Owner: Only The Cinema URL:http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com Join Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:42:24 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: A film review resource, updated nearly daily, with an emphasis on classic Hollywood, foreign films, avant-garde cinema, and independent cinema. Site statistics:Click here
The best books about Warner Brothers animation? 2008-11-21 12:21:00 This is a call to all my readers to give me your recommendations for books that cover WarnerBrothers
animation from the 30s to the 60s. Ideally, I'm looking for one big, comprehensive book with a historical and biographical focus, one that will cover the foundation of the studio, the development of its characters and animation styles over time, and profiles of individual creators (directors, anim
11/20: Ball of Fire 2008-11-20 20:40:00 Ball of Fire is a delightful romantic comedy in the "opposites attract" tradition, throwing together the stuffy, intellectual professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) and the smart-mouthed burlesque girl and gangster's moll Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). Potts is part of a group of eight professors putting together an encyclopedia, but the project stalls when they reach the entry for "slang" an
11/19: L'Atalante 2008-11-19 22:29:00 L'Atalante was the first and only feature of director Jean Vigo, who died shortly after its completion at the age of 29. With this final film, Vigo applied the realist style of his earlier two short documentaries and his psuedo-documentary Zéro de conduite to a simple story of the young couple Jean (Jean Dasté) and Juliette (Dita Parlo) starting out their life as newlyweds on Jean's boat
Films I Love #7: Sink Or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990) 2008-11-17 06:35:00 [This is cross-posted with the Film of the Month Club, where I have selected this film as November's topic of discussion. Comments are turned off here so that all the conversation can take place over there.]Sink Or Swim, Su Friedrich
's experimental short in which she attempts to express, through a wide variety of techniques, her ambivalent experiences with and feelings for her often-absent father, Read more:Films
11/16: Four Warner Brothers cartoons 2008-11-16 22:02:00 The Heckling Hare is a fairly typical Bugs Bunny cartoon animated under the able direction of Tex Avery, though the film doesn't have much sign of the frenzied energy Avery would later become known for. It runs through the usual Bugs gags, setting his wily charm against the incompetent pursuit of whatever poor creature is trying to catch the wascally wabbit this time. The adversary here is one in Read more:Brothers
, Warner
11/16: Synecdoche, New York 2008-11-16 17:27:00 Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York
, the writer's first feature as a director, is a brilliant work of metafiction. It's also confounding, disturbingly scatological, grindingly negative and morbid, self-indulgent, and at times almost impossible to watch without feeling an unpleasant sensation forming in the pit of one's stomach. Its brilliance and its tendency to irritate are not mutually exclus
11/14: A Prairie Home Companion 2008-11-14 21:19:00 One cannot help but think of Robert Altman's final film, A Prairie Home Companion
, as not only a loving tribute to the famed live country-western radio show which gave the film its name, but as a parting valedictory for Altman himself, who surely directed the film with the knowledge that it'd likely be his last. The specter of death lingers over the entire film, both figuratively (with Tommy Lee J
11/13: Jan Svankmajer shorts: Leonardo's Diary; Et Cetera 2008-11-13 21:22:00 Leonardo's Diary
is a dazzling formal experiment from Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, in which he uses the sketchbook drawings of Leonardo as a starting point for a series of fluid animations in which the penciled images leap into motion. It's a test of mastery for Svankmajer, who uses the grace and detail of Leonardo's perfectly rendered faces and architectural constructs as a base for some remark Read more:Leonardo
11/12: A Winter's Tale 2008-11-12 20:59:00 A Winter's Tale is the second installment in Eric Rohmer's "Tales of the Four Seasons," and it is a small pleasure of a film from a director who excels at delivering smart, carefully constructed, meditative confections like this. It is, as its title indicates, mostly set within the space of a few weeks in December, but it is not a chilly film by any means. Indeed, the film opens in a very differen
11/11: Far From Heaven 2008-11-11 22:43:00 Far From Heaven
is Todd Haynes' loving, flawlessly constructed tribute to the cinema of one of his favorite directors, Douglas Sirk, and especially to Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. That film, about a society widow who invites gossip and disgrace by developing a friendship and eventually a romance with her younger gardener, provides the germ of the idea for Haynes' own take on Sirkian melodrama. S
11/11: Vanishing Point 2008-11-11 16:47:00 Vanishing Point is the ultimate ode to the need for speed, a ferocious white-line race dedicated to "the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of soul," the driver Kowalski (Barry Newman), making a high-speed run from Colorado to San Francisco with the police in pursuit. The film pulsates and revs in time with Kowalski, who simply swallows handfuls of pills and takes off, shuttling back a Read more:Vanishing
11/11: I Walked With a Zombie 2008-11-11 13:13:00 The wind blowing through palm fronds on dark, moody Caribbean nights. The insistent rhythm of tribal drums beating in the distance. The strange moans and calls that echo through the chilly night air. With such simple effects, director Jacques Tourneur and legendary horror producer Val Lewton conjured up a genuinely eerie, haunting atmosphere for a film that has only a tangential relationship to it
11/10: Sink Or Swim 2008-11-10 20:52:00 [This is cross-posted with the Film of the Month Club, where I have selected this film as November's topic of discussion. Comments are turned off here so that all the conversation can take place over there.]The title of Su Friedrich's autobiographical essay-film Sink Or Swim comes from the implied moral of one of the stories she tells about her relationship with her father, a robotically unemotion
Films I Love #6: Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974) 2008-11-10 06:21:00 Despite its title, Peter
Watkins' Edvard Munch
is more than just a biographical film about the painter of the famous Scream. Munch's tortured life story, from his sickly childhood to his adult affair with a married woman, figure prominently in this fragmentary, elliptical masterpiece, but these dramas are far from the film's only subject. For one thing, the film is one of the best chronicles of th Read more:Films
11/9: Celebrity 2008-11-09 20:48:00 "You can learn a lot about a society by who it chooses to celebrate." So says former schoolteacher and current television interviewer Robin (Judy Davis) in Woody Allen's Celebrity
, in one of those moments that Woody often inscribes in his films, where his authorial voice comes through loud and clear no matter which character the mouthpiece happens to be at any given moment. This line, coupled with
11/9: Irma la Douce 2008-11-09 15:30:00 Irma la Douce has a delightfully farcical premise, a plotline that one would expect could only yield gold in the hands of a proven comic genius like Billy Wilder, whose One, Two, Three and The Apartment are among the greatest bittersweet gems of classic Hollywood comedy. Irma (Shirley MacLaine) is a Parisian prostitute who falls in with the naïve cop Nestor (Jack Lemmon) after he's kicked off
An Alphabet of Favorite Films 2008-11-06 19:07:00 The Film Doctor has asked me to contribute to a meme started by Blog Cabins: a list consisting of one film for each letter of the alphabet. It's a surprisingly tough task, resulting in something very different from what I might pick if simply asked for favorite films without such restrictions. So here it is...Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, 1998)Beau travail (Claire Denis, 1999)Chine Read more:Alphabet
, Favorite
, Films
11/2: T-Men 2008-11-02 15:51:00 In Anthony Mann's seminal noir T-Men, as in his later morally ambiguous Western cycle, there are the makings of the kind of tough-minded, hard-edged, beautifully shot morality studies that Mann continually returned to. Here, he is slightly hamstrung by his material, an über-patriotic story that attempts to mythologize the agents of the U.S. Treasury Department as they ferret out counterfeiter
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