Tuesday, June 26, 2007
AWFJ’s (The Alliance of Women Film Journalists) Top 100 Films List
HERE is the list - Some great choices....
Monday, June 25, 2007
1000 Top Films - The Guardian
Out of these million-plus movies, our team of experts has picked what we believe is the essential 1,000 - those that best sum up the dazzling achievement and variety of the movies.
Over the next five days we are publishing the full 1,000, in alphabetical order. A - C are HERE
And the Quiz to go with it...
Over the next five days we are publishing the full 1,000, in alphabetical order. A - C are HERE
And the Quiz to go with it...
Sunday, June 24, 2007
The Independent 6-24-07
Spies like us
I loved The Good Shepard - Intricate, but a fascinating look at the workings of the CIA. Matt Damon played so inside himself that sometimes he became a cypher. Still, the final shot of him entering his new kingdom - CIA headquarters - his shoulders hunched, his walk weary - was most touching.
Robert De Niro tells David Thomson why he has become hooked on spooks and why pretending to be other people is strange
I loved The Good Shepard - Intricate, but a fascinating look at the workings of the CIA. Matt Damon played so inside himself that sometimes he became a cypher. Still, the final shot of him entering his new kingdom - CIA headquarters - his shoulders hunched, his walk weary - was most touching.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Down Under's Greatest Contributions to Film
Premiere.com has a slide show presentation of Down Under's greatest contributions to cinema. Included are 28 actors, directors, films, and even a location or two. As you look through the slide show you realize just how many incredibly talented movie folk come from Down Under, including a few of my favorites such as Russell Crowe, Judy Davis, Peter Weir, Phillip Noyce and Cate Blanchett. As you see from the first Talk Back poster comment, they even missed quite a few other talented actors.
Down Under's Greatest Contributions to Film
Down Under's Greatest Contributions to Film
Monday, June 18, 2007
The UK Observer
The best comic films of all time:
From Buster Keaton to Borat, comedies are the films we love most - and also the hardest to get right. But what is the funniest movie ever? To launch our search, we asked a panel of very funny people to name their favourite
Monday, June 11, 2007
20 Movies Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You
For me, an interesting article at Premiere.com about some film projects which have gotten stuck in development hell, and may or may not ever be made. I've always been fascinated by the behind-the-scene machinations of Hollywood film making. Given the number of parts that have to come together to make a whole, sometimes I wonder how any film ever gets completed.
20 Movies Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You.
20 Movies Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Jeff Bridges
I've been strolling around Jeff Bridges' great site, and saw the trailer for a new film of his, the Amateurs - Great cast and looks like fun
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Newman - Come back all is forgiven
Come back, all is forgiven
The actor with the most famous blue eyes in film history is retiring, and nobody quite knows why
David Thomson
Saturday June 2, 2007
Guardian
There was a time when Paul Newman and Robert Redford gave every indication of having been contemporaries in reform school. But if you looked closer, Butch was 15 years older, wiser and sadder than Sundance, which was why he was crazy with insane plans. Anything to stop reality setting in. Newman was only a year older than Brando. He was six years younger than James Dean. And in his first hit, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that stupefyingly silly film where, for some reason, he won't go to bed with Elizabeth Taylor, he was seven years her senior, no matter that he was the kid and she had been around for ever.
Now Newman has let it be known that he doesn't think he can handle the strange bag of tricks called acting any longer. No one is being specific about his problems. Perhaps he can't remember his lines, but so what? His face, his timing, his weary agreement to listen to other people's lousy lines has never been surer. Indeed, in the past 10 years, he has done some old men to treasure, and encouraged the notion that old men can be lethal, very funny and more trouble than their grandsons.
Once Newman was reckoned to be beautiful, with that crinkly brown hair, the cocky grin and his famous blue eyes. He looked younger than 30, which was his age when fate took a hand in his flagging career. He was of Hungarian descent, from Cleveland, part Catholic, part Jewish, and all American. He served several years in the Pacific war and then went to Kenyon College, Ohio, and tried acting. He had a supporting part in the Broadway production of the play Picnic, and that led to some of the worst debut films anyone has had to suffer - The Silver Chalice, Until They Sail, The Helen Morgan Story, The Long Hot Summer.
What happened to save him was that James Dean died, so he walked into the role of boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody up There Likes Me, which was designed for Dean. Still, he had some parts in films that seemed to leave him cold: From the Terrace, Exodus, The Young Philadelphians and the horribly fake Paris Blues. He was a lead actor, but seemed smug and bored until he did The Hustler, a film from nowhere from a novel by Walter Tevis about a pool player, Eddie Felson, who reckons to conquer life on the green baize and has to learn he has the personality of a loser.
