Le chinoise.Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing. Translations from French to English or vice versa can make things even dicier. But according to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard—a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, announced as the first in a series—launches “a new form” and “a new genre.”The brevity of each entry tends to confirm Jameson’s claim. The book can be described as an audience-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by Notebook while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading—a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry,...
- 1/30/2024
- MUBI
Let's hear it for the great westerns -- not the Ford and Hawks classics, but the fascinating marginal gems that see The West in a different way. Do you like Sam Peckinpah? Robert Parrish's evocation of Texas and Mexico in the 1880s will be pleasantly familiar -- a testing ground of personal codes and shifting loyalties in a treacherous land. The Wonderful Country Savant Blu-ray Review Kl Studio Classics 1959 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 98 min. / Street Date September 29, 2015 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Robert Mitchum, Julie London, Pedro Armendariz, Gary Merrill, Jack Oakie, Albert Dekker, Charles McGraw, Leroy "Satchel" Paige. Cinematography Floyd Crosby Film Editor Michael Luciano Production Design Harry Horner Original Music Alex North Written by Robert Ardrey from the book by Tom Lea Produced by Chester Erskine Directed by Robert Parrish
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
This gem is as individual a western as any made in the 1950s, and a...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
This gem is as individual a western as any made in the 1950s, and a...
- 9/8/2015
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Blu-ray Release Date: Jan. 21, 2014
Price: Blu-ray $Tba
Studio: Twilight Time
Charlton Heston heads into battle in Khartoum.
The 1966 historical action adventure movie Khartoum makes its Blu-ray debut in January, 2014 from Twilight Time.
The exotic epic film concerns the ill-fated expedition of British General Charles Gordon (Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments) in late 19th-century Sudan, an attempt to halt the incursion of the fanatical Muslim leader, Muhammad Ahmad (Laurence Olivier, Richard III), the self-styled Mahdi (“The Expected One”).
Directed by Basil Dearden and Elliot Elisofon and written by Robert Ardrey, Khartoum is a large-scale widescreen (it was shot in Cinerama) roadshow extravaganza filled with battle sequences, stunning desert landscapes, and political intrigue involving British Prime Minister Gladstone (Ralph Richardson, The Four Feathers).
As supplier Twilight Time prints up only 3,000 copies of each title, be prepared to pre-order this one directly from distributor Screen Archives as soon as the prebook date is announced,...
Price: Blu-ray $Tba
Studio: Twilight Time
Charlton Heston heads into battle in Khartoum.
The 1966 historical action adventure movie Khartoum makes its Blu-ray debut in January, 2014 from Twilight Time.
The exotic epic film concerns the ill-fated expedition of British General Charles Gordon (Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments) in late 19th-century Sudan, an attempt to halt the incursion of the fanatical Muslim leader, Muhammad Ahmad (Laurence Olivier, Richard III), the self-styled Mahdi (“The Expected One”).
Directed by Basil Dearden and Elliot Elisofon and written by Robert Ardrey, Khartoum is a large-scale widescreen (it was shot in Cinerama) roadshow extravaganza filled with battle sequences, stunning desert landscapes, and political intrigue involving British Prime Minister Gladstone (Ralph Richardson, The Four Feathers).
As supplier Twilight Time prints up only 3,000 copies of each title, be prepared to pre-order this one directly from distributor Screen Archives as soon as the prebook date is announced,...
- 11/14/2013
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
Whether you measure your movies by box office, reviews, or popular appeal, Sony’s $125 million remake of the 1990 Ah-nuld Schwarzenegger interplanetary action fest Total Recall looks like a strike-out. The movie opened with a lethal softness; a $25.7 million first weekend meaning Recall won’t even come close to making back its budget during its domestic theatrical run. In fact, despite 22 years of ticket price increases, it’s doubtful the movie will even match the original’s $119.3 million haul.
And for those of you who think maybe the problem is Total Recall was outgunned opening while The Dark Knight Rises was still sucking up box office coin, entertain, at least for a moment if you will, the possibility the movie just plain sucks. According to Rotten Tomatoes’ canvas, almost 70% of reviewers – and over three-quarters of “top critics” – gave Total Recall a thumbs-down. Those who went to see the movie didn’t...
And for those of you who think maybe the problem is Total Recall was outgunned opening while The Dark Knight Rises was still sucking up box office coin, entertain, at least for a moment if you will, the possibility the movie just plain sucks. According to Rotten Tomatoes’ canvas, almost 70% of reviewers – and over three-quarters of “top critics” – gave Total Recall a thumbs-down. Those who went to see the movie didn’t...
- 8/15/2012
- by Bill Mesce
- SoundOnSight
Chicago – The 2011 remake of Sam Peckinpah’s galvanizing 1971 classic is a film destined to appeal to no one. It’s not poorly made, and the writer/director Rod Lurie is gifted at crafting suspenseful morality tales (such as the under-appreciated “Nothing But the Truth”). But it’s difficult to understand why Lurie would bother putting his personal stamp on a picture that he considers repugnant.
