“I once asked Akira Kurosawa why he had chosen to frame a shot in Ran in a particular way. His answer was that if he’d panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if he’d panned an inch to the right we would see the airport […]
We waited for our theater to open, a Romanian lady and I, chatting. She hadn’t been home for forty years, she admitted — not even since the end of Communism. Ceausescu (she spat the name like poison) had imprisoned her father for seven years. For what, she didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.
How to discuss a film about which the less you know going in the better… which may or may not get enough U.S. distribution to matter… though if it does, you really should try to see… and getting you to do so may depend on someone like me convincing you to… without telling you too […]
According to my 1967 edition of Godard by Richard Roud, the director’s “latest” films — Made in USA and Two or Three Things I Know About Her — represent a summing up of his career thus far. Filmed more-or-less simultaneously, the films make an informal diptych, says Roud…
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, Michael Collins orbited the moon in the Command Module, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin guided their Lunar Module onto Tranquility Base. The next day, human beings walked for the first time on the moon. Meanwhile, 250,000 miles away, […]
Further reflections on events in Iran and revolutions in general, with reference to Eastern Europe in 1989, Romanian films, and my pal Marek, who grew up on the other side of a once supposedly impregnable Iron Curtain.
Among the news coming out of Saturday’s Iranian election and its aftermath is the word that one of Iran’s best-known filmmakers, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, has assumed a role of international spokesman for the cause of the officially defeated candidate.
My usual approach to internet memes is to duck and let them blow over. But “Reading the Movies” swept me into nostalgic list-making, to give honor to the books which were the most influential in my development as a film watcher, writer and programmer. Well, they’re not all books, but they DO involve words about pictures…
Given the round-robin of writers and directors who fashioned it, The Wizard of Oz seems attributable to Chance, Fate, Divine Intervention or the Collective Unconscious. And yet, magically, apparently, this happenstance masterpiece remains among Hollywood’s most beloved for its famous heights and depths. To hear Salman Rushdie tell it, though, the heights are all that count.