With The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology now out on DVD, Josef Braun gets Slavoj Žižek and Sophie Fiennes talking about James Cameron, Terry Gilliam, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and more.
Word from Catherine Grant: The fourth issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image is out and freely available online. Sérgio Dias Branco, the editor this time around, notes that the “first group of articles engage with five major religious traditions: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and Christianity. All of them tackle significant topics within the realm of philosophy of religion through film: identity, tradition, experience, emptiness and emptying, and love.”
If you’ve been watching Kevin B. Lee‘s excellent series of videos leading up to Oscar night—each assesses contenders in the major categories and argues the case for the winner of his choice—you know that numbers figure into his thinking, particularly the amount of time a nominated performer spends on the screen. Now, in the New York Times, he talks with David Bordwell, Geena Davis and American Hustle editor Jay Cassidy about genre, gender and more: “An analytical method introduced by the film historian Barry Salt 40 years ago, cinemetrics extracts statistical data from movies to reveal their inner workings. Its adoption helped add scientific rigor to film studies back when it was still earning respectability in academia. Today the Cinemetrics website, run by Yuri Tsivian, a scholar at the University of Chicago, Daria Khitrova and Gunars Civjans, holds statistics on more than 14,000 films.”
Notable critics making Oscar predictions: Richard Brody (New Yorker), Richard Corliss (Time) and David Thomson (New Republic).
Hunted from Pasquale Iannone.
Suddenly, Colin MacCabe. On Derek Jarman for the New Statesman and on Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) for Criterion.
“Spike Jonze’s fourth feature film, and his fourth feature film collaboration with production designer K.K. Barrett, creates a future world that is both intimate and immersive.” Interiors talks with Barrett about Her and more for ArchDaily.
The Austin Chronicle‘s Kimberley Jones talks with David Gordon Green, who’s “never attended the Texas Film Awards before, and he’s not sure what to expect. ‘What happens? Are there, like, snake handlers?'” He’ll find out on March 6. Meantime, he and Jones look back over his career.
For frieze, Bert Rebhandl considers two Austrian genre hits, Andreas Prochaska’s Das finstere Tal (The Dark Valley) and Marvin Kren’s Blutgletscher (Blood Glacier).
IN OTHER NEWS
“Terrence Malick has come to a settlement with the financiers of his film Voyage of Time, which has remained unfinished since its inception in 2008,” reports Ben Beaumont-Thomas for the Guardian. This’ll be “a documentary narrated by Brad Pitt and Emma Thompson, concerning nothing less than ‘the whole of time, from the birth of the universe to its final collapse.'”
GOINGS ON
New York. MoMA’s series Vienna Unveiled: A City in Cinema opens today and runs through April 20. For Film Comment, Aaron Cutler writes about the opening film, Hans Karl Breslauer’s The City Without Jews (1924), which “accurately predicted that Vienna would suffer following its Jewish population’s expulsion.” The Nazis shelved the film, of course, but it was revived and restored in the early 90s.
IN THE WORKS
“Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, whose Caesar Must Die won the 2012 Berlin Golden Bear, will shoot Maraviglioso Boccaccio, an adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century classic The Decameron, with cameras set to start rolling next week in a villa on the outskirts of Florence,” reports Nick Vivarelli.
Steven Soderbergh on King of the Hill (1993)
Also for Variety, Leo Barraclough reports that Kate Beckinsale has joined Simon Pegg in the cast of Terry Jones’s Absolutely Anything, a comedy that “follows a disillusioned school teacher (Pegg), who suddenly finds he has the ability to do anything he wishes, a challenge bestowed on him by a group of power-crazed aliens (voiced by [John] Cleese, [Terry] Gilliam, Jones, [Michael] Palin and [Eric] Idle).”
“Goldfrapp are breaking into cinemas with a one-off screening of their short film anthology Tales of Us, followed by a live concert,” reports Mark Savage for the BBC. And, as Amanda Dobbins reports for Vulture, Kanye West‘s Yeezus will be hitting theaters as well.
“Diane Ladd and newcomer Eden Brolin have been cast in writer/director Katie Cokinos’s debut film I Dream Too Much,” reports Ryan Lattanzio at Thompson on Hollywood. “An independent feature film about a imaginative recent college grad who finds herself caring for her formidable Great Aunt in snowy upstate New York, the dramedy will also star Orange Is the New Black‘s Danielle Brooks.”
Still in the works, but without David O. Russell, is the ABC series The Club. Deadline‘s Nellie Andreeva notes that Russell developed the “upstairs/downstairs soap set at a private country club” with Susannah Grant, who wrote Erin Brockovich (2000), but he’s now “expected to refocus fully on features.”
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