Following yesterday’s sudden flurry of lineup announcements from Toronto and Venice, we can finally get around to noting that there’s a new issue out from one of best film-related journals out there, Senses of Cinema. Issue 63 features Peter Tonguette on Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (he’s also got a fine new piece on Ray Bradbury at Moving Image Source), Max Nelson on Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Murray Pomerance on Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, Marko Bauer on Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Matt Carlin on Pere Portabella’s Warsaw Bridge, Jennifer Clement and Christian B. Long on Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Peter Henné on Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil, Jacques de Villiers on Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Francesco Baldo on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.
What’s more, Carole Zucker enters Neil Jordan into the Great Directors database, Blaine Allan considers Nicholas Ray at 100, and then there are the festival reports, book reviews, and program notes.
More reading. The Voice has put Karina Longworth‘s excellent profile of Julie Delpy on its cover this week. As for the question Delpy, Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater each have to face each time they give an interview, “The problem is getting the three of us in a room to work, to write, and then shoot it.” “It” being, of course, a third Before…. “They’re not very long films to shoot because it’s usually three weeks. It’s mostly the two of us. But it’s very hard to get the three of us focused on the one thing. So we’ll see. Maybe it will happen; maybe not. I hope it will. I don’t know.”
Laurent Kretzschmar‘s translated Serge Daney’s 1983 piece, “In Search of Arthur Pelechian.”
Dan Callahan at the Chiseler on Frankie Darro: “He was the voice of Lampwick in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), the bad boy who gets turned into a donkey on Pleasure Island, maybe the most upsetting scene in any Disney cartoon. He was one of two actors inside Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956), small enough to fit inside the costume. He played lots of jockeys and Dead End Kids and Bowery Boys, and he made scores of low-budget westerns. He was menaced by Boris Karloff in The Mad Genius (1931). He was a man in a leg cast hoisted up in his hospital bed in Blake Edwards’s The Perfect Furlough (1958) and he examined Cary Grant’s posterior in Edwards’s Operation Petticoat (1959). As an adorable, Jackie Coogan-like little boy, he got a laugh asking a woman to dance in Flesh and the Devil (1927) right before Greta Garbo waltzes away with John Gilbert. He was a son to Marie Dressler’s Tugboat Annie. On Red Skelton’s TV show in the 1950s, he did an old lady routine that routinely brought down the house. Frankie Darro had a long and varied career. And in 1933, in two films, Mayor of Hell and William Wellman‘s Wild Boys of the Road, Darro is an actor with a capacity for greatness, if anyone had bothered to notice.”
“Dan Duryea dancing in a wheelchair to the strains of the ‘Vienna Blood’ waltz is one of those deep cinematic needs you never realized you had until suddenly, it’s fulfilled,” writes Farran Nehme. “Fulfillment came from This Is My Love, an airily romantic title for a snake-mean film.”
The Guardian‘s “my favorite Hitchcock” series rolls on. The Observer‘s Philip French: “The Lady Vanishes is one of the greatest train movies from the genre’s golden era, challenged only in the master’s oeuvre by North by Northwest for the title of best comedy thriller ever made.” And Killian Fox revisits Rear Window: “What stood out for me this time was the film’s panoramic view of romantic attachment and its pitfalls.”
In other news. The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth has good news for champions of Michael Cimino’s notorious Heaven’s Gate: “The Venice Film Festival announced today that a restored version of the 219-minute cut of the film will screen on the Lido this year (where it first premiered in 1982), and even more, Cimino himself will be making a rare public appearance (and will finally put to bed those rumors he had a sex change). The curious nugget of info is that in the press release it says they will be screening a ‘restored copy by Criterion.’ Could an edition on the boutique label be far away?”
“I’ve had wind of this for a while,” begins Nick Dawson at Filmmaker, “via both filmmaker Kentucker Audley and programmer Miriam Bale (who has a feature on Beasts of the Southern Wild in our current issue), but now the news is public. On September 14 and 15, the 92Y Tribeca will host the first La Di Da film festival, which takes a look at the recent work of a group of post-Mumblecore figures, including Amy Seimetz, the Safdies, Sean Price Williams, Dustin Guy Defa, Alex Karpovsky, Kate Lyn Sheil, Eléonore Hendricks and Audley.”
In the works. Edgar Wright will direct Collider, a sci-fi film he’ll co-write with Mark Protosevich and co-produce with J.J. Abrams, reports Deadline‘s Mike Fleming.
Obits. With a remarkable roundup, Catherine Grant remembers Dai Vaughan, “film editor, maker, critic, scholar, and poet extraordinaire.” He was 78.
“Frank Pierson, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke, has died at the age of 87, after a career that saw him working in television on shows like Mad Men and The Good Wife right up to the end of his life.” Adam Martin for the Atlantic Wire: “The Hollywood Reporter‘s Duane Byrge has a good overview of Pierson’s legendary career, which included Emmy awards for directing Conspiracy and Truman as well as a stint as the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2001 to 2005.”
“Sherman Hemsley, the onetime stage actor who became a pop-culture fixture as dry-cleaning entrepreneur George Jefferson on All in the Family and The Jeffersons, has died at age 74,” writes Time‘s James Poniewozik. “As Norman Lear created him and Hemsley brought him to life, George was an example of how the same things that make sitcom characters outsized and hilarious can make them believable and real.”
Further mid-summer browsing: Adam Cook (Notebook) and Girish Shambu.
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