The shape of Daily entries has evolved over the years, and recently I’ve been wrapping up several of them with “endnotes” pointing to noteworthy viewing, listening or simply some odd unclassifiable thing I think you’d want to know about. Today, though, we’ve got a couple of items that need to slide right on up to the top.
Update: Earlier today, this entry was pointing to a list of links to video essays. Turns out, the author of those essays, Tag Gallagher, (John Ford: The Man and His Films [1988] and The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini [1998]), didn’t intend for that list to be public. Some of his essays, though, are freely available, such as the one on Stagecoach, embedded below.
Cinephilia and Beyond has discovered quite the playlist gathering episodes Cinéma cinémas, a program broadcast on French television from 1982 through 1991. The vast majority of these profiles of filmmakers, ranging from Welles to Coppola, Buster Keaton to John Cassavetes, Samuel Fuller to Woody Allen, are in English with French subtitles. One notable exception: Lang / Godard, a conversation conducted in 1965 in French.
Gabe Klinger is Peter Labuza‘s guest on the new episode of The Cinephiliacs (90’53”), talking about Raoul Walsh, Joe Dante and, of course, James Benning and Richard Linklater.
READING
“The arts are manifold these days, re-enchanting and rejuvenating cityscapes as best they can, which is great,” writes Mark Cousins in the Observer. “The post-industrial world needed new reasons to get us out of the house and, when we noticed the stasis of online life, we again wanted to get out. So I hate to rain on the parade, but there’s a problem with this new cultureverse. As a filmmaker, I regularly tour around the major arts venues and cinemas in the UK and abroad and, despite their fighting the good fight and being run by lovely, committed people, too many of them feel exclusive. The taxi driver who drops you off at them has never been inside. They’re too narrow, too defined by class.”
Dreaming of Jeannie: Tag Gallagher on Stagecoach from Kevin B. Lee.
It’s still not clear what The Weinstein Company plans to do with Gomorrah, the Italian series based on Roberto Saviano’s bestselling novel (previously the basis for the 2008 feature film) and directed by Stefano Sollima (Romanzo Criminale). But once it eventually airs, Celluloid Liberation Front, writing at Indiewire, recommends catching it: “The series’ honesty in depicting the harsh realities of organized crime and the social circumstances that allows it to flourish in the first place (unemployment, poor education, etcetera) can hardly be overstated. The need to be as faithful as possible to the ruthless ineluctability of crime manifests itself in the absence of that classical narrative trope: the fight between good and evil.”
Maurice Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together (1972) is out on DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow from Kino Classics, and the Dissolve‘s Scott Tobias gives it 4.5 out of 5 stars: “The film’s emotional and physical violence is startling enough, bluntly realized through Pialat’s visual plainspokenness; but his refusal to situate the viewer in time and place has an unsettling effect that’s harder to identify.”
Watching A Hard Day’s Night (1964), “whether for the first time or (like me) the 30th, anyone with eyes and ears should be able to grasp that what we’re seeing is anything but hysteria,” writes Charles Taylor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “What makes A Hard Day’s Night more than an exhilarating, cinematically alive comedy, what makes it a profound statement of belief in the transcendent possibility of art, is looking at those screaming girls and thinking, ‘That’s me.'”
Shout! Factory’s released Walter Hill’s unduly neglected Southern Comfort (1981) and, writing for Maxim, Calum Marsh argues that “its influence, and its legacy, clearly looms large.”
“John Magary’s feature debut The Mend opens with a mindbending overture reminiscent of the découpage of Resnais’s Muriel before easing into something more compressed but still not lacking in ellipses, dislocations,” writes Craig Keller.
“Feel more. That was what I meant to say.” James Grissom‘s posted a snippet from a 1998 interview he conducted with Stanley Kubrick.
New York Times Op-Ed columnists Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat have begun discussion movies.
For further reading, see Nathaniel Rogers and John Wyver.
IN THE WORKS
Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, Aaron Eckhart, Liev Schreiber and Stanley Tucci are set to star in Tom McCarthy’s “Catholic church sex scandal drama,” Spotlight, reports the Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth.
OBITS
“Shakespearian actor Charles Keating, who won a Daytime Emmy award for his role in the US soap Another World, has died of cancer aged 72,” reports the BBC. “In the UK, he appeared on Crown Court for seven years in the 1970’s as James Elliot QC before starring in the 1981 classic ITV series Brideshead Revisited playing Rex Mottram. His career also took him onto the big screen with roles in The Bodyguard, Awakenings and The Thomas Crown Affair.”
The German Press Agency is reporting that Günter Junghans, primarily known in recent years for his work on television, has died at the age of 73. Among his most important work for DEFA, the state-owned East German studio, are The Adventure of Werner Holt (1965) and Jadup and Boel, a 1980 film banned by the GDR for being too critical of the communist system.
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