“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater where movie love was first concentrated and consecrated. (But even in the “good old days,” movies were often only part of an evening’s entertainment that came complete with vaudeville acts and bank nights). For all this, moviegoing still means what it always meant, joining a community, forming an audience and participating in a collective dream.” –
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
- 6/11/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
It's been half a decade since we last heard from Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj. In 2010 he followed his feature debut Acné with the small, elegiac and lovely A Useful Life, about an aging cinematheque programmer in Montevideo. If you, like myself, have often wondered when we’d get another cinematic novella from this observant, sensitive filmmaker, the answer is now: the director has returned with The Apostate, another modest and deceptively tidy character study of an out-of-sorts, out-of-time man. Gonzalo Tamayo, played with a sleepy-eyed, disheveled and lax handsomeness by non-professional Alvaro Ogalla, decides to apostatize from the Spanish Catholic church. After being raised (involuntarily, Gonzalo says) Catholic by his parents, failing at seemingly every stage of his education, pining for his beautiful cousin who’s already in a relationship, and running vaguely illicit-seeming errands for his never-seen father, Gonzalo seems sick of it all—and his act of rebellion...
- 10/24/2015
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Dear Fernando,Minotaur is the kind of film we’re able to see at such a big festival as Toronto only because adventurous programming strands like Wavelengths have the patience to present their unique tempo within the hectic atmosphere of the surrounding festivities. And its tempo is indeed unique, evoked through the opiated, satin haze of its digital photography. Two young men and a young woman, bohemian occupants of a Mexico City apartment, lounge, inactive and increasingly beset by a crushing sleepiness. Long takes in widescreen fragment their flat, making its space mysterious and jagged. The few other people who interact with this somnolent trio are all helpers, servants or delivery men, the dialog almost all functional, except for excerpts of a book read out loud periodically about a misremembered or perhaps never-happened meeting. You feel echoes of Last Year in Marienbad and also perhaps Marguerite Duras’s India Song,...
- 9/18/2015
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
"Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life (2010)—in which a middle-aged programmer finds himself out of a career after his Montevideo cinematheque fades to black—considered a post-cinema existence and decided it was just fine," begins José Teodoro, writing for Cinema Scope. "Yet the film’s irreverence with regards to its own medium was undercut by a formal elegance and sense of play that made cinema feel, in fact, very much alive. The Uruguayan director’s new film," The Apostate, "set in Madrid, conveys a similar ambivalence toward another fallen cultural institution: the Catholic Church." We've got more reviews and the trailer. » - David Hudson...
- 9/17/2015
- Keyframe
"Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life (2010)—in which a middle-aged programmer finds himself out of a career after his Montevideo cinematheque fades to black—considered a post-cinema existence and decided it was just fine," begins José Teodoro, writing for Cinema Scope. "Yet the film’s irreverence with regards to its own medium was undercut by a formal elegance and sense of play that made cinema feel, in fact, very much alive. The Uruguayan director’s new film," The Apostate, "set in Madrid, conveys a similar ambivalence toward another fallen cultural institution: the Catholic Church." We've got more reviews and the trailer. » - David Hudson...
- 9/17/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
Dear Danny,Happy to hear of your findings, especially the new films by Federico Veiroj and Kazik Radwanski, whose previous features (A Useful Life and Tower, respectively) struck me as brimming with distinctive talent and sensitivity. I’m eager to catch up with both of these young directors’ visions, but first let me tell you about a veteran’s vision, namely Terence Davies’ in the visually lambent, deeply affecting Sunset Song. A passion project for the great British filmmaker with a decade-long production history of false starts, this adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1932 Scottish novel emerges as a full-bodied reverie of faces and landscapes, splendor and pain. Taking place in a bucolic Scottish village in the years leading up to World War I, Davies’ sprawling narrative centers characteristically on a sensitive gaze absorbing and challenging a dour world: Young Chris (Agyness Deyn), a farm lass whose lucidity and vivaciousness...
- 9/17/2015
- by Fernando F. Croce
- MUBI
Due to the large volume of films that the Toronto International Film Festival screens every year, participants often find themselves unsure of how to decide what to see. To that end, festival organisers often distribute the films into numerous programmes to reflect commonalities among them. The Contemporary World Cinema Programme, to that end, looks at the features from filmmakers from around the world, showcasing the talents being displayed from numerous countries.
The full lineup for the 2015 Tiff Contemporary World Cinema Programme has now been announced, adding to the previously announced slate of Canadian Films in the Programme. The films, as well as their official synopses, can be seen below.
