motion picture, it's called

Friday, September 16, 2005

Recently Read Books!

James Naremore's Acting in the Cinema - read this, it's a good way to start thinking about movie acting besides having a lot of great case studies on James Stewart, Lillian Gish, Cary Grant, Charlie Chaplin and more.

Jason Starr's Hard Feelings - like many of Starr's books, a man is driven crazy by the pressure-cooker of work. Not quite the book Cold Caller is, but still very good.

Eric Ambler's Passage of Arms - compared to Ambler's very solid WWII-era thrillers, this one just doesn't........doesn't hit the spot. There just isn't a thrill - the Nazis, Fascists and Soviets always bring a buzz to Ambler's early work, but the baddies here are......Indonesian seperatists? (we're never really clear on their ideology).

John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. Takes far too long to get moving, but this is a critical resource you'll need to understand Katrina.

Charles Willeford's High Priest of California - extraordinarily black tale of an absolutely amoral used-car salesman who sees a woman.......and that's where it starts.

Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy - since Willeford was a poet and himself a painter, many of his noir novels focus unusually on art. This one is a unusual tour-de-force - a dark noir that is also a nimble dissection of Dada / Surrealist art theory.

Joseph McBride's Orson Welles - an excellent discussion of Welles through his work, rather than the infantile personal trashings handed out by Callow and Thomson. Too bad I haven't seen enough of the Master's work to be able to read many of the chapters. Somebody release The Other Side of the Wind, dammit!

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

More Movies Noted

Here's what I've seen recently:

Steven Ross' Quietly on By, 2005 (8/10)
Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, 2004 (8/10)
Dymytrk's Murder My Sweet, 1944 (4/10)
Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, 2005 (5/10)
Will Hindle's Watersmith, 1971 (8/10)
Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, 2004 (9/10)
Alex de la Iglesia's El crimen ferpecto, 2004 (8/10)
Pasolini's La ricotta, 1963 (7/10)
Jerry Lewis' The Ladies Man, 1961 (6/10)
Bruce Conner's Valse Triste, 1977 (6/10)
Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, 1943 (5/10)
Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, 1966 (3/10)
Hitchcock's Under Capricorn, 1949 (4/10)
Tavernier's Safe Conduct, 2002 (6/10)
Alex de la Iglesia's Day of the Beast, 1995 (8/10)
Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, 1953 (7/10)
Jean Painleve's Le vampire, 1945 (9/10)
Alex de la Iglesia's Commonwealth, 2000 (7/10)
Dimitri Kirsanoff's Brumes d' automne, 1929 (10/10)
Dimitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontat, 1926 (9/10)
Dmytryk's Crossfire, 1947 (8/10)
Seong-kang Lee's My beautiful girl, Mari, 2002 (9/10)
Anthony Mann's The Tin Star, 1957 (5/10)
Alain Corneau's Serie Noire, 1979 (9/10)
Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie, 1943 (8/10)
Jacques Tourneur's The Leopard Man, 1943 (6/10)
Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract, 1958 (9/10)
Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005 (3/10)
Solondz' s Palindromes, 2004 (8/10)
Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, 2002 (6/10)
Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, 2005 (9/10)
Erroll Morris, The Thin Blue Line, 1988 (8/10)
Welles' The Hearts of Age, 1934 (6/10)
Eisenstein's Aleksander Nevsky, 1938 (7/10)
Yvan Attal's Happily Ever After, 2004 (5/10)
Lassie Come Home, 1943 (4/10)
Alan Arkin's Little Murders, 1971 (6/10)
Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 1969 (6/10)
Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7, 1961 (10/10)
Walsh's The Roaring Twenties, 1939 (6/10)
Vincent Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952 (8/10)
Jean-Pierre Denis' Murderous Maids, 2000 (6/10)
Peter Watkins' Battle of Culloden, 1964 (9/10)
Peter Watkins' The War Game, 1965 (9/10)
Daves' 3:10 to Yuma, 1957 (7/10)

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Check out this Ehrenstein article

David Ehrenstein tells us critical information regarding how foreign films are going to be distributed in the US here: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/41/film-ehrenstein.php

Check it out.