It’s been over a week since the last full-blown news update and, while several notable items have piled up, we’ve siphoned off a few in entries on new DVD/Blu-ray releases, new books, and general goings on, not to mention birthdays, remembrances and the occasional alert. I’ve already pointed to this or that piece in the new issue of Bright Lights, but it needs to be reiterated: there’s a new issue of Bright Lights. #79 features Oren Shai on the women-in-prison film, Imogen Smith on Powell and Pressburger, Alan Vanneman on Chaplin‘s Limelight, and of course, much, much more.
They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? has relaunched. Not only is it looking really spiffy now, but you’ll want to take a fresh look at the list of 1,000 Greatest Films and follow the countdown of the 21st Century’s Most Acclaimed Films.
The new Interiors maps and analyzes the spaces of Michael Haneke‘s Amour.
“All over the internet and in scholarly works, the phrase ‘all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun’ is attributed to Jean-Luc Godard, and that despite his insistence that ‘c’est Griffith qui a dit ça, ce n’est pas moi’ (‘it was Griffith who said that, not me’).” Roland-François Lack traces the path of a runaway meme.
MUBI’s Notebook is running B. Kite and Bill Krohn‘s revised essay on Richard Fleischer’s Follow Me Quietly (1949), which “holds a paradoxical position as a narrative streamlined to a nearly generic efficiency which holds at its center an image so odd and resonant that its phantoms crowd the surface.”
For Moving Image Source, Rebekah Rutkoff reports on the June 2012 screening in the remote Peloponnese of Gregory Markopoulos’s Orders VI-VIII.
Back in 1989, Glenn Kenny interviewed Martin Scorsese for Video Review magazine, the focus of the talk being on how the advent of home video was changing the way movies were watched—and made.
Farran Nehme tells a terrific story about Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith with guest appearances by Lillian and Dorothy Gish and legendary producer David Belasco.
Bomb‘s posted Museum of the Moving Image curator David Schwartz’s conversation with Thom Andersen about Reconversão, the doc that screened last month in the First Look series.
In an email exchange with Rooney Mara for Interview, Steven Soderbergh proves himself to be as entertaining as an interviewer as he is as an interviewee.
Beasts of the Southern Wild “deploys a casual racism, vilifies public health workers, and romanticizes poverty,” argues Thomas Hackett in the New Republic.
Julie Cline talks with Errol Morris for the Los Angeles Review of Books, where Peter Winkler reflects on Nicholas Ray and We Can’t Go Home Again and Ted Scheinman considers “Melissa McCarthy and the New Female Slapstick.”
“I never thought I’d meet my porn double.” For the Independent, Charlotte Cripps talks with Stacy Martin, the bright young star of Lars von Trier’s forthcoming Nymphomaniac.
Tuesday was Ulli Lommel Day at DC’s.
“If Dark Horse seems like a romantic comedy, [Todd] Solondz deliberately undercuts audience expectations about genre,” writes J.J. Murphy.
For Film International, Wheeler Winston Dixon looks back on Ozu’s gangster movies of the early 1930’s.
“Before Rimbaud, before the Surrealists, there was Nerval (1808 – 1855).” Mark Dery at Boing Boing on poet Gerard de Nerval’s famous ‘lobster walk.'”
Awards. Sunday’s the big night. Kyle Buchanan is hoping Roger Deakins will take home the Oscar for Best Cinematography and, at Vulture, talks with him about “some of the most iconic images he’s produced over his long career.”
Slate‘s Dana Stevens argues the case for Alexandre Desplat in the category of Best Score.
In the run-up to Oscar Night, there’ve been a slew of other bodies besides the Academy dishing out awards. Leos Carax and Holy Motors have come out on top in this year’s Skandies; Mike D’Angelo sorts through the results of his survey.
And as I write, the Muriels have just about completed the countdown. It’s been great fun watching the results come in, voted on by umpteen critics you know and read.
Winners of this year’s Writers Guild Awards: Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty) for original screenplay, Chris Terrio (Argo) for adapted screenplay, and Malik Bendjelloul (Searching for Sugar Man) for documentary screenplay.
Argo and Silver Linings Playbook have scored admirably at the America Cinema Editors’ ACE Eddie Awards, reports In Contention‘s Kristopher Tapley, who also has the winners of the Motion Picture Sound Editors’ 60th annual Golden Reel Awards. And the Cinema Audio Society‘s honored Les Misérables.
In the works. Word’s spreading among English-speakers that Olivier Père‘s January 20 entry at Arte has a bit more on Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini project than most of us have known about. Willem Dafoe will play the Italian filmmaker, poet, artist, and editorialist; Pasolini will be set on November 2, 1975, the last day of his life.
Meantime, Haiku, the silent color film Davide Manuli hopes to make with Ferrara, has a Facebook page.
Deadline‘s Mike Fleming Jr. reports on a Silver Linings Playbook reunion: “Jennifer Lawrence has been tapped to star opposite Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, and Jeremy Renner in the David O. Russell pic formerly known as American Bullshit, the drama written by Eric Singer and Russell about the ’70s FBI sting operation Abscam that took down a bunch of U.S. congressmen.”
Obits. “Screenwriter and producer Richard Collins has died at the age of 98,” reports Phil Dyess-Nugent at the AV Club. “Collins, who started out working at Columbia Pictures as a script reader, was the last surviving member of the ‘Hollywood 19,’ the nickname given to the ‘unfriendly witnesses’ who were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during its investigation of Communism’s infiltration of the movie industry, which ended in 10 of them being sent to prison for refusing to ‘name names.'”
From Joe Leydon: “Sidney Berger earned for himself at least a footnote in film history for his iconic portrayal of the haunted heroine’s obnoxious neighbor—a performance memorably described by Roger Ebert as ‘the definitive study of a nerd in lust’—in Carnival of Souls, Herk Harvey’s stripped-to-essentials 1962 cult-fave ghost story. But I’m fairly certain that his friends and colleagues—and the thousands of students (including Jim Parsons, Dennis Quaid, Brent Spiner and Robert Wuhl) he mentored during his decades as director of the University of Houston School of Theatre and Dance—would prefer to remember him for his far more respectable and inspiring achievements. And those achievements were many.”
Viewing (8’37”). The Los Angeles Review of Books posts highlights from an on-stage conversation David Lynch had with Paul Holdengräber about his favorite photographs Paris Photo‘s most recent Month of Photography.
Natan, a new documentary, describes itself: “Bernard Natan changed the course of French cinema and was destroyed because of it, his name seemingly forever linked to sordid tales of pornography and fraud. This film tells the real story, an epic tale of the birth of cinema, the horrors of war and the power of myth.” And the teaser’s via writer and co-director David Cairns.
Catherine Grant presents “a real-time comparison” (5’14”) “of Len Lye’s 1958 experimental animation Free Radicals and the opening minutes of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s 1968 Grupo Cine Liberación activist film La Hora de los Hornos (Hour of the Furnaces). Also: A proposal for a Len Lye Centre.
And then there are the trailers for the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, for The Unbelievers, a doc featuring Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Werner Herzog, Woody Allen, and Cormac McCarthy, and for Keith Miller’s Slamdance Winner, Welcome to Pine Hill.
More browsing? See the cinetrix. The Film Doctor challenges several of his favorite film writers to come up with a list of the “top ten favorite movie reviews of all time.” Then it’s on to the links. Meantime, John Wyver‘s got a fresh batch of links as well, plus videos.
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