New on Blu-ray and streaming, including Where'd You Go Bernadette, Dora and the Lost City of Gold, and a Criterion edition of Cold War.
With FilmStruck gone and no real alternative filling the void at present, Amazon is in a prime position to grab up fans of classic movies.
An interview with author Pascal Mérigeau, whose latest work celebrates the life of filmmaker Jean Renoir.
An appreciation of the lasting power of Bette Davis.
Sheila writes: This week, on Rogerebert.com, we celebrate the women writers on the site, with tons of great content, all of it written by women. Chaz Ebert shares some introductory words for this weeklong project, which had been a dream of Roger's as well. The Table of Contents will be updated as the week goes on. Keep checking back!
Marie writes: And so it begins! A new year and another season of Film Festivals and Award shows. The Golden Globes have come and gone and in advance of quirky SXSW, there's Robert Redford's Sundance 2013...
"A Letter to Three Wives" (1949) is a terrific triplicate of a melodrama. It won Joe L. Mankiewicz Academy Awards for writing and directing one year before he gave the audiences one bumpy ride in "All About Eve" by suggesting that - at least when it comes to love, sex and ambition - fastening one's seat belts is for sissies only. The earlier film is tamer than "Eve"'s non-stop repartee-fest, and its focus is not as pointed. Still, it remains one of my favorite movies ever made: not only for all its brilliant rejoinders (of which Thelma Ritter gets to utter the most hilarious), but for its portrayal of what it means to be anxious about one's relationship and then to receive reassurance from the person we love. It's a story of three women envisioning the end of their marriages in the morning and feeling them strengthened by the end of the day. It goes down like an anxiety-glazed donut with a filling of hope.
Marie writes: There's a glorified duck pond at the center of the complex where I live. And since moving in, my apartment has been an object of enduring fascination for Canadian geese - who arrive each Spring like a squadron of jet fighters returning from a mission in France, to run a sweeping aerial recon my little garden aka: playhouse for birds... (click to enlarge)
Camille Paglia is known for being both brilliant and wacky (possibly wacko) -- often at the same time, which is probably when she's at her most inspired. A founding contributor at Salon.com (and co-star of "It's Pat: The Movie"), Paglia spoke on the phone to Salon editor Kerry Lauerman yesterday after the news of Elizabeth Taylor's death, and offered up an extraordinary tribute. I just wanted to share some of it with you. Lauerman begins by quoting something Paglia wrote about Taylor in Penthouse in 1992:
"She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm." Paglia takes it from there:
Exactly. At that time, you have to realize, Elizabeth Taylor was still being underestimated as an actress. No one took her seriously -- she would even make jokes about it in public. And when I wrote that piece, Meryl Streep was constantly being touted as the greatest actress who ever lived. I was in total revolt against that and launched this protest because I think that Elizabeth Taylor is actually a greater actress than Meryl Streep, despite Streep's command of a certain kind of technical skill. [...]
"Veni. Vedi. Vici"Roger Ebert accepts the Person Of The Year award with his wife, Chaz, at the Webby Awards in New York June 14, 2010. Jimmy Fallon presenter.From the Big Poobah: Our club secretary Marie Haws, who pokes here and there more than a dentist, came up with a list of the geographical locations of Club members. Most are in the U.S. and Canada, as expected, but we also have members in 40 other nations! This reflects my website's overall readership; over the last 12 months, 25% of all visitors have been non-U.S.Foreign: Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, Iceland, Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Demark, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Greece, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, India, China, Japan, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand.
Click above to REALLY enlarge...
UPDATED 01/28/10: 2:25 p.m. PST -- COMPLETED!: Thanks for all the detective work -- and special thanks to Christopher Stangl and Srikanth Srinivasan himself for their comprehensive efforts at filling the last few holes! Now I have to go read about who some of these experimental filmmakers are. I did find some Craig Baldwin movies on Netflix, actually...
