“Screen and Surface, Soft and Hard: The Cinema of Leos Carax” is a new essay in Transit by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López accompanied by three three video pieces: “It is seductive, on a first experience of Carax’s films, to tie them to [a] romantic, surrealistic vision of overcoming, of transcendence, of magical fusion and transformation…. However, the more we look at these films, we intuit a different, rather darker logic in them—a logic that finds its culmination in Holy Motors, a movie that manages (like much of Carax’s work) to be both bleak (as a testament, a kind of seismograph) and exhilarating (as a sensory and narrative experience)—at exactly the same time. It is this deep, poetic logic of Carax’s cinema that we seek here.”
MORE READING
Rebecca Keegan talks with Hayao Miyazaki for the Los Angeles Times: “I’ve learned a lot of things by being 72, and what I’ve learned is that I don’t have a lot of time.”
“At 83, Hollywood’s most notorious film producer is back from the dead,” writes Sean Macaulay in the Telegraph. “Fifteen years ago, Evans flatlined in an ambulance taking him to Cedar Sinai hospital after he’d suffered the first of three strokes. He had been hosting a party for horror director Wes Craven when he keeled over—with characteristic dramatic flair—mid-toast, Bellini still in hand. The incident forms the opening set piece to his new memoir, The Fat Lady Sang, which covers his long road back from the stroke (‘I passed out as Robert Evans and woke up as Quasimodo’) along with some earlier escapades: eating chilli with Frank Sinatra, brothel-hopping with Alain Delon, dating Ava Gardner and Lana Turner at the same time…” And the Telegraph‘s running an excerpt.
Presented without comment but with unbridled enthusiasm
Via Matt Zoller Seitz, a lengthy and very fine appreciation by Niles Schwartz in l’étoile of a film from 1993: “Carlito’s Way is one of De Palma’s most dramatically engaging films, a character-driven period epic where the final half-hour is a non-stop chase through offices, a hospital, a night club, the subway, and Grand Central Station, concluding at this incendiary Ground Zero destination of death, affirming how great suspense moviemaking pulls the audience in with sympathy and fear in spite of the ineluctable outcome of which we’re already certain.”
Max Ophüls “made only two true noir films in his long and distinguished career,” writes Wheeler Winston Dixon, “back to back: Caught (1948) and The Reckless Moment (1949), both from his brief period in the United States.”
Also in Film International, Brandon Konecny on Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience: “Combining his extensive knowledge of cinema, music, and theology, [Kutter] Callaway explores the affective nature of film music and its potentialities to provide viewers a way to experience God’s presence in their filmgoing experience, that perhaps He’s as close to us as our theater seat’s proximity to the big screen.”
“Arturo de Córdova (1907-73) was a Mexican movie star, very much of his time, with a pencil moustache and elegant suits,” writes Nick Roddick for Sight & Sound. “Quentin Tarantino is a Hollywood director whose work—and clothing—are equally of their time, but a very different one.” Roddick reports on QT’s introductions to screening of several of his own (QT’s) personal prints of de Córdova’s films at the recently wrapped Morelia International Film Festival.
At retinalechoes, “fragment 0016: Elio Petri.”
IN OTHER NEWS
Time Out New York has eliminated six positions, including Film Editor David Fear‘s, reports Criticwire‘s Sam Adams, who’s “not the only one who feels that severing him from the publication represents both a huge loss and huge mistake. Time Out, which closed its Chicago print edition in April, eliminating Film Editor Ben Kenigsberg and critic A.A. Dowd, said it’s looking to ‘leverage global efficiencies through an integrated global editorial team and the externalization of listings,’ which translates to something like recycling content among its various editions—expect some London bylines to start turning up in Manhattan—and outsourcing gruntwork.” David Fear, who’d been with TONY for nine-and-a-half years, is a terrific writer and critic, and we look forward to reading his work anywhere we find it.
Richard Brody on Antonioni‘s Zabriskie Point (1970)
Rotterdam‘s posted its second teaser: Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me.
