Watching Dietrich occupy cinematic space is one of the most intoxicating experiences that movies afford. Sternberg's films with Dietrich cannot really date because his readings, his dialogue, his gestures are as conspicuously stylized as verse drama.
Out of the hundreds of movies shown in this year's film festival, these are the ones selected via audience ballots or, in some cases, special juries: http://www.siff.net/press/detail.aspx?NID=210&year=2011
Picking the Ten Best films of the year has been a ritual for critics and reviewers pretty much as long as there have been critics and reviewers. There are criteria for Ten Best-ness, of course. But what about criteria for years? Can it be that the just-concluded 2010 may not have brought us a single great film?
"Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) calls Tabloid, his latest CT scan of an obsessive psyche, 'sad, sick and funny.' How else to describe the fabricated life of Joyce McKinney, a dotty, 60-something blonde whose pathologically romantic imagination has clearly never brooked much interference from reality?" Keep reading Kathleen Murphy at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/tabloid.2/
Kathleen Murphy measures the shortfall of Lee Tamahori's new film The Devil's Double at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/the-devil's-double/. The movie is disappointing but erstwhile Mamma Mia! footnote Dominic Cooper is terrific.
A definitive set of shorts and features starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy cues me to pluck this 1996 cinebio back from the Classics section. And by all means read the splendid commentary of Dave Kehr in the Nov. 6 New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/movies/homevideo/new-dvds-laurel-and-hardy-the-essential-collection.html?ref=arts
How not to treat a classic.
Turner Classic Movies always devotes the month of August to "Summer Under the Stars," with every 24-hour day a tribute to a given player. This year TCM has tipped its chapeau to quite a few lesser-known but worthy actors (e.g., Ann Dvorak) along with the stellar likes of Grant, Stewart, and Bogart. Devoting August 18 to the iconic French actor Jean Gabin cued me to dig out another of those 1996 cinebios.
I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but the other day the habitués of the high-quality movie salon at davekehr.com got to talking about Henry Hathaway. Hathaway's were among the first movies that caught my eye when I became addicted to the late show (also the late late show, and the matinee, and the dinner-hour movie) on Fifties television. It's a rare week that doesn't have one or more of his films playing on some TV or cable channel, and dozens are readily available on DVD, Netflix, etc. All of which is prelude to saying, here's another of those 1996 cinebios nobody got to read. And by all means check out davekehr.com, as well as the host's superb DVD reviews in the Sunday New York Times. —RTJ
For years Kathleen Murphy has written a seasonal movie guide for MSN.com/Movies. The autumn edition is up now: http://movies.msn.com/movie-guide-fall/intro/Hmm, MSN.com seems to be acting up ... but at the moment the link does get you to their Movies area at least. Look for a less-than-obvious clickable heading, FALL FEATURES: FRANCHISES, REMAKES AND FRESH FARE, and that works. Maybe.
Kathleen Murphy says: "Steven Soderbergh's super-creepy Contagion does for pandemic what the Oscar-winning director did for drug Traffic back in 2000. Mimicking the insidious spread of coke-related ills, he tracks a lethal little virus—bat-borne, then transmitted to a piglet—as it metastasizes out of a friendly handshake to become a world-killer. A panic-worthy journey for sure, but no need to buckle up for fast-cutting, tension-building, apocalyptic action—or anything else that might significantly raise your blood pressure. Less hysterical than hushed, more numbing than terrifying, Contagion is closer to documentary—an imagined record of how global citizenry might realistically react to monumental crisis." Get right along—stat—to http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/contagion.4/#Review_0
This has been a screwy movie year for me. Of the films that would end up on my Ten Best list, only two opened theatrically in the United States in the first half of 2005. As I put it recently to another editor, "You could say that film in 2005 was a matter of several days in September at the Toronto Film Festival." Whatever the reasons, there was a long, highlight-challenged stretch from the Seattle bow of 2004's best picture, Million Dollar Baby, in the first week of January 2005 and the diamond-dust storm of fine films that has swirled around us in the last four months of the year.
Your webmaster didn't report for the 5:30 a.m. assembly to hear the top Oscar nominations, but he did get up an hour-or-so later to watch the recording. As the TV screen came to life, there was an Academy-news crawl in progress at the bottom, and the first name I saw was John Hawkes, Winter's Bone's brilliant Uncle Teardrop. Very cool.
Kathleen Murphy writes, "Memo to Sarah Jessica Parker: For the love of God, stop churning out avatars of Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw. That shtick is so past its sell date. Even in her heyday, not everyone was crazy about Carrie and her airhead aperçus about pretend-life and love. And now, in I Don't Know How She Does It, her/your magic fizzles for good." For the damning evidence, visit http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/i-don't-know-how-she-does-it/#Review_0 ... and tell them Big sent you.
"Adapted from Michael Lewis' best-seller, Moneyball makes the down-and-dirty business side of baseball painful fun to follow. Remember those old Thirties musicals that generated sizzle out of backstage machinations, charismatic producers conning investors and starstruck unknowns hitting the big time? That's how Moneyball plays, not so much in the ballpark but in offices and deep pockets, on phones and computers—and best of all, through agile conversational pitch-and-catch. Spotlighting the muscle, brain and skill that goes into getting The Show on the road, this remarkably absorbing baseball saga hits a homer to the heart and mind." Read on with Kathleen Murphy at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/moneyball/#Review_0