By taking the moral high ground and cutting out the original film’s offensive content, Lurie has entirely lost the point of Peckinpah’s tale, and instead veered into severely hypocritical territory. If “Straw Dogs” isn’t about the animalistic nature of man, then what’s left to explore? It’s like draining the anti-Semitism out of “Triumph of the Will.” Lurie has essentially taken Peckinpah’s blueprint and morphed it into one of those maddening “Get the Hell Out Of There” idiot plots inhabited...
By taking the moral high ground and cutting out the original film’s offensive content, Lurie has entirely lost the point of Peckinpah’s tale, and instead veered into severely hypocritical territory. If “Straw Dogs” isn’t about the animalistic nature of man, then what’s left to explore? It’s like draining the anti-Semitism out of “Triumph of the Will.” Lurie has essentially taken Peckinpah’s blueprint and morphed it into one of those maddening “Get the Hell Out Of There” idiot plots inhabited...
- 1/5/2012
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Forty years ago my main regular writing spot was a weekly page of general commentary on the arts for the New Statesman, and due to the current discussion provoked by Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and the appearance of Rod Lurie's 40th anniversary remake of Straw Dogs, two of the items in the column of 2 December 1971 have a certain topical interest. One is about the third winner of the Booker prize, of which I observed: "Vs Naipaul's In a Free State is a splendid book but is it, as the Booker conditions demand, a full-length novel?"
The other is about a film that had opened the previous week: "I was at the press show for Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, and rarely have I experienced such a palpable sense of shock and disgust sweep through an audience. Peckinpah is an artist I admire immensely and I wouldn't want to ban his film,...
The other is about a film that had opened the previous week: "I was at the press show for Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, and rarely have I experienced such a palpable sense of shock and disgust sweep through an audience. Peckinpah is an artist I admire immensely and I wouldn't want to ban his film,...
- 11/6/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Win A Sony ‘Bloggie’ Camcorder And Learn Ten Things About The Original Straw Dogs……And Ten Things About The New Version!
Rod Lurie’s remake of Straw Dogs is released in the UK on Friday 4th November and we have teamed up with Sony to give away a Sony “Bloggie” Camcorder to one lucky reader. Additionally, the lucky winner will also receive an awesome poster from the film. Details of how to win are at the bottom of this page.
David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth), a Hollywood screenwriter and his actress wife, return to her small hometown in the deep South to prepare the family home for sale after her father’s death. Once there, tensions build in their marriage and old conflicts re-emerge with the locals, including Amy’s ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgård), leading to a violent confrontation.
Here’s an image of the bloggie...
Rod Lurie’s remake of Straw Dogs is released in the UK on Friday 4th November and we have teamed up with Sony to give away a Sony “Bloggie” Camcorder to one lucky reader. Additionally, the lucky winner will also receive an awesome poster from the film. Details of how to win are at the bottom of this page.
David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth), a Hollywood screenwriter and his actress wife, return to her small hometown in the deep South to prepare the family home for sale after her father’s death. Once there, tensions build in their marriage and old conflicts re-emerge with the locals, including Amy’s ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgård), leading to a violent confrontation.
Here’s an image of the bloggie...
- 11/3/2011
- by Matt Holmes
- Obsessed with Film
Katharine Whitehorn on a survey of Britain in the 1950s
What was it like to live in the 1950s? Until recently the decade was thought of as a bare patch between the battleground of the 40s and the fairground of the 60s, but recently its complexities and excitements have exercised historians Peter Hennessy and Dominic Sandbrook; and now there's Family Britain, the second book in David Kynaston's three-volume New Jerusalem project. Mercifully, this massive work – nearly 800 pages – is made highly readable by all sorts of extracts and quotations from diaries, columns and oral records, and deals as much with ordinary, everyday lives as with the machinations of politics and power.
There are surprises in it even for someone who lived delightedly through those years: was rationing really not finally called off until July 1954? Was a Tory government cheerfully still subsidising milk and National Butter in 1956? Some things I remember all...
What was it like to live in the 1950s? Until recently the decade was thought of as a bare patch between the battleground of the 40s and the fairground of the 60s, but recently its complexities and excitements have exercised historians Peter Hennessy and Dominic Sandbrook; and now there's Family Britain, the second book in David Kynaston's three-volume New Jerusalem project. Mercifully, this massive work – nearly 800 pages – is made highly readable by all sorts of extracts and quotations from diaries, columns and oral records, and deals as much with ordinary, everyday lives as with the machinations of politics and power.
There are surprises in it even for someone who lived delightedly through those years: was rationing really not finally called off until July 1954? Was a Tory government cheerfully still subsidising milk and National Butter in 1956? Some things I remember all...
- 11/14/2009
- by Katharine Whitehorn
- The Guardian - Film News
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