Srikanth Srinivasan of Bangalore writes one of the most impressive movie blogs on the web: The Seventh Art. I don't remember how I happened upon it last week, but wow am I glad I did. Dig into his exploration of connections between Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and Jean-Luc Godard's "History of Cinema." Or check out his piece on James Benning's 1986 "Landscape Suicide." There's a lot to look through, divided into sections for Hollywood and World Cinema.
In the section called "The Cinemaniac... I found the above collage (mosaic?) of mostly-famous faces belonging to film directors, which Srikanth says he assembled from thumbnails at Senses of Cinema. Many of them looked quite familiar to me, and if I'm not mistaken they were among the biographical portraits we used in the multimedia CD-ROM movie encyclopedia Microsoft Cinemania, which I edited from 1994 to 1998, first on disc, then also on the web. (Anybody with a copy of Cinemania able to confirm that? My Mac copy of Cinemania97 won't run on Snow Leopard.)
View image Antonioni's "L'Avventura" ranked in the top ten.
OK, as long as the simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have shaken the foundations of the pantheon and got us debating canons -- again: Near the end of the last millennium, I decided to do something difficult and convoluted and thoroughly silly. On this particular occasion I determined to figure out which 100 movies were the most highly regarded at the close of the century. I think this was in late 1998 or early 1999. But more recent films wouldn't have registered very high anyway, because I was using a larger historical sampling to compile the results.
I came up with some complex point scale for rating the movies by the awards and honors they had received, using a mixture of domestic and international, popular and critical sources. I no longer have any recollection of the formula I used, but I'm sure it was at least as complicated as the one for Coca-Cola. I know (given my personal bent) that I weighted, for example, the "Sight & Sound" international critics' poll more highly than, say, the Oscars. And I tried to find a mathematical way to properly consider and weigh American with non-English-language films (given the restrictions and biases of some sources), and older films with newer ones. The sources I used were (in no particular order): Academy Awards, "Sight & Sound" polls (1952, '62, '72, '82, '92), the first AFI 100 list, the National Film Registry (American films selected for preservation in the Library of Congress -- which had to be at least 10 years old), the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards (1975 - ), the New York Film Critics Circle (1935 - ), and the National Society of Film Critics (1966 - ).
Although it seems inconceivable to me now, I actually put together several charts (spreadsheets!), so you could view the lists and the movies' individual honors, not only by rank, but by director, title (alphabetically), year/decade, -- and a comprehensive list of the 400+ titles that came under consideration, given my sources.
I doubt -- and I hope -- I will never be that anal again. But what I liked about the results was that they reflected a mix of "art films" ("The Passion of Joan of Arc," "Bicycle Thieves"), silents ("Greed," "Intolerance," "The Gold Rush") and popular titles ("West Side Story," "Annie Hall," "Schindler's List"). I was also pleased with the distribution over the decades, a little more balanced than you usually see in polls: two films from the 1910s; six from the '20s; 19 from the '30s; 16 from the '40s; 29 from the '50s; 19 from the '60s; 21 from the '70s; 13 from the '80s; and 14 from the '90s (which weren't quite over yet).
Point of interest: Bergman had three films on the list: "Persona" (22), "Wild Strawberries" (66), and "Fanny and Alexander" (84). Antonioni had one: "L'Avventura" (8).
Welles and Chaplin each had two films in the top 25. Other directors represented in the upper quarter include: Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Sergei Eisenstein, Stanley Donen, Steven Spielberg, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Vittorio de Sica, Woody Allen, Erich von Stroheim, Elia Kazan, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Robert Wise, D.W. Griffith, Jean Vigo, and Michael Curtiz.
The Big List begins like this:
EXCERPT FROM INTRO: This isn't like Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" series. It's not my idea of The Best Movies Ever Made (that would be a different list, though there's some overlap here), or limited to my personal favorites or my estimation of the most important or influential films. These are the movies I just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat "movie-literate." I hope these movies are experiences we can all assume we share.
The Festival International du Film, held annually in Cannes, France, has become the world's most prestigious film festival—the spot on the beach where the newest films from the world's top directors compete for both publicity and awards.
Great Movies