25 April, directed by Leanne Pooley, making its World Premiere
Award-winning filmmaker Leanne Pooley utilizes the letters and memoirs of New Zealand soldiers and nurses along with state of the art animation to tell the true story of the 1915 battle of Gallipoli.
The full lineup for the 2015 Tiff Contemporary World Cinema Programme has now been announced, adding to the previously announced slate of Canadian Films in the Programme. The films, as well as their official synopses, can be seen below.
25 April, directed by Leanne Pooley, making its World Premiere
Award-winning filmmaker Leanne Pooley utilizes the letters and memoirs of New Zealand soldiers and nurses along with state of the art animation to tell the true story of the 1915 battle of Gallipoli.
- 8/18/2015
- by Deepayan Sengupta
- SoundOnSight
Hit List is a handful of items that we find noteworthy, shared with you daily on our homepage. Enjoy!
Characters We Most Love to Hate from AVClub.com
May the Board Be With You from Wired.com
The Top 50 Post-End Credits Scenes from DenOfGeek.com (Suggested by simon_brew)
Reel Gone: A Useful Life And Cinema’s Premature Nostalgia from TheQuietus.com
Cinematic Love Triangles – Did They Pick The Right One? from EmpireOnline.com
Have an item you’d like to see featured on Hit List? Submit it here.
Characters We Most Love to Hate from AVClub.com
May the Board Be With You from Wired.com
The Top 50 Post-End Credits Scenes from DenOfGeek.com (Suggested by simon_brew)
Reel Gone: A Useful Life And Cinema’s Premature Nostalgia from TheQuietus.com
Cinematic Love Triangles – Did They Pick The Right One? from EmpireOnline.com
Have an item you’d like to see featured on Hit List? Submit it here.
- 3/5/2012
- by Heather Campbell
- IMDb Blog - All the Latest
We Need to Talk About Kevin; The Greatest Movie Ever Sold; A Useful Life; In Time; Jack Goes Boating
Whatever happens at the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood tonight, you can be sure of one thing: there won't be any statuettes handed out to the very best film of the year. While the board-sweeping success of a near-silent B&W beauty is a reason to be cheerful, not even the rule-breaking brilliance of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist can outshine the excellence of my favourite film of 2011, which saw the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay making a triumphant return to our screens after a nine-year absence. Welcome back!
Superbly adapted (by screenwriters Ramsay and Rory Kinnear) from Lionel Shriver's supposedly unfilmable bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Artificial Eye, 15) inhabits a painterly netherworld pitched somewhere between the subtle hues of European psychodrama and the bolder strokes of populist paedophobic horror.
Whatever happens at the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood tonight, you can be sure of one thing: there won't be any statuettes handed out to the very best film of the year. While the board-sweeping success of a near-silent B&W beauty is a reason to be cheerful, not even the rule-breaking brilliance of Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist can outshine the excellence of my favourite film of 2011, which saw the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay making a triumphant return to our screens after a nine-year absence. Welcome back!
Superbly adapted (by screenwriters Ramsay and Rory Kinnear) from Lionel Shriver's supposedly unfilmable bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Artificial Eye, 15) inhabits a painterly netherworld pitched somewhere between the subtle hues of European psychodrama and the bolder strokes of populist paedophobic horror.
- 2/26/2012
- by Mark Kermode
- The Guardian - Film News
Every once in a while a director will use their fame to pay tribute to the medium they love. Federico Fellini’s 8½ is perhaps the most famous example of a film about film: the title alludes to the number of completed works Fellini had made up to that point. These kinds of films, which tread the fine line between self-reflexive and self-absorbed, tend to come along every once in a while and attract a certain amount of critical adulation. With the exception of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, which prompted moral outrage in the British press, works like Kiss of the Spider Woman and Cinema Paradiso are regarded as artistic, personal works which are unlikely to trouble the box office.
But in the last couple of years, there has been a veritable influx of films about films which is coming to a head in the 2012 awards season. Cast your minds...
But in the last couple of years, there has been a veritable influx of films about films which is coming to a head in the 2012 awards season. Cast your minds...
- 1/25/2012
- by Daniel Mumby
- Obsessed with Film
Spielberg's equine epic beats the rest. Meanwhile the awards contenders heat up and The Iron Lady's still shining
The winner
Forecasting UK box office for War Horse was never going to be easy. On the plus side, the film benefits from familiar source material (Michael Morpurgo's novel and the National Theatre stage production), a British setting and the allure of director Steven Spielberg. On the minus, the cast lacks major marquee names, and the first world war has not traditionally provided crowd-pleasing stories for the screen: the conflict was static, bogged down in trenches, highly wasteful of human life, and, unlike the second world war, not evidently in the service of a noble and just purpose.
