has no one to blame but himself. But a deeper analysis reveals Kubrick’s true motives. Barry Lyndon contains subtle critiques of British manners, aristocracy and empire—the defining characteristics of 18th century England. Kubrick’s goal is to show the hollowness beneath the gilded veneer typically found in period dramas.... (more)
- A Clockwork Orange
- Kubrick – There’s a sense that Kubrick lost control of his material because of his loss of the necessary critical distance. This is literally embodied in the many production stills you can find of Kubrick with his handheld camera sticking close to the rape and mayhem, appearing as one more droog in Alex’s gang. After establishing the narrative perspective as that of Alex, Kubrick’s treatment of his victims is the next inevitable step, whether he turns them into ... (more)
- White Dog
- Sam Fuller was frenetic. He was wiry and tough and ready to pounce on you with jittery enthusiasm. And in case you don’t know it, Martin Scorsese will tell you: If you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema. Or at least you don’t understand it. Sam would hold a cigar in his teeth, then quickly swipe it out to start fast-talking, ready to thrust a lens on one of his protagonists’ faces at any moment, anxious to sweep himself and his viewe... (more)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Kubrick – The film’s bizarre structure, which has undoubtedly contributed to its reputation as an indecipherable cinematic puzzle, is a cycle in which seemingly irrelevant moments, images, shapes, and statements reappear, albeit slightly evolved, to create a sense of cinematic déjà vu. The bone used in the film’s first section to commit violence becomes a nuclear satellite circling Earth—one piece of technology becoming another, one weapon becoming... (more)
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