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10 articles from 2009
The Imaginarium of Doctor Gilliam
20 December 2009 5:23 PM, PST
| Huffington Post
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Terry Gilliam's latest film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a work of art. It is probably a masterpiece but it's too early to say. Movie critics see it somewhat differently because, as a result of their job description, they are judging it by the wrong criteria. Gilliam's film is like a rose entered in a competition for vegetables: it's never going to win 'best in show' but that doesn't mean it isn't a pretty good rose.
The word 'masterpiece' is generally associated with great paintings or great pieces of music and, occasionally, great works of fiction. Motion pictures, the product of collaborators and the result of compromise, don't generally qualify for the epithet, even if they are called Citizen Kane, On the Waterfront or Battleship Potemkin. There are many truly great movies which
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- Richard Broke
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Inglourious Basterds (Blu-Ray/DVD Review)
17 December 2009 1:10 AM, PST
| Fangoria
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Here Come the Basterds
The Basterds have come to Blu-Ray. As anticipated as Chinese Democracy, but not nearly as disappointing, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds made its Blu-ray and DVD this past Tuesday.
Dropped into German occupied France, a band of Jewish-American soldiers have one mission- kill as many Nazis as possible. Led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), The Basterds carry out their goal with a total disregard for human life or proper spelling. Whether scalping Nazi soldiers or beating them with baseball bats, they carry out their task with a truly “exploitation” level of violence. Their acts become legendary within the Third Reich, even sticking in the craw of one Adolph Hitler.
Inglourious Basterds is World War II as fought by battalions of film geeks. Taratino stays true to his video store clerk roots invoking 70’s WWII exploitation flicks like Escape To Athena (1979), Kelly’S Heroes (1970), and of
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- no-reply@fangoria.com (David McKendry)
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Blu-ray Review: The General
15 December 2009 2:09 AM, PST
| Rope of Silicon
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I was shocked to look over my DVD/Blu-ray collection and find I didn't actually own a single title from Kino, the eclectic home entertainment studio. They have several noteworthy films in their collection and on top of The General there's Battleship Potemkin, the Griffith Masterworks, Ballast, Metropolis, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and their collection of F.W. Murnau films is impressive. Yet, I own none of them, which makes the addition of Buster Keaton's classic silent comedy The General on Blu-ray a special occasion.
First off, this film is great without any kind of high definition clean-up. My first time watching it was September of 2008 and it was on Netflix's Instant Play service and I loved it then as much as I loved it this time around, but the comparison stops there. Kino's restoration and presentation is immaculate. The General was released in 1927 and is now the oldest
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- Brad Brevet
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Clip joint: the best film clips featuring montages
10 December 2009 7:35 AM, PST
| The Guardian - Film News
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This week Pinkos wants your help to assemble a sequence of clips featuring Eisenstein's much-copied creation
Sergei Eisenstein presented his theory of montage to an august group of cineastes in the 1920s. It was, he said, "the nerve of cinema", and that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema". Eighty odd years later, his theory finally came to the attention of the wider world, as the subject of a song in Team America: World Police.
The word can be taken in several different ways. Deriving from the French word for "assembly", in Gallic film practice it simply refers to the editing process. For Eisenstein's Soviet colleagues, it was a means to derive an abstract meaning from a combination of shots in sequence. Nowadays, thanks to Rocky et al, a montage is a cliched sequence where a song (usually a pounding rock anthem) or
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Sam Raimi Wants To Give Audiences A Large Scale Panic Attack!
30 November 2009 3:56 AM, PST
| FilmShaft.com
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Director Sam Raimi’s Ghost House production company has won the bidding war for the rights to Panic Attack! Based on a cracking short film by Uryguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez, the city of Montevideo is attacked by giant robots and they blow everything up: it’s quite a calling card. There’s even a cheeky blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to The Battleship Potemkin. The Hollywood Reporter notes the director was whipped over to the Us for a plethora of meetings in the past few weeks, before signing on the dotted line with Raimi.
Hollywood loves robots and explosions. They usually equate to box office. This year has seen a raft of low budget films grip the audience’s imagination. Whether its things-going-bump-in-the-night in Paranormal Activity Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 or, even, £45 quid zombie film Colin. They’ve all done well. Alvarez’s imaginative short cost a few hundred dollars.
