Great Movies
Interviews
Judy Garland's Last Film at MGM: Interview with Author David Fantle
An interview with David Fantle, co-author of C'mon, Get Happy: The Making of Summer Stock, about the last film Judy Garland made at MGM.
An interview with David Fantle, co-author of C'mon, Get Happy: The Making of Summer Stock, about the last film Judy Garland made at MGM.
Reviews from the New York Film Festival of the latest by Alfonso Cuaron, Alex Ross Perry, the Coen brothers and Julian Schnabel.
Just a glimpse at the massive program for this year's Chicago International Film Festival, running from October 13 - 27.
How we process movies in 2015; Top Ten Pixar Movies; Christopher McQuarrie on Minnelli and more; Dangers of auteur TV; Dorothy Arzner retrospective at UCLA.
A Berlin report on the circus surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey and the quality of Peter Greenaway's Eisenstein in Guanajuato and Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth.
An obituary for the legendary Lauren Bacall.
The 67th Cannes Film Festival kicks off with an original, adventurous and beautiful film from the great Mike Leigh.
The completion of our countdown of twelve great Chirstmas-set scenes from the movies. Check out #4–#1.
As the 66th Cannes International Film Festival gets underway, blogger and filmmaker Scout Tafoya looks back at some especially notable years at the festival with a series of video essays.
"Something's Gonna Live" (78 minutes) is available via iTunes, Amazon Instant, and DVD.
Architecture's loss was the movies' immeasurable gain. Robert Boyle, Albert Nozaki and Henry Bumstead, classmates at the University of Southern California in the 1930s could not find jobs in their studied profession. They wound up at Paramount Studios, where, as production designers and art directors, they set the stage for some of the movies' most indelible images.
Boyle designed Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur," "Shadow of a Doubt," "North by Northwest," "The Birds," and "Marnie." And those are the just the Hitchcock credits. Bumstead earned Academy Awards for his contributions to "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Sting." He received nominations for his work on "Vertigo" and "Unforgiven." Tokyo-born Nozaki was the art director on "The War of the Worlds" and "The Ten Commandments," for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.
"Of few deaths can it be said that they end an era, but hers does. No other actress commanded more attention for longer, for her work, her beauty, her private life, and a series of health problems that brought her near death more than once." - Roger, from Elizabeth Taylor, a star in her own category
Fifty years ago, the Palme d'Or winner at Cannes was Fellini's "La Dolce Vita." More every year I realize that it was the film of my lifetime. But indulge me while I list some more titles.
The other entries in the official competition included "Ballad of a Soldier," by Grigori Chukhrai; "Lady with a Dog," by Iosif Kheifits; "Home from the Hill," by Vincente Minnelli; "The Virgin Spring," by Ingmar Bergman;" "Kagi," by Kon Ichikawa; "L'Avventura," by Michelangelo Antonioni; "Le Trou," by Jacques Becker; "Never on Sunday," by Jules Dassin; "Sons and Lovers," by Jack Cardiff; "The Savage Innocents," by Nicholas Ray, and "The Young One," by Luis Bunuel.
And many more. But I am not here at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival to mourn the present and praise the past.
We tend to remember long takes that call attention to themselves as such: the opening shots of "Touch of Evil" or "The Player"; the entrance to the Copacabana in "GoodFellas"; all those shots in Romanian movies, and pictures directed by Bela Tarr and Jia Zhangke... And then there are the ones you barely notice because your eyes have been guided so effortlessly around the frame, or you've been given the freedom to explore it on your own, or you've simply gotten so involved in the rhythms of the scene, the interplay between the characters, that you didn't notice how long the shot had been going on.
For this compilation, "Deep Focus," I've chosen eight shots I treasure (the last two I regard as among the finest in all of cinema). They're not all strictly "deep focus" shots, but they do emphasize three-dimensionality in their compositions. I've presented them with only minimal identifications so you can simply watch them and see what happens without distraction or interruption. Instead, I've decided to write about them below. Feel free to watch the clips and then re-watch (freeze-frame, rewind, replay) the clips to see what you can see. To say they repay re-viewing is an understatement.
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.)
It's a newsletter and a web site!
Nobody does a better job of reminding us that movies are always in the present tense, no matter how long ago they were made, than movie historian, critic, and (above all) enthusiast Leonard Maltin, who's celebrating the fifth anniversary of his own, personal movie-zine, "Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy" ("A Newsletter for People Who Love Movies"). That's right -- it's a newsletter. As in, printed on paper and snail-mailed to you. The "Collector's Corner" of the most recent issue (which just arrived in my mailbox today), appropriately features some vintage promotional envelopes -- one from RKO studios, and one "Direct From Location" in Old Tucson, AZ, for Wesley Ruggles' "Arizona," starring Jean Arthur. I love Jean Arthur. Almost as much as Barbara Stanwyck.