The outcome – an opening weekend of £3.94m, and a site average of £8,034 – will be welcome news for backers Disney. The number is slightly ahead of the debut of Spielberg's recent Tintin picture...
The winner
Forecasting UK box office for War Horse was never going to be easy. On the plus side, the film benefits from familiar source material (Michael Morpurgo's novel and the National Theatre stage production), a British setting and the allure of director Steven Spielberg. On the minus, the cast lacks major marquee names, and the first world war has not traditionally provided crowd-pleasing stories for the screen: the conflict was static, bogged down in trenches, highly wasteful of human life, and, unlike the second world war, not evidently in the service of a noble and just purpose.
The outcome – an opening weekend of £3.94m, and a site average of £8,034 – will be welcome news for backers Disney. The number is slightly ahead of the debut of Spielberg's recent Tintin picture...
- 1/17/2012
- by Charles Gant
- The Guardian - Film News
War Horse (12A)
(Steven Spielberg, 2011, Us) Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch. 146 mins
You can see why the hit boy-and-his-horse book/play appealed to Spielberg, in a sort of Et-meets-Saving Private Ryan way. It brings out the best and worst of him. There's some brazen old-school tear-jerking and rosy rural farming hardship, but there's also the first world war, thank God. Epic action frequently comes to the rescue, in what becomes a stirring, gruelling steeplechase across wartime Europe, towards an ending that's pure Hollywood.
Shame (18)
(Steve McQueen, 2011, UK) Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale. 101 mins
McQueen's follow-up to Hunger tackles an equally risky topic (sex addiction) with a similarly sparse and frank approach, though this is arguably more conventional. Fassbender is magnetic as usual, playing a terminally horny Manhattan man whose lone-wolf existence is disrupted by the arrival of his needy sister.
(Steven Spielberg, 2011, Us) Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch. 146 mins
You can see why the hit boy-and-his-horse book/play appealed to Spielberg, in a sort of Et-meets-Saving Private Ryan way. It brings out the best and worst of him. There's some brazen old-school tear-jerking and rosy rural farming hardship, but there's also the first world war, thank God. Epic action frequently comes to the rescue, in what becomes a stirring, gruelling steeplechase across wartime Europe, towards an ending that's pure Hollywood.
Shame (18)
(Steve McQueen, 2011, UK) Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale. 101 mins
McQueen's follow-up to Hunger tackles an equally risky topic (sex addiction) with a similarly sparse and frank approach, though this is arguably more conventional. Fassbender is magnetic as usual, playing a terminally horny Manhattan man whose lone-wolf existence is disrupted by the arrival of his needy sister.
- 1/14/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
★★★☆☆ Unlike recent releases such as Hugo (2011) and The Artist (2011) which have paid homage to cinema's history, Federico Veiroj's Uruguayan black and white drama A Useful Life (La Vida Útil, 2011) focuses upon the contemporary decline of arts institution funding and the collapse of small independent cinemas. Although A Useful Life is set in Uruguay, the message is one that resonates strongly here in the UK in the light of recent comments by Pm David Cameron.
Read more »...
Read more »...
- 1/13/2012
- by CineVue
- CineVue
The Iron Lady (12A)
(Phyllida Lloyd, 2011, UK) Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Olivia Colman. 105 mins
Depicting Margaret Thatcher as a human being is already being over-generous in the eyes of many, but this weird biopic gives us Thatcher as a senile old dear, looking back on her memories and conversing with the ghost of Denis, which means we're forced to empathise. What's more, this narrative device defuses the more contentious aspects of her political legacy. The career highlights are dutifully run through (Falklands, Brighton bombing, a bit of poll tax, the miners' strike barely happens), but there's little curiosity about how the rest of Britain felt or fared as a result of her reign. What's left is a faultless, often riveting impersonation by Streep, and a sense of a personality undone by its own unbending will, but there's little here to dent the ironwork. You could imagine this playing on Fox News.
