SYNOPSIS
Directed and written by Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic and one-time Acting Curator of the Harvard Film Archive, For the Love of Movies offers a 100-year history of film criticism through clips from Hollywood movies and illuminating, entertaining interviews with many of America’s key reviewers, including Roger Ebert (The Chicago Sun-Times), A.O. Scott (The New York Times), Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly), Wesley Morris (The Boston Globe), and Harry Knowles (aintitcoolnews.com).

Narrated by Patricia Clarkson, the documentary explores the beginnings of criticism before The Birth of a Nation through the incendiary Pauline Kael-Andrew Sarris debates of the 60s and 70s, and follows the battle today between youthful one-liners and the print establishment.

For.the.Love.of.Movies.2009.720p.WEBRip.AAC2.0.H.264-HRiP.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 20mn
Size:	1.60 GiB
Video
Codec:	h264
Resolution:	1280x720
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	29.970 fps
Bit rate:	
Audio
English 2.0ch AAC

https://nitro.download/view/6041CB3D5908697/For.the.Love.of.Movies.2009.720p.WEBRip.AAC2.0.H.264-HRiP.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Gerald Peary – For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“Wendigo” is a good movie with an ending that doesn’t work. While it was not working I felt a keen disappointment, because the rest of the movie works so well. The writer, director and editor is Larry Fessenden, whose “Habit” (1997) was about a New York college student who found solace, and too much more, in the arms of a vampire. Now Fessenden goes into the Catskills to tell a story that will be compared to “The Blair Witch Project” when it should be compared to “The Innocents.” The film builds considerable scariness, and does it in the details. Ordinary things happen in ominous ways. Kim and George (Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber), a couple from New York, drive to the Catskills to spend a weekend in a friend’s cottage, bringing along their young son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan). Even before they arrive, there’s trouble. They run into a deer on the road, and three hunters emerge from the woods and complain that the city people killed “their” deer–and worse, broke its antlers.

Two of the hunters seem like all-right guys. The third, named Otis (John Speredakos), is not. Holding a rifle that seems like a threat, he engages in macho name-calling with George, and the scene is seen mostly through the big-eyed point of view of little Miles, in the back seat. He says little, he does little, and the less he says and does, the more his fear becomes real to us. Fessenden is using an effective technique: Instead of scaring us, he scares the kid, and we get scared through empathy and osmosis.

Kim and George are not getting along too well, and that works to increase the tension. They’re not fighting out loud, but you can feel the buried unhappiness, and Kim tells him: “You’ve got all this anger you carry around with you from work and I don’t know where, and he feels it’s directed at him.” George tries to be nice to Miles, tries to take an interest, but he’s not really listening, and kids notice that.

There are bullet holes in the cabin when they get to it. It’s cold inside. Miles hears noises and sees things–or thinks he does. The next day at the general store, he is given a wooden figure by a man behind the counter, who says it represents a wendigo, an Indian spirit. His mother asks where he got the figure. “From the man,” Miles says. “Nobody works here but me,” says a woman behind another counter.

It doesn’t sound as effective as it is. The effect is all in the direction, in Fessenden’s control of mood. I watched in admiration as he created tension and fear out of thin air. When the boy and his father go sledding, an event takes place so abruptly that it almost happens to us. The way Fessenden handles the aftermath is just right, building suspense without forgetting logic.

The actors have an unforced, natural quality that looks easy but is hard to do. Look and listen at the conversation between Otis and the local sheriff (Christopher Wynkoop). Notice the way they both know what is being said and what it being meant, and how they both know the other knows. And look at the way the scene involves us in what will happen next.

The build-up, which continues for most of the film, is very well done. Unfortunately, Fessenden felt compelled, I guess, to tilt over into the supernatural (or the hallucinatory) in a climax that feels false and rushed. Maybe he would have been better off dropping the wendigo altogether, and basing the story simply on the scariness of a cottage in the woods in winter, and the ominous ways of Otis.

The ending doesn’t work, as I’ve said, but most of the movie works so well I’m almost recommending it, anyway–maybe not to everybody, but certainly to people with a curiosity about how a movie can go very right, and then step wrong. Fessenden has not made a perfect film, but he’s a real filmmaker.

