Waggish (Free subscription) | 20/11/2009
Childhood, says the Children's Encyclopaedia, is a time of innocent joy, to be spent in the meadows amid buttercups and bunny-rabbits or at the hearthside absorbed in a storybook. It is a vision of childhood utterly alien to him. Nothing he experiences in Worcester, at home or at school, leads him to think that childhood is anything but a time of gritting the teeth and enduring. J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood...
The House Next Door (Free subscription) | 03/11/2009
By Dan Callahan "I'm not an apparition," insists Delphine Seyrig in Truffaut's Stolen Kisses (1968), "I'm a woman." While we would like to give her the benefit of the doubt, there can be no denying that Seyrig is the most ghostly of actresses, haunting her own movies with a druggy, dazed quality over which she placed a severe intellectual patina. Something as simple as a different...
Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal (Free subscription) | 07/10/2009
Mundane History , the debut feature by "May" Anocha Suwichakornpong, will have its Thailand premiere as the opening film of the 7th World Film Festival of Bangkok . With around 100 features and shorts screening over 10 days, the WFFBKK is set for November 6 to 15 at Paragon Cineplex. Among the highlights announced at a press conference today is a Retrospective on Swiss director Alain Tanner,...
Twitch (Free subscription) | 20/09/2009
Cinema is as close to immortality as anyone will achieve. It lives along with beautiful facsimiles (when preserved on celluloid, DVD, digital drives, etc.) long after the actors and directors are gone. We can see Greta Garbo or Charlie Chaplin or Jean-Pierre Leaud as a confused and passionate child and make friends with them, love them even. Tsai Ming-Liang's latest move literalizes that love on screen...
Movie Moxie (Free subscription) | 13/09/2009
The hordes of folks at Scotiabank for the free Antichrist videoconference early Friday morning There was something a little different in the air tonight that I couldn't peg down right away. Everyone looked pretty sparkled up. Then, it hit me that it was Friday night. Funny, to me it's just "TIFF Day 2" and the day of the week is almost irrelevant! Along with the regular preshow promo reels...
The Life and Times of a Problem Child (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
I seem to be caught up in this kind of tendency in cinema wherein a certain réalisateur favours a certain actor and their collaborations just keep on. This is much like how Truffaut has worked countless times with Jean-Pierre Léaud,...
Silly Little Country (Free subscription) | 13/08/2009
Published oddly as an op-ed in the NYTimes . About 15 years ago, I wrote John from Paris, where I was living, to tell him how important he was to me. I had been on a François Truffaut kick and had just watched the series of “Antoine Doinel” films that he had made with the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. There was something in the connection of actor and director that I recognized...
The Plank (Free subscription) | 08/08/2009
In an excellent appraisal of the writer-director John Hughes--who died this week at the age of 59--A.O. Scott tells the following story: Shortly after I heard the shocking news of Mr. Hughes’s death, I was talking to a friend of mine, a few years older than I am, who had seen almost none of those movies. The half-decade gap in our ages made all the difference. While I was in high school, in...
MovingPictureBlog (Free subscription) | 06/08/2009
I can't say I was a big fan of John Hughes ' Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club -- though, to be fair, I already was a decade or so past their target demographic even when they first appeared in theaters -- but I can't deny, and won't denigrate, the pop-culture impact and enduring popularity of those teen-centric "Brat Pack" comedies. Indeed, during the next few days, I fully expect...
Dialogic (Free subscription) | 06/07/2009
#293 Guy Maddin The Bat Segundo Show Subjects Discussed: Whether living in Winnipeg for many year makes one an expert of Winnipeg, expertise and confused feelings, the importance of not straying from your methods, pleasant feelings and hellish depictions of Winnipeg, the strength one obtains from retellings of Icelandic sagas, the difficulties of laughing at smallpox plagues, “My Winnipeg”...
India Press Release (Free subscription) | 16/06/2009
/India PRwire/ - UTV World Movies leaves no stone unturned to reach to its assurance of bringing the Ace of World Cinema to television exclusively through In –Focus a unique on-air property. Month on month, the channel focuses on an iconic filmmaker and presents his work along with information, trivia, contests and online communities. This month the channel brings to you a repertoire of incomparable...
Critic After Dark (Free subscription) | 12/06/2009
Classical and neoclassical French cinema Francois Truffaut's first feature film Les quatre cent coups ( The 400 Blows , 1959) was mainly a reaction to what Truffaut witheringly called the "tradition of quality." Where "quality" films emphasized production value, Truffaut used everyday Parisian locations; where "quality" films used smooth-gliding camerawork and flawless...
Filles Sourires (Free subscription) | 01/06/2009
And the guestposts by Sky on Nicoletta keep on a-comin': Nicoletta’s second cooperation with Francois de Roubaix was her vocal version of the master’s theme melody for José Giovanni’s 1969 noir policier Dernier Domicile Connu – featuring a stupendous, timeless leitmotif that was also used by the likes of Robbie Williams and R&B queen Missy Elliott. The female lead...
Secondhand Smoke (Free subscription) | 04/05/2009
Jean Pierre Léaud and Patrick Auffay - Audition
Libertarian Democrat Point Of View (Free subscription) | 19/04/2009
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