(Phyllida Lloyd, 2011, UK) Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Olivia Colman. 105 mins
Depicting Margaret Thatcher as a human being is already being over-generous in the eyes of many, but this weird biopic gives us Thatcher as a senile old dear, looking back on her memories and conversing with the ghost of Denis, which means we're forced to empathise. What's more, this narrative device defuses the more contentious aspects of her political legacy. The career highlights are dutifully run through (Falklands, Brighton bombing, a bit of poll tax, the miners' strike barely happens), but there's little curiosity about how the rest of Britain felt or fared as a result of her reign. What's left is a faultless, often riveting impersonation by Streep, and a sense of a personality undone by its own unbending will, but there's little here to dent the ironwork. You could imagine this playing on Fox News.
- 1/7/2012
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
The 16th annual Festivalissimo, the Ibero-Latin-American film festival of Montreal, opens May 18th and runs until June 5 with a selection of thirty films culled from the international festival circuit. The competition for the El Sol prize for best feature film, best actor and actress will open with Matías Bize’s La Vida De Los Peces (The Life of Fish, and closes with Federico Vieroj’s La Vida Util (A Useful Life). In addition to the Official Selection films in competition, Festivalissimo also presents a series of films out of competition which represent Latin-American society of the past and present, and a selection of the most commercially successful films at the Latin American box office.
A few must-see films from this year’s lineup:
La Vida Util (A Useful Life) Federico Vieroj, Uruguay-Spain, 2010
-
Synopsis:
After twenty-five years, Cinemateca Uruguaya’s most devoted employee, Jorge (real-life Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek...
A few must-see films from this year’s lineup:
La Vida Util (A Useful Life) Federico Vieroj, Uruguay-Spain, 2010
-
Synopsis:
After twenty-five years, Cinemateca Uruguaya’s most devoted employee, Jorge (real-life Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek...
- 5/9/2011
- by Lindsay Peters
- SoundOnSight
The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project, a film directed by Srinivas Sunderrajan is one among the 12 films that will contend for the Transilvania Trophy at the tenth edition of Transilvania International Film Festival (Tiff).
Presented by Romanian Film Promotion, 10th Tiff will take place from June 3-12, 2011 in Cluj- Napoca and June 15-19, 2011 in Sibiu, Romania. The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project will compete with films from Spain, Iceland, Sweden, USA, Germany, Denmark, Argentina, Belgium, Uruguay, Israel and Russia.
The film belonging to meta fiction genre stars Kartik Krishnan, Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, Swara Bhaskar and D Santosh. A Hindi-English drama-thriller film shot in Mumbai, it was screened in Mumbai International Film Festival, 2010, South-Asian International Film Festival New York 2010 and Asian Hot Shots International Film Festival Berlin 2010.
The films in competition are:
A useful life / La vida util
Dir: Federico Veiroj, Uruguay – Spain, 2010
Innocent Saturday / V subbotu
Dir: Alexander Mindadze, Russia – Germany – Ukraine, 2011
King...
Presented by Romanian Film Promotion, 10th Tiff will take place from June 3-12, 2011 in Cluj- Napoca and June 15-19, 2011 in Sibiu, Romania. The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project will compete with films from Spain, Iceland, Sweden, USA, Germany, Denmark, Argentina, Belgium, Uruguay, Israel and Russia.
The film belonging to meta fiction genre stars Kartik Krishnan, Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, Swara Bhaskar and D Santosh. A Hindi-English drama-thriller film shot in Mumbai, it was screened in Mumbai International Film Festival, 2010, South-Asian International Film Festival New York 2010 and Asian Hot Shots International Film Festival Berlin 2010.
The films in competition are:
A useful life / La vida util
Dir: Federico Veiroj, Uruguay – Spain, 2010
Innocent Saturday / V subbotu
Dir: Alexander Mindadze, Russia – Germany – Ukraine, 2011
King...
- 5/6/2011
- by NewsDesk
- DearCinema.com
Updated through 4/30.
The San Francisco International Film Festival (Sfiff), the longest one running in the Americas, opens tonight with Mike Mills's Beginners and closes on May 5 with Mathieu Amalric's On Tour. Among the 150 films screening in between, give or take, will be the centerpiece, Azazel Jacobs's Terri.
"In terms of artistic achievement, it's safe to say no producer has contributed to independent American cinema over the last two decades like Christine Vachon," writes Dennis Harvey, introducing his interview. Vachon will be delivering the State of Cinema address on Sunday evening (it's a busy time for her; she's also on Tribeca's Documentary and Student Short Film Competitions jury). Also at SF360, Michael Fox has cinema studies professor Bill Nichols give him a preview of the discussion he'll be leading on the Social Justice Documentary and talks with Bay Area filmmakers who have work in the lineup.
Max Goldberg...
