A few weeks ago the Consulate-General of Japan at Denver sent me a stack of titles by Yasuzo Masumura (1924 – 1986), a director largely unknown to American audiences despite a prodigious body of work and plaudits by film critics who have placed him within the same pantheon as Kenji Mizoguchi (with whom Masumura worked with as an assistant director), Yasujiro Ozu, and Akira Kurosawa. Masumura also had an influence on Nagisa Ôshima and the Japanese New Wave. Despite Masumura having about 60 films to his credit, only a half-dozen of those can readily be found on Region 1 DVD’s here in the U.S.  READ MORE

I’m in the process of assembling a spreadsheet of films that I’d like to bring to my fall calendar program. As an exhibitor, I wish I could give all (or, at least, most or many) of these films a home. But as the market place keeps shrinking the theatrical windows, and as V.O.D. becomes more rampant, the harsh reality is that a balance has to be struck between viable money-makers and smaller niche titles that are very interesting and compelling but lack high-profile visibility, this despite being top-shelf items. In the former category are titles such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In the latter category are movies like Marwencol or Bill Cunningham New York. I never need to see advance screeners for films in the former category as, for the most part, it’s pretty obvious what the big hitters are. In the latter category, however, it’s essential to watch the preview screeners sent to me by distributors because I really need to know if the material stands a chance of connecting with the audience in our area despite a low profile. Or, at very least, whether it resonates so strongly with me that I’m willing to champion it personally in the hopes that I might, despite long odds, find it an audience. Here’s what I’ve got queued up for the coming week. READ MORE

In my last post I wrapped up my interview with Alex Cox by talking a bit about John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). Alex said: “They Live holds up for the first 45 minutes, and then there’s this long wrestling match between Roddy Piper and Keith David, and it never recovers. But those first 45 minutes are amazing. Pretty much the only good science fiction film I’ve seen post 2001: A Space Odyssey.” When I heard that, I thought for sure there would be a long tussle of words in the comment section to rival what John Carpenter claimed was “the longest fight scene in movie history.” To my surprise, only two people chimed in, both in support of the film in general. Where were the cries of bloody murder from the fans of THX 1138, Brazil, Videodrome, RoboCop, A Clockwork Orange, Tetsuo, Inception, Alien, and so on? There are plenty of bones to fight over here, but I’ll stick to They Live for the purpose of this post. As to the long fight scene, I’ve gotten into my own fights with people who dismiss it as ridiculous. Agreeing to some extent with Alex Cox is author and music journalist Greil Marcus who says of They Live that it is “a fabulous movie (except for the endless fight behind the building).” Again, I strongly disagree. READ MORE

Last week I saw 20 films in five days at Sundance. With just over 200 films listed in the index, that means I barely covered 10% of the slate. Documentaries are a Sundance forté, so it’s not surprising that almost half of the films I screened fall into this category. Similarly, as most docs these days never get transferred to film that accounts for why about half of all my screenings were digital projections. Happily, despite many rumblings by industry pundits regarding the eminent death of 35mm film, most of the narrative features were still on celluloid. Huzzah! READ MORE

12 ANGRY MEN is a dangerous movie.  It’s one of the worst threats to my productivity of any movie ever made—if I’m unlucky enough to come across it while channel surfing, I’m stuck.  I won’t be going anywhere until it’s over.  And once, the movie sucked me in pretty much literally, until I found myself living inside it, with the fate of an actual human being in the balance.

READ MORE

I rarely attend films on opening night, but made an exception for Christopher Nolan’s Inception, knowing that it would be one of those films, like The Usual Suspects, whose ending can be telegraphed in two or three words by anyone who’d seen the film before me. Among other things, Inception is about dreams, dreams within dreams, lucid dreaming and shared dreams – which is ripe terrain for cinema since films themselves reveal the collective unconsciousness of the nations that burp them into existence. I followed up Inception with Sullivan’s Travels, and found it an appropriate choice. After all, Preston Sturges’ 1941 classic is, like the dreamer who knows he’s dreaming, very much self-aware. It’s a film about films that knows it’s a film. The more precise and academic term that Bruce Kawin, my Film History professor would use for this is “self-reflexive.” READ MORE

What do André de Toth, Michael Curtiz, and Leo McCarey have in common? These three directors were represented at the last Telluride Film Festival thanks to Alexander Payne, a Guest Director who introduced films from these cinematic stalwarts as part of his presentation on Forgotten Hollywood. Payne got his start with Citizen Ruth (1996), and then gave Matthew Broderick a memorable role in Election (1999), he cast Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt (2002), and followed this with an Oscar win for Sideways (2004). Payne’s selection of films for TFF was, as he was the first to admit, a selfish one: these were all rare films that he, personally, wanted to see on the big screen. In his introduction to Curtiz’ The Breaking Point he mentioned how TCM was to blame, because one day he woke up, turned on TCM, and only managed to see the last third of the film, which blew him away. But he’s always wanted to see the rest of it, and it’s not on DVD. Toth’s Day of the Outlaw? That 35mm print had to be secured by the TFF staff from Martin Scorsese’s personal archive. McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow? Well… if you have a PAL player and don’t mind buying the DVD from France, you’re in luck. But if you were in Telluride last Labor Day weekend, you had a chance to see rare 35mm print screenings of all three films that were sure to put you in the clouds. READ MORE

Above: A WPA image of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s

A certain influential Mr. Turner–no–not the estimable Ted, but Frederick Jackson Turner the American historian, once pointed out that “the forging of the unique and rugged American identity had to occur precisely at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness. The dynamic of these oppositional conditions engendered a process by which citizens were made, citizens with the power to tame the wild and upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality.” That was at the end of the 19th century, just as the American Western frontier was closing, but the impact of that view of America still has resonance today.

Watching the distinctly different Three Faces West (1940-Bernard Vorhaus) as part of the John Wayne Day for Summer Under the Stars celebration on TCM, the scholarly Turner’s sometimes controversial ideas came back to me out of the blur of my increasingly distant undergraduate days (or is it daze?). This Republic studios movie is among the least known of Wayne‘s movies, but one of the more interesting–since it came at a time when he was just beginning his ascent to a plane somewhere between a movie star and a force of nature. It incorporates ideas old and new, some of them still contentious, in the course of a brief 79 minute story that effectively portrays the savagery of that wilderness as it affected the lives of Midwesterners in the Depression era.
READ MORE