It’s pretty certain,
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- Martyn Conterio
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Celebrate Veteran’s Day with a War Movie Overload
11 November 2009 2:33 PM, PST
| FilmSchoolRejects.com
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Instead of doing a cheesy list for Veteran's Day, we here at Fsr decided just to give a run down of all the war-type movies that we've covered over the years (the good, the bad, and the boots on the ground). Some of these you'll be able to pick up at the rental store on your way back home from work, but hopefully your employer was nice enough to give you the day off so you could sit back with a beer, some BBQ and a swelling fervor in remembrance of the monumental jobs done by the bravest members of our society.
And since we're overloading here, we went ahead and included just about any flicks that involve soldiers and wartime. We even included some featuring those limey Brits! Look how far we've come since 1776.
As an added challenge, why not watch all of them?
The General (1927)
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)
To Hell and Back (1955)
Operation Petticoat
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- Dr. Cole Abaius
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Ciff 2009: The winners! And our reviews
22 October 2009 6:39 PM, PDT
| blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
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Tina Mabry's "Mississippi Damned," an independent American production, won the Gold Hugo as the best film in the 2009 Chicago International Film Festival, and added Gold Plaques for best supporting actress (Jossie Thacker) and best screenplay (Mabry). It tells the harrowing story of three black children growing up in rural Mississippi in circumstances of violence and addiction. The film's trailer and an interview with Mabry are linked at the bottom.
Kylee Russell in "Mississippi Damned"
The win came over a crowed field of competitors from all over the world, many of them with much larger budgets. The other big winner at the Pump Room of the Ambassador East awards ceremony Saturday evening was by veteran master Marco Bellocchio of Italy, who won the Silver Hugo as best director for "Vincere," the story of Mussolini's younger brother. Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi won Silver Hugos as best actress and actor,
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- Roger Ebert
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"Ghost Stories" — Toronto's Wavelengths 5: Une Catastrophe
19 September 2009 3:27 PM, PDT
| Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
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Glowing phantoms of days and films past haunted the fifth Wavelengths avant-garde film program at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, a series of meditations in which, as film programmer Andréa Picard described, “personal expressions of historical and collective memory confront spectres from the past.” Une Catastrophe (pictured), Jean-Luc Godard’s trailer for the Viennale is a companion piece of sorts to the Alonso Bifici trailer that screened the night before. At once forward-looking and nostalgic (it excerpts and pays homage to Sergei Eistenstein's Battleship Potemkin, among other films) Godard's piece is happily available online here.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai director whose work includes the miraculous
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- Livia Bloom
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Before They Were 'Basterds'
1 September 2009 2:37 AM, PDT
| Rope of Silicon
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Seattle's Scarecrow Video is located approximately 15 blocks down the road from my house (don't stalk me!) and on top of being one of the largest independent video stores in the country they apparently have a blog I knew nothing about and my first trip to said blog has me looking squarely at a post titled "Before They Were Basterds," which is described by the site as such:
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is perhaps his most deft handling of reference and homage yet. The video store nerds at Scarecrow Video would like to present to you an unofficial and in progress footnotes companion to Basterds. Some of these films are directly referenced in the film, others are only evoked, while others still are films we simply felt should go on the list. All titles will be available for rent in a special section except where noted.
Now, I want to
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- Brad Brevet
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TCM Unveils Their List of Top 15 Most Influential Films of All-Time
13 April 2009 12:08 PM, PDT
| Rope of Silicon
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Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has just released their official list of top 15 most influential classic films of all time, the latest element in the network's 15th anniversary celebration and the launching point for a new feature at TCM.com in which the network says it will post a fresh list of movie favorites each day (although it actually looks like it is only going to be a weekly feature). The feature will be called TCM Dailies and will usually highlight five films, with a constantly changing theme. The lists will run from serious to silly, such as TCM's favorite car-chase movies, best slap scenes and top sequels.
Perhaps the most unfortunate thing is that TCM will just be listing the films and not necessarily showing them. This would have been even bigger news had I been able to tell you the 15 films featured will be shown on TCM over
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- Brad Brevet
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2009 |
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10 articles from 2009
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