The San Francisco International Film Festival (Sfiff), the longest one running in the Americas, opens tonight with Mike Mills's Beginners and closes on May 5 with Mathieu Amalric's On Tour. Among the 150 films screening in between, give or take, will be the centerpiece, Azazel Jacobs's Terri.
"In terms of artistic achievement, it's safe to say no producer has contributed to independent American cinema over the last two decades like Christine Vachon," writes Dennis Harvey, introducing his interview. Vachon will be delivering the State of Cinema address on Sunday evening (it's a busy time for her; she's also on Tribeca's Documentary and Student Short Film Competitions jury). Also at SF360, Michael Fox has cinema studies professor Bill Nichols give him a preview of the discussion he'll be leading on the Social Justice Documentary and talks with Bay Area filmmakers who have work in the lineup.
Max Goldberg...
- 4/30/2011
- MUBI
Meredith Brody's diary entry for Sdiff day seven: The film-going day begins with inserting a DVD into the player, which I guess means staying rather than going. It’s A Useful Life, a film directed by a former employee of the Cinemateca Uruguaya, Federico Veiroj, about a longtime employee of the Cinemateca Uruguaya in Montevideo (which occasions a notation in the opening credits that the movie does not reflect the actual Cinemateca Uruguaya in any way shape or form). Said rather sad-sackish employee (played by an Uruguayan film critic with the young/old face of an obsessive) has spent a quarter-century doing all that’s necessary in showing films to the public – programming, introducing, talking on the radio, even repairing a seat in the theater. For someone ...
- 4/29/2011
- Thompson on Hollywood
"The indie Texan filmmaker David Lowery receives a double bill at the reRun Gastropub Theater in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and while Pioneer, a 16-minute short, and St Nick, an 86-minute feature, don't provide hard answers to their mysteries, both are deeply intriguing," writes Andy Webster in the New York Times. Regarding St Nick, a "potentially stifling ambience is deflected by quiet suspense and the awe-inspiring compositions of the cinematographer, Clay Liford. Decaying rustic interiors evoke Andrew Wyeth still lifes; pastoral long shots suggest a Southwestern walkabout. And Mr Lowery seems ready for a bigger canvas."
"Obliquely charting the terror, loneliness, and liberation of navigating a cold, callous grown-up world, St Nick follows nameless brother and sister runaways (played by real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears) who take up impermanent residence in an empty Texas house," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "David Lowery's debut feature is long on silence and laden...
"Obliquely charting the terror, loneliness, and liberation of navigating a cold, callous grown-up world, St Nick follows nameless brother and sister runaways (played by real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears) who take up impermanent residence in an empty Texas house," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "David Lowery's debut feature is long on silence and laden...
- 4/23/2011
- MUBI
The 30th edition of one of Europe’s most accomplished film festivals, the Istanbul International, presented its Golden Tulip Awards at the Lütfi Kırdar Convention and Exhibition Centre on April 16th.
The International Competition Golden Tulip Awards come with cash awards of 10,000 Euros to the director who wins the Golden Tulip Award and 10,000 Euros to a Turkish company to distribute the film. 5,000 Euros are also presented to the Special Jury Prize winner.
Golden Tulip International Competition Award: Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla for “Microphone.”
Golden Tulip International Competition Special Jury Prizes: Seyfi Teoman for Bizim Büyük “Çaresizliğimiz” (“Our Grand Despair”), and Federico Veiroj for (“A Useful Life”).
Golden Tulip for Best Turkish Film of the Year: Tayfun Pirselimoğlu for ”Saç” (“Hair”).
Golden Tulip for Best Director of the Year: ”Saç” (“Hair”) director, Tayfun Pirselimoğlu.
The Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism gives 150,000 Tl to the Golden Tulip winner for Best Turkish Film,...
The International Competition Golden Tulip Awards come with cash awards of 10,000 Euros to the director who wins the Golden Tulip Award and 10,000 Euros to a Turkish company to distribute the film. 5,000 Euros are also presented to the Special Jury Prize winner.
Golden Tulip International Competition Award: Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla for “Microphone.”
Golden Tulip International Competition Special Jury Prizes: Seyfi Teoman for Bizim Büyük “Çaresizliğimiz” (“Our Grand Despair”), and Federico Veiroj for (“A Useful Life”).
Golden Tulip for Best Turkish Film of the Year: Tayfun Pirselimoğlu for ”Saç” (“Hair”).
Golden Tulip for Best Director of the Year: ”Saç” (“Hair”) director, Tayfun Pirselimoğlu.
The Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism gives 150,000 Tl to the Golden Tulip winner for Best Turkish Film,...
- 4/18/2011
- by admin
- Moving Pictures Network
The 30th edition of one of Europe’s most accomplished film festivals, the Istanbul International, presented its Golden Tulip Awards at the Lütfi Kırdar Convention and Exhibition Centre on April 16th.
The International Competition Golden Tulip Awards come with cash awards of 10,000 Euros to the director who wins the Golden Tulip Award and 10,000 Euros to a Turkish company to distribute the film. 5,000 Euros are also presented to the Special Jury Prize winner.
Golden Tulip International Competition Award: Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla for “Microphone.”
Golden Tulip International Competition Special Jury Prizes: Seyfi Teoman for Bizim Büyük “Çaresizliğimiz” (“Our Grand Despair”), and Federico Veiroj for (“A Useful Life”).
Golden Tulip for Best Turkish Film of the Year: Tayfun Pirselimoğlu for ”Saç” (“Hair”).
Golden Tulip for Best Director of the Year: ”Saç” (“Hair”) director, Tayfun Pirselimoğlu.
The Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism gives 150,000 Tl to the Golden Tulip winner for Best Turkish Film,...
The International Competition Golden Tulip Awards come with cash awards of 10,000 Euros to the director who wins the Golden Tulip Award and 10,000 Euros to a Turkish company to distribute the film. 5,000 Euros are also presented to the Special Jury Prize winner.
Golden Tulip International Competition Award: Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla for “Microphone.”
Golden Tulip International Competition Special Jury Prizes: Seyfi Teoman for Bizim Büyük “Çaresizliğimiz” (“Our Grand Despair”), and Federico Veiroj for (“A Useful Life”).
Golden Tulip for Best Turkish Film of the Year: Tayfun Pirselimoğlu for ”Saç” (“Hair”).
Golden Tulip for Best Director of the Year: ”Saç” (“Hair”) director, Tayfun Pirselimoğlu.
The Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism gives 150,000 Tl to the Golden Tulip winner for Best Turkish Film,...
- 4/18/2011
- by admin
- Moving Pictures Magazine
Following news that the Tribeca film festival is launching a parallel, online version of itself, Flatpack's Ian Francis brings you a webby preview of this week's filmic fun in Birmingham
Flatpack kicks off tonight. If the film festival were a house party, this is the stage when we would start dishing out the nibbles, removing any unsightly carpet stains and hoping people turn up.
Flatpack has long liked to mix things up ("wilfully eclectic" says the Guardian) and this year's programme includes documentary, animation, independent cinema, audio-visual performance and archive cut-ups, with a generous side order of food art. We'll be taking over venues across Birmingham, including pubs, galleries and warehouses, the town hall and the century-old Electric cinema, and we'll also be trundling all over the city thanks to the vintage mobile cinema. This modified Bedford truck was commissioned in the 60s by Tony Benn to tour British factories,...
Flatpack kicks off tonight. If the film festival were a house party, this is the stage when we would start dishing out the nibbles, removing any unsightly carpet stains and hoping people turn up.
Flatpack has long liked to mix things up ("wilfully eclectic" says the Guardian) and this year's programme includes documentary, animation, independent cinema, audio-visual performance and archive cut-ups, with a generous side order of food art. We'll be taking over venues across Birmingham, including pubs, galleries and warehouses, the town hall and the century-old Electric cinema, and we'll also be trundling all over the city thanks to the vintage mobile cinema. This modified Bedford truck was commissioned in the 60s by Tony Benn to tour British factories,...
- 3/23/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
Inspector Bellamy and Cold Weather have, frankly, a lot in common: a male detective with an interest in crime fiction (in Bellamy Georges Simenon and Agatha Christie take the places occupied by Arthur Conan Doyle and E.W. Hornung in Cold Weather) is assisted in an investigation by the woman he is closest to (Bellamy, his wife; Cold Weather, his sister); the first clues to the mystery are introduced in a motel room; an emphasis on dinner scenes and establishing the social life of the characters before establishing the crime; the integral role played by a frequent collaborator's score (Chabrol's son, Matthieu, in Bellamy; Keegan DeWitt in Cold Weather); adult siblings (Paul and Jacques, Doug and Gail) cohabitating, one noticeably more aimless than the other; overcast skies, the sea, and landscapes, namely the way landscapes appear from a moving car; the cars themselves, key participants in the action, indicators of character...
