David Liu introduces a generous sampling from a remarkable interview: “In October 1990, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez visited Tokyo during the shooting of Akira Kurosawa’s penultimate feature, Rhapsody in August. García Márquez, who spent some years in Bogota as a film critic before penning landmark novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, spoke with Kurosawa for over six hours on a number of subjects.”
At To Be (Cont’d), Nick Newman has opened up a conversation with Danny King about the films of Todd Haynes: “In spite of how clear-headed and assured he seems as both a formalist and storyteller, what we have is a filmography built on contradictions and half-truths, often propelled by the unease of what cannot be known. There’s too much empathy and deeply felt pain to pin him as some overly clever, game-playing sort, yet much of the dramatic action in his films is either instigated by or concludes with an unresolved matter.”
Chris Cagle has updated his guide to film history textbooks.
“Is the ghost of Wilson Mizner haunting the Chicago arts scene?” asks Ben Sachs in a Reader entry on the screenwriter whose “legacy includes fleecing miners in Gold Rush-era Alaska, selling forged paintings in New York, and organizing a spectacular swindle during Florida’s mid-20s real estate boom.” And work he had a hand in before he died in 1933 seems to keep popping up in and around Chicago.
For the London Review of Books, Ian Penman riffs on Fassbinder the Fußball fan.
Tom Schiller‘s 1984 comedy Nothing Lasts Forever was never released, but for the past week or so it’s been making the rounds again—see, for example, Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds. The mostly black and white film features Zach Galligan (Gremlins) and cameos from the likes of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Fischer and now the New Yorker‘s Richard Brody is arguing that it’s a “masterpiece” and that “the obscurity in which it unjustly remains today, is a loss to the world of movies, to viewers, and to the evolution of the art.” Schiller, in the meantime, known for the shorts he made for Saturday Night Live in the 80s, has gone on to direct over 500 television commercials.
Trailer for Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Nick Cave doc, 20,000 Days on Earth
David Cairns has lost patience with Terrence Malick: “The mannerism of women wading through cornfields touching the crops in a wistful way has hardened into cliché, although at least Rachel McAdams has the good grace to look awkward doing it.”
At the Talkhouse Film, Aaron Katz, whose Land Ho!, co-directed with Martha Stephens, is faring very well at Critics Round Up, explains why he was “eager to love” Chapman and Maclain Way’s doc The Battered Bastards of Baseball—and how it kind of let him down.
Ready for another round of the best of 2014 so far? You might want to see this one. The AV Club‘s gone about it a bit differently.
IN OTHER NEWS
“The U.S. debut of a 4K restoration of Alain Resnais‘s debut feature Hiroshima Mon Amour [1959] will screen at the 2014 New York Film Festival… prior to opening at the Film Society on October 17,” reports the FSLC’s Brian Brooks.
“Chantal Akerman will open her desert-inspired installation De la mèr(e) au désert at the Mamuta Art and Media Centre on Tuesday evening at Hansen House, a former leper colony-turned-cultural center close to the Jerusalem Cinématheque.” Melanie Goodfellow reports for Screen Daily.
Paul Schrader on Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959)
“A group of Israeli filmmakers have issued a joint statement condemning the current Israeli military action against Palestinian targets in Gaza, and the attacks by Hamas on Israel.” Ben Beaumont-Thomas reports for the Guardian: “At a press conference during the Jerusalem film festival, the likes of Keren Yedaya and Shira Geffen read out the names of children who had been killed in the Israeli missile attacks of recent days.”
GOINGS ON
San Francisco. Tomorrow, filmmaker Tom Gilroy and our own Ted Hope will be at the Roxie to present a screening of The Cold Lands.
IN THE WORKS
Film Comment editor Gavin Smith has posted another round of news, and he begins with word that Olivier Assayas‘s Idol’s Eye, about Chicago mobster Tony Accardo and starring Robert Pattinson, Robert De Niro, and Rachel Weisz, begins shooting in Chicago in October. Omer Fast will be adapting Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder. Other names popping up in the new dispatch: Andrew Bujalski, Takashi Miike, the Coen brothers and Richard Linklater.
“Paramount Pictures is in negotiations to buy the U.S. distribution rights to Martin Scorsese’s historical drama Silence,” reports Variety‘s Dave McNary. “Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, Ken Watanabe and Adam Driver are starring with production expected to start in Taiwan later this year.”
At Cineuropa, Stefan Dobroiu reports that Radu Jude has begun shooting Aferim! near Bucharest. It’s “set in the 19th century, when a local policeman, Costandin, is hired by Iordache, a boyar, to find Carfin, a Gypsy slave who had run away from the boyar’s estate after having an affair with his wife, Sultana. Costandin sets out to find the fugitive, beginning a journey full of adventures.”
John Landis on Leo McCarey and the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933)
Atom Egoyan will begin shooting Remember with Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Dean Norris, Bruno Ganz, Jurgen Prochnow and Henry Czerny on Monday, reports Anne Thompson. “Benjamin August’s original screenplay for Remember combines a contemporary revenge plot with World War II history.”
For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily. Get Keyframe Daily in your inbox by signing in at fandor.com/daily.
