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Lists and Awards #6: Nyt, Guardian and More
10 hours ago
Updated through 12/22. Previous roundups of year-end and decade-end lists and awards: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
"This was the year that the art world repeatedly checked its pulse to see if it was still alive. And guess what? It persisted, albeit in a slightly altered, chastened form." That's Roberta Smith, actually, one of two chief art critics at the New York Times and not one of the paper's three film critics. But as you look over "The Year in the Arts," this weekend's special section, you find that Smith might was well be writing about the whole of the art world, encompassing theater, music, architecture, cinema, of course, and all the rest. …
"Avatar," "Nine," "Young Victoria" and Holiday Revivals
10 hours ago
Updated through 12/22.
"With Avatar James Cameron has turned one man's dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life - our moviegoing life included - as we know it," declares Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Several decades in the dreaming and four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock 'em, sock 'em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie - one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump - is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged." …
Robin Wood, 1931 - 2009
11 hours ago
"Just learned, Robin Wood has died," Jaime posted at Dave Kehr's site yesterday evening. "I can't think of anything else to say, except that the loss hurts, a lot. What a wonderful mind."
Anecdotes and appreciations have followed in the ensuing hours. "He and Andrew Sarris were my role models when I started writing film criticism," posts Joseph McBride, "and they remain my two idols in the field. Robin wrote brilliantly and in great intellectual depth and with a brave candor and passion. He showed us all the way to write about films seriously and with the kind of scholarly involvement that characterized the work of the great literary critics who paved his way before film criticism became a true scholarly field. Robin was one of the few auteurists who weathered the structuralist storm by accomodating its insights while not succumbing to its jargon or conformism. His work was actually strengthened by that challenge. …
Jacques Tati, Coast to Coast
11 hours ago
"The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of the French screenwriter, director, and actor Jacques Tati (born Jacques Tatischeff, 1907–1982) features newly struck, gloriously restored 35mm prints of his six feature films," brags the Museum, and well they should: "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Playtime, Mon Oncle, his long-dreamed-of colorized version of Jour de fête, the revelatory Traffic, and the little-seen Parade - along with three short sketch films." The series runs through January 2 and Jordan Hruska (T Magazine) notes that, architecturally, "MoMA is a perfect venue" for it, while Nicolas Rapold (Voice) notes that it follows "the huge Cinémathèque Française exhibition" and: "Besides a 1936 René Clément short with gangly Tati as a farm boy recruited for sparring (sports-based routines were initially his specialty), MoMA also shows the delightful Cours du soir (1966), shot during Playtime downtime, in which Tati presides at a night school for pratfalls and mime. It's quite an education, but then, …
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report, Holiday Repeat Edition: "Christmas Holiday" (Robert Siodmak, 1944)
17 hours ago
One of the most unusual putatively-hoiday-themed pictures ever made, Robert Siodmak's 1944 Christmas Holiday features beloved child/teen songstress Deanna Durbin in pretty much her first real adult role, and a doozy it is, too. Herman J. Mankiewicz—he of Citizen Kane screenwriting fame—here whittles down Somerset Maugham's novel (a tale of self discovery with the more far-flung tales of its secondary characters folded in, which begins with its hero's titular getaway to Paris, where he meets a mysterious prostitute)—into something more anecdotal and possibly personal. …
Jennifer Jones, 1919 - 2009
21 December 2009 1:46 PM, PST
"Jennifer Jones, 90, an actress who won an Academy Award for playing a saint in The Song of Bernadette and became a popular sinner in Hollywood melodramas including Duel in the Sun and Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, died Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif," reports Adam Bernstein in the Washington Post.
"Jennifer Jones remains one of the more controversial actresses in the Hollywood cinema," writes Richard Lippe in Film Reference. "In general, her professional and personal involvement with David O Selznick has been given a prominence that has colored assessments of Jones's distinctive contribution to 1940s cinema. Interestingly, the central issue is not that Jones lacked talent or screen presence. The longstanding criticism is that Selznick, because of his commitment to Jones, had no critical distance and, with King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, tried to fashion an erotic identity for her, making Jones into a ridiculous creation." Still, …
勝手にしやがれ: Japanese Film & Media on Its Own Terms, #1: Out of Sight
21 December 2009 11:43 AM, PST
勝手にしやがれ (Katte Ni Shiyagare)
In François Truffaut’s fourth episode of the Antoine Doinel saga, Bed and Board (1970), Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) embarks on an affair with a Japanese woman, Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer), culminating in a restaurant sequence in which Antoine keeps excusing himself to call his wife Christine (Claude Jade). Kyoko exits the restaurant, leaving a small piece of paper on which she’s written, in kanji, ‘katte ni shiyagare,’ a declaration of frustration and independence, of having had enough, which can be translated politely, as above, as well as in a far more casual manner. Antoine is unable to read this of course, it suffices that she’s gone. In Truffaut’s film, this subtitle appears on the shot of the brief note, ‘va te faire foutre’/'go to hell'. What French audiences at the time did not know at the time was that this Japanese expression was also …
"Hiroshima mon amour": All These Years I've Been Looking For An Impossible Love
21 December 2009 2:23 AM, PST
Just days ago, Cahiers du Cinéma named Alain Resnais's Wild Grass as the best film of 2009, so how very appropriate it is that the Recyclage de luxe Online Film Festival presents as its final film, free to viewers in the UK over 18, Renais's debut feature; it's practically a 50th anniversary presentation.
"'I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.' That's Eric Rohmer," notes Kent Jones for Criterion, "in a July 1959 round-table discussion between the members of Cahiers du Cinéma's editorial staff, devoted to Alain Resnais's groundbreaking first feature. Rohmer's remark is in perfect sync with the spirit of the film, which, as he says later in the discussion, 'has a very strong sense of the future, particularly the anguish of the future. …
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