Though he also has a web site (and writes a "Journal" -- not a blog!), I love that someone of Leonard's stature still puts out a good, analog-style newsletter. (Could we consider it "artisanal"?) But, of course, it's also perfectly in character for Leonard, someone whose passion for movies has always been deeply personal as well as professional. (I take pride in getting Leonard on the web in the first place. He used to fax his weekly columns to me at Cinemania Online, which was a bit "klugey," as we used to say. So, I went to his house and set him up on e-mail in 1996 or so. Leonard was an ebay early-adopter -- for his astounding collection of movie memorabilia, of course -- and once he discovered e-mail, he took to it like a sprocket to celluloid.)
The new issue features an interview with 92-year-old Leslie Martinson, a television director and former MGM script supervisor who worked for Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, Sam Wood, Rouben Mamoulian and others, and who has plenty of stories to tell -- including anecdotes about Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. "Long before I had any real awareness of directors and their careers, I knew the name Leslie H. Martinson," Leonard writes, recalling his days as a budding auteurist. "No one who watched television in the 1950s and '60s could have avoided seeing that name. It was emblazoned on countless TV shows, ranging from "Topper" and "The Millionaire" to every Warner Bros. show imaginable, when that studio dominated the airwaves..." Martinson directed episodes of such series as "Maverick," "Hawaiian Eye," "77 Sunset Strip," "Mannix," "Mission: Impossible," "ChiPs," and "Dallas" -- and some movies, too ("Lad: A Dog," "PT 109," the 1966 feature "Batman," based on the hit TV show).
The cover story, "Grade B -- But Choice," is devoted to an obscure 1934 musical called "Young and Beautiful," featuring "budding starlets, grade-A character actors, grade-B musical numbers, a pair of vaudevillians, a look behind the scenes of Hollywood, bogus appearances by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and a script by Dore Schary" [later famous as a producer of films such as "Crossfire," "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," "They Live By Night" and "The Red Badge of Courage"].
Maltin describes "one of the most bizarre musical numbers ever staged, in which actors wearing full-face masks of major stars appear on stage together," along with the WAMPAS girls, beauties selected by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers -- an organization that, between 1922 and 1934, chose an annual list of promising "Baby Stars," which included Clara Bow, Mary Astor, Fay Wray, Joan Crawford, Janet Gaynor, Lupe Valez, Jean Arthur (!), Ginger Rogers and Gloria Stuart.
These stars were not on display in "Young and Beautiful," however. (Betty Bryson, anyone? Dorothy Drake? Hazel Hayes? Lucile Lund? Neoma Judge?) Imagine this: At first, youre not sure whether or not to believe your eyes; many of the caricature masks are quite good. Some of the performers adopt the actors' body language, and appear in costumes from the stars' most recent roles: John Barrymore as he appeared in "Reunion in Vienna," Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa from "Viva Villa," George Arliss as "The Iron Duke," Joe E. Brown in uniform from "Son of a Sailor," Eddie Cantor in costume from "Roman Scandals," along with Clark Gable, Maurice Chevalier, Adolphe Menjou, Jimmy Durante, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. After an introductory sequence, the bogus stars participate in a kind of elaborate parade with the WAMPAS lovelies.If that doesn't sound tantalizing, I don't know what will.
Believe it or not, "Young and Beautiful" is still available on VHS from Turner Classic Movies.
Thanks, Leonard! Here's to five -- or 55 -- more years of film fanaticism. You're right: "We movie nuts have to stick together..."
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.
You always know with a Robert Altman film that you'll get some kind of nudge, a dig in the ribs to wake you up and make you think differently. In the days when he was riding high with "M*A*S*H" and "Nashville," and now in these latter days when his eccentricity isn't fashionable, that hasn't changed. When you ask him why he's working in Paris or on Broadway or cable TV, Altman always grins and says, "I fiddle on the corner where they throw the coins." It's one of his favorite expressions. But he fiddles where he damn well pleases.
Rome, New York -- So you tell me: How you gonna explain to the kids a statue of two boys being nursed by a wolf? The chamber of commerce of Rome (Italy) sent this statue of Romulus and Remus, the city founders, being nursed by a wolf as per the legend.
