1. As noted by Eric Kohn at indieWIRE, a series of films (or videos) by House founder Matt Zoller Seitz and House contributor Kevin B Lee will be screened in Berlin on April 17th. Embedded above, as you can see, is Kevin's solo commentary-film about Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II, which, with its brevity and its inclusion of personally shot footage, remains a favorite of mine.
["With many people discussing the prospects of distributing movies over the Internet, it’s nice to see someone go the other direction by transplanting online videos from the web to the big screen. That’s the plan at Berlin’s Arsenal-Cinema on April 17th, when the meticulously edited movie clip deconstructions by Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz will screen as part of a “movies commenting on movies” series"]
2. It's official! Benten Films and Watchmaker Films Announce International Partnership. Word up, AG and AH. Looking forward to that GoodTimesKid disc!
["New York/London - March 10, 2009] – US-based distributor Benten Films, the first label run by film critics, and UK-based Watchmaker Films have entered into a strategic and financial partnership. Effective immediately, Benten President and CEO Andrew Grant will head up Production and Acquisitions for Watchmaker. Benten VP and Art Director Aaron Hillis will assume a greater role in the day-to-day operations of Benten while simultaneously looking to expand the organization. Watchmaker, the brainchild of Mark Rance, shares Benten’s commitment to curation and quality, and extends it beyond distribution into restoration, preservation and remastering services. Watchmaker’s in-house capabilities include HD-4K and higher scans, full picture and audio restoration, color timing, audio/video remastering, DVD and Blu-ray authoring, and the ability to encode for digital cinema and online delivery systems. As a result, both companies can now seek out older titles that previously didn’t have satisfactory digital elements, bringing them to viewers via the many consumer-ready digital formats."]
3. I interviewed Jacques Doillon for a piece I'm still working on, a bit of reportage on the 9-film retro FIAF continues to host through the rest of the month, but Richard Brody has a raw account of his talk with the man available at The New Yorker's blog, The Front Row. Sounds like they got to have a longer talk than I did. Shows to go ya... something. In any case, do read it, and try to hit the last few they're showing since they're all good and singular. Below, Doillon describes next week's film, Touched in the Head.
["The film is set in the world of working-class people. It wasn’t affected by May ’68. I made the film six years after 1968. The people in the film were eighteen, nineteen years old, so they were thirteen at the time. There’s hardly any chance they could have been involved with it. It’s another world. On the other hand, May ’68 would have had a subterranean effect. To all appearances, everything became more conservative—Pompidou won the election, and the government took its revenge; but fundamentally, for instance, concerning women, homosexuals, things had progressed."]
4. Claire Denis' 35 Rhums plays this week in New York. Go see it if you can. Look for my essay on it shortly at The Auteurs' Notebook. But until then, you can read a fine interview Rob Davis conducted with our lady on behalf of his very own Daily Plastic. UPDATE: My essay is now online!
["After jotting down some initial impressions of Claire Denis' wonderful, warm-hearted new film, I sat down for a conversation with Denis in Toronto. As Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times recently, 35 Shots of Rum is "a movie of few words and little psychology that relies mostly on the physical vocabulary of faces and bodies to convey feelings too complex to be verbalized." That's often true of Denis' films, and when I talked with her I found that this one has a very personal connection, as well. We talked about the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, about her grandfather, and about the interplay of work and family that appears in Ozu's films, in Denis' own film, and even in her band of regular collaborators."]
5. Last and definitely not least: update your readers, readers! Larry Aydlette has moved shop over to WordPress, which you can witness by clicking here. Currently all that's up is a series of posts in tribute to John Frankenheimer. Such as this lead-in to an unembeddable interview on youtube.
["Nothing gives you a better sense of John Frankenheimer than a lengthy, 12-part interview series conducted for the Archive of American Television, mostly about his career in the early days of live TV. It’s easily forgotten that Frankenheimer’s TV career in the ’50s was nearly as significant as his film career. Each interview segment is about 30 minutes long, and it gives you time to study Frankenheimer’s mannerisms. He comes across as deeply intelligent, a little restless, a little imperious — you get a strong sense of his drive, the no-nonsense leadership style that made him a commanding director of TV and film. Frankenheimer has always struck me as being in the mold of the older generation of Hollywood directors — Ford, Hawks, Wellman, Walsh. The adventurer-directors, the ones who led a dashing, romantic life and who somehow found themselves propelled into a Hollywood career. In the first of these interviews, Frankenheimer discusses his early life, his longstanding interest in tennis and fast cars, his unhappy years at Williams College (where he met fellow classmates Stephen Sondheim and Dominick Dunne), how he lied to get into an Air Force film squadron and learned from the ground up making films about asphalt and cows, eventually ending up shooting the footage inside the cockpit of Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. And that was before he got into TV! A born raconteur, Frankenheimer shares stories of Sidney Lumet, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Don Hewitt, Mark Rydell and the time Tallulah Bankhead showed him her breasts. Great, great stuff. He really should have written a memoir."]
Quote of the Day:
— Claire Denis
Images of the Day (click to enlarge): Lloyd of mardecortesbaja.com has been sharing some Little Nemo panels over the past few weeks. I've stolen them for this now that this phenomenal series is all available for us.
Clip of the Day: Is that the number one app on the iPhone or is it real gas? Either way, somebody made it up...
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"Links for the Day": A selection of Links that will hopefully spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to ryknight at gmail dot com.
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8 comments:
McCay! *Swoon*
This is my favorite blog, the inspiration shows here: http://muse-n-mash.blogspot.com/
Anyone know showings of that Denis film in LA in the not so/or so distant future?
I've been reading this site for a long time, but it's starting to be a real bore. It's basically become the Pimp Kevin Lee Site.
Well, the bitch can pull some serious tricks!
Well done to both Kevin and Matt.
Thanks for the shout, Ryland.
Congrats, Matt and Kevin - that's so great!
Thanks for the link-up!
Thanks, everybody, for reading + commenting. And thanks, to all, for giving me the great stuff to link to in the first place!
And, yes, I will pimp my friends as long as they continue to produce top tier art that does its part in keeping our little corner of the world alive with passion and smarts.
Also, I dropped in a link to my piece on the Denis picture above. For e-mail subscription ease, and self-pimping, here it is again.
Be back next week with more links! 'Til then, happy viewing!
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