Celebrated directors from around the world, including the Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant, Gurinder Chadha, Wes Craven, Walter Salles, Alexander Payne and Olivier Assayas, have come together to portray Paris in a way never before imagined. Made by a team of contributors as cosmopolitan as the city itself, this portrait of the city is as diverse as its creators’ backgrounds and nationalities. With each director telling the story of an unusual encounter in one of the city’s neighborhoods, the vignettes go beyond the ‘postcard’ view of Paris to portray aspects of the city rarely seen on the big screen.Wikipedia.
A wonderful film, well worth seeing.
The true story of Germany's most famous anti-Nazi heroine is brought to thrilling life in the multi-award winning drama SOPHIE SCHOLL-THE FINAL DAYS. Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film of 2005, SOPHIE SCHOLL stars Julia Jentsch in a luminous performance as the young coed-turned-fearless activist. Armed with long-buried historical records of her incarceration, director Marc Rothemund expertly re-creates the last six days of Sophie Scholl's life: a heart-stopping journey from arrest to interrogation, trial and sentence.In 1943, as Hitler continues to wage war across Europe, a group of college students mount an underground resistance movement in Munich. Dedicated expressly to the downfall of the monolithic Third Reich war machine, they call themselves the White Rose. One of its few female members, Sophie Scholl is captured during a dangerous mission to distribute pamphlets on campus with her brother Hans. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to the White Rose, her cross-examination by the Gestapo quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility that is both haunting and timeless.
The moral of “Ratatouille” is delivered by a critic: a gaunt, unsmiling fellow named Anton Ego who composes his acidic notices in a coffin-shaped room and who speaks in the parched baritone of Peter O’Toole. “Not everyone can be a great artist,” Mr. Ego muses. “But a great artist can come from anywhere.”I was impressed with this film on many levels, especially the incredible attention to details. Bird's framing of Ego was superb. Go! Brad Bird directs (he also lead the Incredibles).Quite so. Written and directed by Brad Bird and displaying the usual meticulousness associated with the Pixar brand, “Ratatouille” is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.
Its sensibility, implicit in Mr. Ego’s aphorism, is both exuberantly democratic and unabashedly elitist, defending good taste and aesthetic accomplishment not as snobbish entitlements but as universal ideals. Like “The Incredibles,” Mr. Bird’s earlier film for Pixar, “Ratatouille” celebrates the passionate, sometimes aggressive pursuit of excellence, an impulse it also exemplifies.
The hero (and perhaps Mr. Bird’s alter ego) is Remy (Patton Oswalt), a young rat who lives somewhere in the French countryside and conceives a passion for fine cooking. Raised by garbage-eaters, he is drawn toward a more exalted notion of food by the sensitivity of his own palate and by the example of Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett), a famous chef who insists — more in the manner of Julia Child than of his real-life haute cuisine counterparts — that “anyone can cook.”
THE herd instinct is as powerful in humans as in other animal species.Frank believes that the SUV craze started when Robert Altman's "The Player" was released in 1992 (Great Movie). "The film’s lead character, the studio executive Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins), could have bought any vehicle he pleased. His choice? A Range Rover with a fax machine in the dashboard."
Anyone who doubts it should rent “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?”, the 1970 film by Allen Funt, the creator of “Candid Camera.” The money scene portrays a man responding to a help-wanted ad. He is directed to a waiting room occupied by men who appear to be other job seekers but are actually Mr. Funt’s confederates. At no apparent signal, these men stand and begin to disrobe. The hapless job seeker’s dismay is evident. Yet, after a few moments, he, too, stands and disrobes. At scene’s end, the men are standing naked, apparently waiting for whatever comes next.
Clearly, the herd instinct can lead us astray. For the most part, however, the impulse to emulate others serves us well. After all, without drawing on the wisdom and experience of others, it would be almost impossible to cope with the stream of complex decisions we confront.
Knotts first rose to prominence in the late 1950s, joining Louis Nye and other comedy players on "The Steve Allen Show." In 1961, United Artists Records released a comedy album titled "Don Knotts: An Evening with Me," which featured various takeoffs on the "nervous man" routine the comic had made famous on Allen's show. One of the bits, "The Weatherman," concerned a TV forecaster forced to wing it after the meteorology report fails to make it to the studio by air time.Much more on Don Knotts.
During the mid- to late 1960s, in a largely unsuccessful bid for major film stardom, Knotts made a series of family films that many connoisseurs now say were critically underappreciated at the time. These include "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964), "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966) and "The Reluctant Astronaut" (1967). The latter two were made as part of a five-picture deal with Universal Pictures.
