Howard Hawks assigned Christian Nyby to direct this excursion into sci-fi horror, one of the few genres he hadn't yet worked in. Although the producer graciously insisted in interviews that Nyby had made a fine job of it, in later years surviving cast members had no hesitation in asserting that Hawks himself did most of the picture.
The Coen brothers' first great film is releasing on Blu-ray this week. It didn't come near getting the attention and respect it deserved in 1990, of which year I still reckon it was the top movie.
Pioneer Seattle film exhibitor Jim Selvidge recalls a land that time forgot.
An MSN.com/Movies feature by Kathleen Murphy, taking its cue from the release of The Tourist but focusing on rather better films. Read it here.
Oscar turned 10 at age 82. How The Hurt Locker and Avatar duked it out in an enlarged Best Picture race.
Does Quentin Tarantino still show prospective girlfriends Rio Bravoto see whether they're worth having around? The writing team of David Newman and Robert Benton opined—shortly before we got to know them for Bonnie and Clyde—that this long, casual-seeming Howard Hawks movie from 1959 is "maybe one of the four or five best movies ever made in America." (Why stop there?) The program note reproduced here assumes the reader has seen the film, and indeed had been seeing other Hawks pictures in a UW film series. —RTJ
Limitless does not precisely describe Kathleen Murphy's approval of the new Bradley Cooper movie of the same name, but she sees some value in it at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/limitless/#Review_0
Turner Classic Movies recently ran a movie that's rarely shown but is eminently deserving of attention: Accident, a 1967 British film directed by American expatriate Joseph Losey and written for the screen by the late Harold Pinter (who also appears in a brief, ultra-Pinteresque scene). The team had made The Servant several years earlier, a savage black comedy of social class, sexual identity, and the sort of power struggle both can inspire. That film became something of an arthouse hit; Accident did not, but it's a subtler and more disturbing picture—haunting, really. Once more, the article I'm posting isn't a straightforward review or conventional critical essay. It was written about five years ago for a fascinating project Jim Emerson had going at his provocative Scanners website (http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/), a study of opening shots and how they set up what their movies are going to be about and how they're going to go at it. I also say something about the last shot, so if you're leery of possible spoilers, postpone reading the last several paragraphs till after seeing the movie. —RTJ
...Kechiche's film breaks your heart and hurts like hell to watch. Black Venus insists that we put skin in the game. It won't allow us to lean back and look at this African life through a happy haze of unreality.
From the moment the distant figure of a man approaches out of the foggy whiteness of a snowfield, Kosmos appears to be a movie bent on allegorizing something elemental. Don't worry about it. What matters is that Kosmos, whether metaphysical mystery or a bit of a mess, grabs one's eyes and interest at the outset and holds them for most of the ensuing two hours.
Japan, 2010; Takeshi KitanoKitano's often bleakly hilarious movie is a nihilistic roundelay of double- and triple-crosses and truly grotesque violence, acted out by an ever-diminishing community of yakuza. Kitano plays an old-school, Zen'd-out hitman who persists in believing there are meaningful rituals, rules, and reasons in the ongoing mayhem. A far less resonant take on the fate of Peckinpah's anachronistic outlaws, Outrage keeps fatalistic count as the members of Kitano's wild bunch are co-opted by the future of crime: colorless stockbrokers and bureaucrats. —KAM
One virtue of film festivals is that they provide an opportunity for small-scale, unheralded movies of distinction to get discovered, if only by a less than mainstream audience. It's not necessary that they be great; being unexpectedly good carries its own satisfaction. Small Town Murder Songs, a 75-minute picture from Canada, is the best example so far in this year's Seattle International Film Festival. It's now out on DVD.
"Folks will either embrace the 'real' in Mike Mills' biographical Beginners or recoil from the reek of indie twee. Though drawn from the director's life-altering personal experiences, this amiable dramedy seems oddly lightweight and remote. A strung-together series of vignettes, montages and threadbare French New Wave tropes, the movie could have been storyboarded by Oliver (Ewan McGregor), Mills' cartoonist alter ego, who inks a Jules Feiffer–esque comic strip titled 'The History of Sadness.'" Read on with Kathleen Murphy at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/beginners/#Review_0
Poland/Japan, 2010; Dorota Kedzierzawska In her dark, totally unsentimental films about children, Polish director Dorota Kedzierzawska has always gifted her youthful, mostly female protagonists with old, outlaw souls hungry for family and freedom....
Two days of trying to see a movie at SIFF press screenings make it pretty clear that no one is paying attention.NOTE addendum from SIFF Publicity.