3.36GB | 1h 32m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6911C5BB00763ED/Larry_Fessenden_-_(2001)_Wendigo.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Larry Fessenden – Wendigo (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Very often films which are defiant of genre categorisation can easily come across as messy and imprecise, but in Ira Sachs’ “Married Life,” he blends dark comedy, suspense and stylish melodrama into a contemporary throwback, conceptualised from a male perspective, to the film noir facet of the glamour of the 40’s in a wholesome package that keeps the viewer on their toes every step of the way. Audiences will either revel in the manner in which the film strays from a singular course or they will find annoyance in the seemingly directionless film, with an insubordinate mixture of tones and principles, in a way that very much resembles reality. What the film does not manage to do is balance its daring concept will an entirely fulfilling outcome, and perhaps “Married Life” is too modest for its own good.

Pitch-perfecting casting is the films biggest asset. Chris Cooper was born to play roles of men who are emotionally suppressed and end up living quiet lives of aching desperation. He has done it repeatedly, and he gets better every time. His character has continuously stuffed all his anger and torment neatly under his suave suits and buttoned them up as best as he could. However, when the monumental weight of all his internal repression gets the better of him, what’s a man to do? Especially a respectable, considerate and an obviously damaged man that we have no choice but to sympathise with him. Just as good as Cooper is, and this came as a surprise to me, Brosman matches him. His representation of a man with questionable morals is interesting because his devil-may-care attitude is clearly a mask with which he covers his vulnerability, a role which Cary Grant would have had a blast with. Clarkson and McAdams are always effervescent no matter how undefined and underdeveloped their roles may be, and where Clarkson is already an established screen presence, the film will no doubt mark a high point in McAdams career, her transition into darker, more dramatic, and ultimately more challenging material begins in this film. In addition, it suits her to no end, the same can be said for her bottle-blonde do – she is almost unrecognizable, but her smile can melt a man, which makes the fact that she gets two well-poised men going out of their minds just to be with her, entirely believable.

The true power of “Married Life” comes from its impact on the viewer when they leave the cinema and get home, and have no choice but to begin to question their relationships in their own lives. Do we really know what out better halves are thinking and feeling all the time? Of course not, and it is the utter mysteriousness of the affair that makes love, and seeing this film, worth it.

2.03GB | 1 h 30 min | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/41F0BEC2C8DFD73/Ira_Sachs_-_(2007)_Married_Life.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Ira Sachs – Married Life (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

NY Times website:
“Regarding Susan Sontag,” a documentary Monday night on HBO, will fill you in on a lot of the details of its subject’s life: her precocity, her travels, her illnesses, her lovers. (Particularly her lovers.)

What it won’t give you is any strong sense of her work. The famous essays and collections of criticism and analysis — “Notes on Camp,” “Against Interpretation,” “On Photography,” “Illness as Metaphor” — are used as mile markers, along with the less famous novels and films. But rather than tackle Ms. Sontag’s ideas or their value head-on, the director, Nancy Kates, continually deflects the discussion along other lines: Ms. Sontag as closeted bisexual, serial heartbreaker, liberal provocateur, narcissist, celebrity, camera subject, Jew, cancer survivor.

There’s nothing wrong with a gossipy account of a full, glamorous life, and “Regarding Susan Sontag” provides that, in some measure. Anecdotes and observations are provided by a large cast that includes Ms. Sontag’s sister, Judith Sontag Cohen, and representatives of her impressive roster of girlfriends: Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, Eva Kollisch, the choreographer Lucinda Childs, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. Frequent excerpts from her writing, read in voice-over by Patricia Clarkson, give a feel for her style if not her substance. And Ms. Sontag herself, with her striking good looks, heavy mane of hair and gravelly voice, is a presence throughout, having been among the most filmed and photographed of serious writers.

But there’s also something reluctant, slightly scolding and oddly funereal about the film, which begins with her saying, “I love being alive,” and ends with an account of her death from cancer at 71, in 2004.

The news that Ms. Sontag won a National Book Award (for the novel “In America”) is followed by someone saying, “Sometimes awards are given in recognition of a career as much as the merits of a particular book.” We’re told how bad her first novel was and how bad her first film was. When her body of work is directly addressed, it’s with faint praise like: “She had an unbelievably good sense of what was important,” and “It’s mannered and stylized, but that’s part of the fun of the package of Susan Sontag.”

You’re left with the feeling that Ms. Kates was drawn to Ms. Sontag as a personality and a sexual and political symbol but didn’t really take seriously the work she devoted her life to. That’s a defensible position, but it would have been better to take it head-on, the way Ms. Sontag would have.

https://nitro.download/view/40C4450D7284D2E/HBO.Documentaries.Regarding.Susan.Sontag.2014.HDTV.x264-BATV.mkv

Language(s):English, French
Subtitles:none

The post Nancy D. Kates – Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.