LISTS AND AWARDS
It seems a little early to be listing the “25 Best Undistributed Films of 2013,” but Film.com‘s gone right on ahead anyway.
The trades, too, are hoping you’ll assume that awards season has begun. Variety‘s asked 21 directors for a few words on 21 other directors, most of whose films might be considered to be in the running for some sort of Oscar recognition. As Guy Lodge has tweeted, some of the pairings “are so perfectly obvious, and others so random as to be seemingly drawn out of a hat, but plainly sincere.” So what we have here are J.J. Abrams on Peter Berg, Ben Affleck on Nicole Holofcener, Judd Apatow on Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich on Alexander Payne, Guillermo del Toro on Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Duplass on James Ponsoldt, Charles Ferguson on Asghar Farhadi, Ryan Fleck on Derek Cianfrance, Rodrigo Garcia on Richard Linklater, Vince Gilligan on John Lee Hancock, John Hillcoat on Ralph Fiennes, Stephen Hopkins on Brian Percival, Rian Johnson on Spike Jonze, Michael Mann on Paul Greengrass, Oren Moverman on Scott Cooper, Gary Ross on Denis Villeneuve, Julian Schnabel on Lee Daniels, Adam Shankman on Jean-Marc Vallée, John Singleton on Steve McQueen, John Turturro on Ethan and Joel Coen, and Marc Webb on John Wells.
Also in Variety, Scott Foundas reports on the Academy’s foreign-language film competition, “where both the nominating and voting protocols have been extensively overhauled, with more changes possibly in the offing.”
Meantime, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Directors Roundtable features Alfonso Cuarón, Lee Daniels, Paul Greengrass, Steve McQueen, David O. Russell, and Ben Stiller.
“Cinematographers Dean Cundey, Eduardo Serra, and Richard Rawlings Jr. will be honored at the 28th Annual American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) awards on February 1, 2014,” reports Beth Hanna at Thompson on Hollywood. “Cundey will receive the ASC’s Lifetime Achievement Award; Serra will be presented with the International Achievement Award; and Rawlings will pick up the org’s Career Achievement in Television Award.”
GOINGS ON
New York. “For the eighth year running, MoMA’s Department of Film, in association with IFP and its quarterly publication Filmmaker, brings you highlights from the festival circuit that have yet to be picked up for theatrical distribution, along with other discoveries, from visual artists working in the moving image to the latest indies not available in theaters.” Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You opens today and runs through Monday.
Los Angeles. Naming, a solo show of work by David Lynch, will be on view at Kayne Griffin Corcoran from November 23 through January 4.
Vienna. A series on the cinema of Marseille opens today and runs through December 2 at the Austrian Film Museum.
IN THE WORKS
“Suggesting Comedy Central sketch shows are increasingly becoming Judd Apatow’s version of a farm team, the producer has partnered with Key & Peele stars Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele to develop a movie for the duo—a deal that comes not long after Apatow made a similar one with Amy Schumer.” Sean O’Neal has more at the AV Club.
The new short for Prada, presented in Rome
The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth notes that, during an onstage conversation at the Rome Film Festival with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, Wes Anderson remarked that the three friends “have been talking about an animated film together, but as we work on it, we are struggling as it’s becoming increasing violent, depressing and inappropriate for youngsters so probably won’t get funded.”
“Don Cheadle will play Miles Davis in a biopic the actor has long planned on the innovative jazz pioneer,” reports the AP.
“HBO’s The Brink has found two leading men, tapping Jack Black and Tim Robbins to star in the dark comedy,” reports AJ Marechal. Also in Variety, Justin Kroll: “Keeping a full film slate since leaving Downton Abbey, Dan Stevens has now joined Adam Sandler in Tom McCarthy’s indie drama The Cobbler.”
Clint Holloway at Indiewire: “Factory 25 has acquired the rights to Joe Swanberg‘s latest film, All the Lights in the Sky.”
ENDNOTE
I’ve recently updated the entries on Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, the just-wrapped AFI Fest, and the Rome Film Festival.
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