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10 articles from 2009

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Clip joint: the best film clips featuring montages

10 December 2009 7:35 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

This week Pinkos wants your help to assemble a sequence of clips featuring Eisenstein's much-copied creation

Sergei Eisenstein presented his theory of montage to an august group of cineastes in the 1920s. It was, he said, "the nerve of cinema", and that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema". Eighty odd years later, his theory finally came to the attention of the wider world, as the subject of a song in Team America: World Police.

The word can be taken in several different ways. Deriving from the French word for "assembly", in Gallic film practice it simply refers to the editing process. For Eisenstein's Soviet colleagues, it was a means to derive an abstract meaning from a combination of shots in sequence. Nowadays, thanks to Rocky et al, a montage is a cliched sequence where a song (usually a pounding rock anthem) or »

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Downhill Racer

7 December 2009 7:14 PM, PST | GreenCine | See recent GreenCine news »

Reviewer: Jonthan Poritsky

Rating (out of 5): ****

Even in an artform as ever-changing as cinema, the best films from what many consider one of Hollywood's strongest, richest periods -- the late 60s/early 70s -- still feel remarkably fresh. And it's not just the famous examples, from The Graduate to The Parallax View, Chinatown to The Godfather, it's some of the lesser but still important films from that period that make it such a deep and endlessly fascinating era to study. And in that group I'd add Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer, which is now out in a sparkling new Criterion DVD. Featuring some of the most innovative sports photography for its day and remarkable performances from Gene Hackman and Robert Redford, it's a wonder that this film isn't more well known. Thankfully, Criterion has reminded us to give it another look.

On its surface, Downhill Racer is a simple »

- underdog

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Christmas TV movies have lost their special glitter | Jason Solomons

5 December 2009 4:09 PM, PST | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »

A festive treat has become tired repeats or cartoons. Jason Solomons suggests it should now be a season for Fellini or Renoir

Forget about Christmas movies with snow and tinsel and grumpy fathers learning lessons. Those have their place, and no doubt we'll have our fill of them, good and bad, over the coming month, from Elf to Scrooged, from The Muppet Christmas Carol to Miracle on 34th Street.

What worries me is the lack of new classics. Growing up, my favourite Christmas movies were never the ones actually about Christmas. Rather, it was the season of Billy Wilder and Fred Astaire, a time for The Great Escape and The Towering Inferno, for The Poseidon Adventure and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In short, Christmas was when you learned about film, its rich history and capacity to thrill and unite. 

It was when I watched films with my dad »

- Jason Solomons

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Top 10 conspiracy films of the 70s

3 December 2009 5:19 AM, PST | HeyUGuys.co.uk | See recent HeyUGuys news »

Richard Kelly’s The Box opens today in the UK, you can read my review here, and to celebrate the 70s paranoia vibe we’re posting this look back at some of the greatest conspiracy/paranoia thrillers of that decade. There are some great films here, and The Box does its best to emulate this, so you might want to look into some of these when you’re done with Kelly’s latest.

Klute 1971

Strongly following the crime / investigation genre, this film tells the story of a conspiracy theory that may be a little more personal, a little more close to home. Realistic and gritty (it centres on a prostitute); it promises the keep fans of 70’s films on their edge of their seat. ‘Don’t be afraid…’

When laboratory engineer Tom Gruneman (Robert Mili) disappears, the only clue available to detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland) is an obscene letter »

- admin

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The Box Movie Review

12 November 2009 8:00 PM, PST | MoviesOnline.ca | See recent MoviesOnline news »

Richard Kelly has once again made a film that confuses me. It's not the head-spinning, I need a chart to figure out the plot sort of confusion that Donnie Darko was. It isn't the "why did they need to expand more" confusion created by the director's cut of Darko. Nor is it that frustrating form of confusion caused by Southland Tales, where you wonder how this movie even got made when even the director doesn't seem to know what the movie's about. This is a different kind of confusing, as The Box is more than competently made, has a story that's easy to follow, and features terrific turns from all three leads, and yet it left me cold and not sure how I feel about it.

