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How is it that the same movie can seem tedious on first viewing and absorbing on the second? Why doesn’t it grow even more tedious? In the case of “Distant,” which I first saw at Cannes in 2003, perhaps it helped that I knew what the story offered and what it did not offer, and was able to see it again without expecting what would not come.Read More »
“Narrated by actress Charlize Theron, Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies (2001) is a documentary about the Hollywood legend whose acting career was overshadowed by her much-criticized love affair with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The film features the final on-camera interview with Davies’ biographer Fred Guiles as well as interviews with film historians Kevin Brownlow, Jeanine Basinger, and Cari Beauchamp; former film critic Charles Champlin; and actress Virginia Madsen, who researched Davies for her portrayal of the star in the made-for-TV movie The Hearst and Davies Affair (1985). First-hand accounts of events in Davies’s life will be shared by Carl Roup, a studio newspaper boy who was chosen by Davies to appear as an extra in The Red Mill (1927); Davies’s friends, including actress Constance Moore and King Vidor’s daughter, Belinda Vidor Holiday; and Life magazine correspondent Stanley Flink, who taped interviews with Davies in 1951, excerpts which are heard in the documentary.Read More »
Review by Michael Hastings (Allmovie)
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Though Paul Schrader isn’t often tapped to direct scripts other than his own, his touch proves essential to Auto Focus, a true-life tale of sex, celebrity, and videotape that seems tailor-made to the man who dreamed up Taxi Driver and American Gigolo. Schrader’s clinical, detached directorial style proves well-matched to the genial, humorous tone of Michael Gerbosi’s script; it’s like Hardcore without all the proselytizing (and without the sight of George C. Scott in a campy porn-producer costume). What Auto Focus is most interested in is not the narcotizing effects of anonymous sex — though that’s undeniably a big part of it — but the latent homosexuality lurking behind Bob Crane and John Carpenter’s buddy-buddy sexcapades. Finally cast in a role that successfully sends up and subverts his All-American charm, Greg Kinnear perfectly captures Crane’s kid-in-a-candy-store sexual awakening; meanwhile, Willem Dafoe underlines the desperation at the heart of the swinging lifestyle. Schrader overplays his hand in the film’s “downward spiral” sequences, switching to hand-held camera and bleached-out film stock, but even those minor technical miscalculations don’t detract from the film’s portrait of Crane as a man whose determination to lead the unobserved life ultimately led to his death.Read More »
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Synopsis
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
—Socrates
Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets…
In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.Read More »
Zeitgeist Films wrote:
Manufactured Landscapes is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.Read More »
Le Streghe, Femmes entre elles (The Witches, Women among Themselves).2008. France/Italy. Written and directed by Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Dialogues with Leucò, by Cesare Pavese. With Giovanna Giuliani, Giovanna Daddi. 35mm. In Italian. 21 min.
The enchantress Circe recounts to Leucò her attempts to bewitch and bed Odysseus. She talks about men and women, the human and the divine, and the brave hero who chooses to become neither pig nor God. In her adamantine repose, Circe also hints at the monotony of her own immortal fate, and contrasts it with the vibrating currents of life she so dearly craves and envies in Odysseus, with his longing for home, childhood, and love. These women-demigods are frank and sensitive at the same time, like the men of Raoul Walsh’s films, where the communities of male and female are deathly separate, and massive to each other. Walsh made a western, The Tall Men, in 1955. This 2008 Straub-film is its reverse shot. (Joshua Siegel – MoMA)Read More »
Jean-Marie Straub’s first film after the death of Danièlle Huillet is a love poem to her. Le Genou d’Artémide is based on Cesare Pavese’s “Dialogues of Leuco”, which had already been adapted by Straub et Huillet as Ces Rencontres Avec Eux (2006).Read More »
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Anti-Fascist Attitude” is the first ever documentary on the emerging Russian anti-fascist movement which is made by the activists themselves. The movie features both moderate NGO activists and radical grassroots activists and anarchists from three cities – Moscow, St. Petersburg and Irkutsk.
It also features Stanislav Markelov, murdered in Moscow on 19th January, 2009.Read More »
IMDB:
In Prospect Bay, a remote outpost on the South Australian coast, two communities, the Goonyas (whites) and the Nungas (blacks), come together on the one field they have in common, the football field. But the underlying racism and class warfare threatens to make the team’s greatest victories irrelevant. This holds particularly true for Blacky, a white teen who is more interested in books than sport, and his best friend, Dumby, the Aboriginal star of the team. Written by Anonymous
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