- 2/14/2011
- MUBI
There is a certain patience to Federico Veiroj's "A Useful Life" that sets it apart. Produced just across the Río de la Plata from last year's Best Foreign Film Oscar winner - Juan José Campanella's "The Secret in Their Eyes" - Veiroj's second feature resigns itself from the high-gloss/high-profile aesthetic that links a recent string of films from the contemporary Latin American cinema. "A Useful Life" is different; not as ...
- 1/16/2011
- Indiewire
There is a certain patience to Federico Veiroj's "A Useful Life" that sets it apart. Produced just across the Río de la Plata from last year's Best Foreign Film Oscar winner - Juan José Campanella's "The Secret in Their Eyes" - Veiroj's second feature resigns itself from the high-gloss/high-profile aesthetic that links a recent string of films from the contemporary Latin American cinema. "A Useful Life" is different; not as ...
- 1/16/2011
- indieWIRE - People
In "A Useful Life," director Federico Veiroj assembles a patient character study around the impact of curatorial work on individual experience. Shot in expressive black-and-white and using the Academy ratio, this is a movie about movies that could seem awkwardly familiar to some devout cinephiles. Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek plays a middle-aged film buff whose world is defined by movies. The reclusive programmer of a struggling cinematheque, Jorge inhabits ...
- 1/12/2011
- Indiewire
Introducing Jorge, the film-obsessed hero of “A Useful Life” (2010), part of the “Global Lens 2011” series at the Museum of Modern Art. He’s 45 and still lives with his parents. For a quarter of a century he’s been a programmer — and devoted employee — at Cinemateca Uruguaya in Montevideo, the kind of theater I’d frequent. He also has a radio show devoted to movies. Clearly, his life is obsessed with cinema — the good stuff, not Hollywood junk. Then the unthinkable happens. The art house loses its sponsor and shuts down (in the middle of a Manoel de Oliveira retro,...
- 1/9/2011
- by By V.A. MUSETTO
- NYPost.com
Pairon Talle
Sidharth Srinivasan’s Pairon Talle (Soul of Sand) will be a part of Global Lens 2011, the eighth annual touring film exhibition organized by MoMA (Museum of Modern Arts, New York City). The exhibition, in collaboration with the Global Film Initiative (Gfi) will be held from January 13–28, 2011.
The nine films to be presented in this exhibition have been developed with grants from Gfi.
“Accomplished, entertaining, and thought-provoking, the films are also deeply rooted in the social and political realities of the countries where their talented and resourceful makers live and set their stories”, as stated in a press release.
This year’s other selections are:
Federico Veiroj’s La Vida Útil (A Useful Life) (2010), Uruguay; Sérgio Bianchi’s Os Inquilinos (The Tenants) (2009), Brazil; Diego Lerman’s La Mirada Invisible (The Invisible Eye) (2010), Argentina; Aktan Arym Kubat’s Svet-Ake (The Light Thief) (2010), Kyrgyzstan; Mohammad Rasoulof’s Kestzar Haye Sepid (The...
Sidharth Srinivasan’s Pairon Talle (Soul of Sand) will be a part of Global Lens 2011, the eighth annual touring film exhibition organized by MoMA (Museum of Modern Arts, New York City). The exhibition, in collaboration with the Global Film Initiative (Gfi) will be held from January 13–28, 2011.
The nine films to be presented in this exhibition have been developed with grants from Gfi.
“Accomplished, entertaining, and thought-provoking, the films are also deeply rooted in the social and political realities of the countries where their talented and resourceful makers live and set their stories”, as stated in a press release.
This year’s other selections are:
Federico Veiroj’s La Vida Útil (A Useful Life) (2010), Uruguay; Sérgio Bianchi’s Os Inquilinos (The Tenants) (2009), Brazil; Diego Lerman’s La Mirada Invisible (The Invisible Eye) (2010), Argentina; Aktan Arym Kubat’s Svet-Ake (The Light Thief) (2010), Kyrgyzstan; Mohammad Rasoulof’s Kestzar Haye Sepid (The...
- 1/4/2011
- by NewsDesk
- DearCinema.com
Federico Veiroj's A Useful Life was the first film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival I heard applauded at its press screening, confirming--as Diana Sanchez had written in her program capsule--that "for anyone who loves cinema in its purest form, this film will be a revelation."
At an admirably unassuming 66 minutes, it will be challenging to fit A Useful Life into any model of theatrical distribution and it might end up being primarily a festival darling; in which case, I strongly encourage anyone in love with cinema not to miss the opportunity to watch this droll film at any festival where it's programmed.