Within the entertainment industry, Errol Morris holds a chameleon position. To the commercial production world, he’s established as a highly successful director, both innovative and intelligent. (He’s one of the only, if not the only, director of TV commercials who has written an opinion-page article published in The New York Times.) Within talent and advertising agencies, he is known for his exceptional off-kilter vision, and honored in ways usually reserved for noncommercial artists. (In November 1999, his work received a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2002, the organizers of the Academy Awards asked him to direct the short film that introduced the annual Oscars ceremony; it featured a series of real-life characters—some well-known, some everyday citizens—describing their passion for movies.) In a 2004 Adweek article honoring Morris’s contributions as someone who “rises above the fray to create work that resonates and inspires,”Errol Morris
Reuters has published a look at the presence of bloggers at Sundance, the popular independent film festival held each year in Park City, Utah.
I've been collecting data on just how bad it's getting in the music industry, and this useful list of the 100 all-time bestselling albums offered another lens on the meltdown. I looked up the release dates of each and grouped them in half-decade bins. The data speaks for itself
This amazing documentary from Thomas Riedelsheimer won the Golden Gate Award Grand Prize for Best Documentary at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. The film follows renowned sculptor Andy Goldsworthy as he creates with ice, driftwood, bracken, leaves, stone, dirt and snow in open fields, beaches, rivers, creeks and forests. With each new creation, he carefully studies the energetic flow and transitory nature of his work.
The cast and crew of the latest Robert Altman film wrapped up their work and headed home this week. For the past month they'd taken over the Fitizgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minn., home to the popular public radio show A Prairie Home Companion, which also happens to be the subject of the film.NPR has posted an extended audio interview. Check it out.The show's creator Garrison Keillor wrote the screenplay, a fictional account of life on the show. Keillor plays himself, acting with a host of Hollywood stars including Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline and the young star Lindsay Lohan.
Great film, check it out:
An elite group of champion skiers, mountain climbers and European mountaineers become the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division, America's only mountain and winter warfare fighting unit. From the intensive training atop the Colorado Rockies to the spectacular night climb of Italy's Riva Ridge -- where the 10th scored their biggest victory against Hitler's troops -- the exploits of this famous division are scrupulously chronicled.
Kevin Kelly just released a $3.00 PDF version of his book, True Films. This interesting and useful e-book contains the best 100 documenatries he reviewed as True Films in December, 2004.
The result was wildly iconoclastic: released at the height of the cold war, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, before the escalation in Vietnam, "Dr. Strangelove" dared to suggest - with yucks! - that our top generals might be bonkers and that our well-designed system for preserving the peace was in fact a doomsday machine.NetflixWhat few people knew, at the time and since, was just how accurate this film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its wildest characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military leaders of the day. The audience had almost no way of detecting these similiarities:Nearly everything about the bomb was shrouded in secrecy back then. There was no Freedom of Information Act and little investigative reporting on the subject. It was easy to laugh off "Dr. Strangelove" as a comic book.
Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin is one of the better films I've seen recently. Netflix
In news fit to set Steven Spielberg's hair on end, Pendragon Pictures has just announced the completion of principal photography on their take of H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds. Set in Wells' intended turn-of-the-century English locale, the movie is the world's first authentic adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic 1898 novel
The Telluride Film Festival is underway. Scott Simon talks with Elvis Mitchell about this year's event.
Telluride is well worth a visit.
This stunning film, the first to be made in a post-Taliban Afghanistan and inspired by a newspaper account read by director Siddiq Barmak, recounts the efforts of a family of women to survive under an oppressive regime. To eke out a meager living, they dress up their 12-year-old girl, Osama, as a boy so she can work
Verlyn Klinkenborg nicely summarizes recent news in the recording industry's battle against file sharing:
But this isn't just a legal battle, of course. It's a battle of information and ideas. A new book from Lawrence Lessig called "Free Culture" makes a forceful, cogent defense of many forms of file sharing. And perhaps worst of all from the industry's perspective a new academic study prepared by professors at Harvard and the University of North Carolina concludes, "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." This directly counters recording industry claims that place nearly all the blame for declining CD sales on illegal file sharing.
Rob Thomas interviews Errol Morris on the Fog of War.
"They're the odd couple of American film in 2004, Robert McNamara and Errol Morris.
McNamara is the former U.S. secretary of defense who was one of the prime forces behind the Vietnam War, who ended up hated by both the left and the right."
An excellent film! (I believe this played briefly at the Orpheum) Available on DVD.
Shortly before World War II, a Jewish couple and their young daughter emigrate to Kenya from Germany to escape the Nazis. Not all members of the family are happy with this drastic change -- but going home isn't an option. Ultimately, they must all come to terms with a new life in a new continent. Director Caroline Link's epic drama won the 2002 Oscar for best foreign film.
UPDATE: Interestingly, the University of Wisconsin Press published the autobiographical novel upon which the film was based.
McNamara speaks at Berkeley.
Robert McNamara, the defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, fielded questions from center stage in a packed auditorium at his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, for the first time since graduating in 1937.
Since Errol Morris's (a UW Grad) The Fog of War" was released last year, Mr. McNamara has appeared before several audiences, including those at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and one last month in Washington.