The Box is a typical Twilight Zone-movie, where an unnatural situation is thrown at a seemingly normal person, or peoples, who are then »

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The Box (Film Review)

6 November 2009 4:22 AM, PST | Fangoria | See recent Fangoria news »

To answer the most obvious question right away: No, sadly, Richard Kelly’s The Box is not a return to the absorbingly strange glories of his knockout debut feature Donnie Darko. But nor is it as frustratingly out of control as his follow-up film Southland Tales either. In fact, it’s kind of a combination of both: opening and closing reels of compelling and dark personal drama surrounding more expansive, elaborate plotting that loses its grip.

Based on Richard Matheson’s 1970 short story “Button, Button,” The Box relocates the action to Virginia in 1976, where Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) is a Nasa technician and his wife Norma (Cameron Diaz, with a fetching drawl) teaches at the private school attended by their preteen son Walter (Sam Oz Stone). They’re a loving couple, and Arthur is even taking advantage of his skills and facility to create a prosthesis for Norma’s disfigured »

- no-reply@fangoria.com (Michael Gingold)

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Take "The Parallax Test"

27 October 2009 1:08 PM, PDT | The Hollywood Interview | See recent The Hollywood Interview news »

Alan J. Pakula's 1974 masterpiece The Parallax View is a film that just gets better with age, and is correctly regarded by film scholars, critics and cinefiles alike as the greatest paranoid political thriller ever made.

Warren Beatty plays a washed-up reporter from a third-rate Oregon newspaper who stumbles upon the story of the century: all the high-profile political assassinations of years past have been masterminded by the shadowy Parallax Corporation, headhunters, if you will, for sociopaths, societal deviants and misguided idealists, all of whom are equipped with the perfect psychological baggage to be killers-for-hire.

This sequence, the one that is still talked about 35 years later, is a montage of images that comprise the Parallax Corp's "test" for potential candidates. As reporter Beatty infiltrates the Parallax HQ in downtown L.A., we the audience get to take the test with him. It's one of the greatest montages in film history, »

- The Hollywood Interview.com

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Meet the New Oscar Recipients: Gordon Willis

14 September 2009 9:50 AM, PDT | The Wrap | See recent The Wrap news »

By Steve Pond

Notes on the honorary Oscar recipients, part four:

 

For many years, Gordon Willis was the guy who was thanked from the stage of the Oscar show, but overlooked in the nominations.

 

As a cinematographer who started making movies in 1970, he shot films whose looks were iconic: “The Godfather,” “All the President’s Men,” “Klute,” “The Parallax View,” “The Godfather Part II,” “All the President’s Men,” “Annie Hall,” “Interiors,” “Manhattan&rdqu »

- Steve Pond

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Retro Cafe: 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three'

4 June 2009 9:50 PM, PDT | CinemaSpy | See recent CinemaSpy news »

Modern thrillers, and action films to an extent, seem to me to take themselves pretty seriously. I love the 'Bourne' films, which are probably the new benchmark of modern thriller filmmaking, but there seems very little time taken in contemporary thrillers to give the audience little respites of humor, even in the relationships between characters.

Action-thrillers from the 1970s seem to me to have a much greater sense of fun and levity to them. A film like The French Connection, doubtless as gritty and downright thrilling as any film you will ever see, has a huge number of terrific lines and moments between the lead characters that bring them down to earth and away from Superman-like invincibility.

Then there's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Not forgotten by any means, but there’s no doubt that it has been overtaken in the public's collective memory by the more revolutionary »

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Classic Status

19 May 2009 2:39 AM, PDT | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

The critical work on the American New Wave, it seems, has only just begun -- Robert Altman still gets a free skate (who thinks "M*A*S*H" is worthwhile anymore?), Hal Ashby has been sanctified, but Alan J. Pakula has not, and Robert Aldrich's contributions to the decade are forgotten, while the proper canonization of the films of Monte Hellman and Barbara Loden's "Wanda" is paperwork still waiting to be filed, and the few fascinating films Peter Fonda directed are still cinema non grata. The era's propensity for desperate road travel, dusty realism and pitiless narrative makes it the match for the meaning of film noir, but as yet it seems more critical and academic thought has been devoted, generally, to "Blade Runner" and "E.T.", to the least of Hitchcock's films and to the oeuvre of David Fincher. There's still so much that's left out of the discussion -- for example, »

- Michael Atkinson

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2009 | 2008 | 2003 | 1999

10 articles from 2009

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