My thanks to Danny Kasman and Mubi for optioning my conversation with the charmingly affable Veiroj.
Cross-published at The Evening Class.
At an admirably unassuming 66 minutes, it will be challenging to fit A Useful Life into any model of theatrical distribution and it might end up being primarily a festival darling; in which case, I strongly encourage anyone in love with cinema not to miss the opportunity to watch this droll film at any festival where it's programmed.
My thanks to Danny Kasman and Mubi for optioning my conversation with the charmingly affable Veiroj.
Cross-published at The Evening Class.
- 10/14/2010
- Screen Anarchy
I have been keeping track of all of the Foreign Language Oscar submissions in my "The Contenders" section of the site and today the official list of sixty-five films from sixty-five countries was unveiled by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for consideration for the 83rd Academy Awards. On January 20, 2011 a shortlist of nine contenders will be announced prior to the naming of the nominees on January 25, 2011.
I have included the complete list directly below, which includes first-time entrants Ethiopia and Greenland. The only film that was originally thought to be under consideration, but didn't show up on the Academy's final list was Afghanistan's entry, Black Tulip, directed by Sonia Nassery Cole. IMDb doesn't list a release date for the film, which means it may not have met the release requirements in time.
I have linked each film to their corresponding IMDb page for those films not included...
I have included the complete list directly below, which includes first-time entrants Ethiopia and Greenland. The only film that was originally thought to be under consideration, but didn't show up on the Academy's final list was Afghanistan's entry, Black Tulip, directed by Sonia Nassery Cole. IMDb doesn't list a release date for the film, which means it may not have met the release requirements in time.
I have linked each film to their corresponding IMDb page for those films not included...
- 10/13/2010
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
Uruguayan filmmaker Federico Veiroj was born in Montevideo in 1976. In 2000 he obtained a Degree in Social Communication at the Catholic University in Montevideo, coursing one semester at Vcu (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA). He has been directing and producing short-films since 1996. He has also worked as an actor in many Uruguayan short-films and as script supervisor in Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll's features 25 Watts and Whisky. He has followed up his first feature film Acné with the cinephilic valentine A Useful Life (La vida útil, 2010).
A Useful Life was the first film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival I heard applauded at its press screening, confirming as Diana Sanchez had written in her program capsule that "for anyone who loves cinema in its purest form, this film will be a revelation." As Sanchez synopsized: "Federico Veiroj's thoughtful and delicate second feature contemplates the value of outmoded occupations with this evocative (and alarming!
A Useful Life was the first film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival I heard applauded at its press screening, confirming as Diana Sanchez had written in her program capsule that "for anyone who loves cinema in its purest form, this film will be a revelation." As Sanchez synopsized: "Federico Veiroj's thoughtful and delicate second feature contemplates the value of outmoded occupations with this evocative (and alarming!
- 10/1/2010
- MUBI
0204 A Useful Life (Federico Veiroj, Uruguay)
Should we be worried, or at the very least troubled and sad, that the amount of melancholy homages to dying film theaters keep coming? (Or perhaps even sadder, the films either die at the box office or aren’t even picked up for distribution, some kind of horrible irony.) Federico Veiroj’s wonderfully trim and sensitive record of working at a place—and that place happens to be a cinema—is another elegiac entry in a micro-genre being slowly carved out by such filmmakers as Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and Lisandro Alonso (Fantomas) which explore the soon-to-be-abandoned spaces that will soon be inhabited only by the ghosts of cinema. Distinctly ungeeky in its cinephilia, A Useful Life, like the aforementioned films, upends the sentimental nostalgia of so many homage a cinema by being itself rather than a love letter to something else. The director’s personality is felt,...
Should we be worried, or at the very least troubled and sad, that the amount of melancholy homages to dying film theaters keep coming? (Or perhaps even sadder, the films either die at the box office or aren’t even picked up for distribution, some kind of horrible irony.) Federico Veiroj’s wonderfully trim and sensitive record of working at a place—and that place happens to be a cinema—is another elegiac entry in a micro-genre being slowly carved out by such filmmakers as Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and Lisandro Alonso (Fantomas) which explore the soon-to-be-abandoned spaces that will soon be inhabited only by the ghosts of cinema. Distinctly ungeeky in its cinephilia, A Useful Life, like the aforementioned films, upends the sentimental nostalgia of so many homage a cinema by being itself rather than a love letter to something else. The director’s personality is felt,...
- 9/13/2010
- MUBI
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