Newman looked spoiled and vain in The Hustler but it helped, because it let George C Scott's character look him over and judge he was playing to be beaten. Eddie protested, but it would take years and tragedy before he learned to win. I think something like this happened with Newman. For a big star, he made a ton of poor pictures. Yet in truth he had a female following that was always likely to lead him astray. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting were the pictures that locked down his reputation, yet I'd say they are pieces of pipedream that betray their own actors.
With Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman started being nominated, and won eventually for the grownup Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money. That Oscar was a travesty, given that he was passed over for his drunken lawyer Galvin in The Verdict - one of his great films. He grew better, simpler and drier.
He was adored once and is esteemed now, and we will have to take his word for it that he should stop. I dare say the story is bigger, but don't expect him to tell it. He directed (quite decently). He did good works and stayed married to Joanne Woodward as if his life depended on it. Forgive him the rubbish and grant that he made some fine films - The Hustler, Hud, the badly neglected Buffalo Bill and the Indians, The Verdict, Nobody's Fool and Road to Perdition. Any time he decides he wants to come back, he's in, no questions asked.
· David Thomson is author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
comment@guardian.co.uk
The actor with the most famous blue eyes in film history is retiring, and nobody quite knows why
David Thomson
Saturday June 2, 2007
Guardian
There was a time when Paul Newman and Robert Redford gave every indication of having been contemporaries in reform school. But if you looked closer, Butch was 15 years older, wiser and sadder than Sundance, which was why he was crazy with insane plans. Anything to stop reality setting in. Newman was only a year older than Brando. He was six years younger than James Dean. And in his first hit, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that stupefyingly silly film where, for some reason, he won't go to bed with Elizabeth Taylor, he was seven years her senior, no matter that he was the kid and she had been around for ever.
Now Newman has let it be known that he doesn't think he can handle the strange bag of tricks called acting any longer. No one is being specific about his problems. Perhaps he can't remember his lines, but so what? His face, his timing, his weary agreement to listen to other people's lousy lines has never been surer. Indeed, in the past 10 years, he has done some old men to treasure, and encouraged the notion that old men can be lethal, very funny and more trouble than their grandsons.
Once Newman was reckoned to be beautiful, with that crinkly brown hair, the cocky grin and his famous blue eyes. He looked younger than 30, which was his age when fate took a hand in his flagging career. He was of Hungarian descent, from Cleveland, part Catholic, part Jewish, and all American. He served several years in the Pacific war and then went to Kenyon College, Ohio, and tried acting. He had a supporting part in the Broadway production of the play Picnic, and that led to some of the worst debut films anyone has had to suffer - The Silver Chalice, Until They Sail, The Helen Morgan Story, The Long Hot Summer.
What happened to save him was that James Dean died, so he walked into the role of boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody up There Likes Me, which was designed for Dean. Still, he had some parts in films that seemed to leave him cold: From the Terrace, Exodus, The Young Philadelphians and the horribly fake Paris Blues. He was a lead actor, but seemed smug and bored until he did The Hustler, a film from nowhere from a novel by Walter Tevis about a pool player, Eddie Felson, who reckons to conquer life on the green baize and has to learn he has the personality of a loser.
Newman looked spoiled and vain in The Hustler but it helped, because it let George C Scott's character look him over and judge he was playing to be beaten. Eddie protested, but it would take years and tragedy before he learned to win. I think something like this happened with Newman. For a big star, he made a ton of poor pictures. Yet in truth he had a female following that was always likely to lead him astray. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting were the pictures that locked down his reputation, yet I'd say they are pieces of pipedream that betray their own actors.
With Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman started being nominated, and won eventually for the grownup Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money. That Oscar was a travesty, given that he was passed over for his drunken lawyer Galvin in The Verdict - one of his great films. He grew better, simpler and drier.
He was adored once and is esteemed now, and we will have to take his word for it that he should stop. I dare say the story is bigger, but don't expect him to tell it. He directed (quite decently). He did good works and stayed married to Joanne Woodward as if his life depended on it. Forgive him the rubbish and grant that he made some fine films - The Hustler, Hud, the badly neglected Buffalo Bill and the Indians, The Verdict, Nobody's Fool and Road to Perdition. Any time he decides he wants to come back, he's in, no questions asked.
· David Thomson is author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
comment@guardian.co.uk
Friday, June 01, 2007
The NY Times
Excellent review for Ten Canoes -
“I came from a water hole,” declares the wise, slyly humorous Storyteller, who narrates “Ten Canoes,” Rolf de Heer’s mesmerizing film of Australian Aboriginal life many centuries ago. As he muses on birth, death and reincarnation in tribal mythology, and goes on to relate an ancient, rambling fable in which a young man learns patience, the cycle of human life is indivisible from the rhythms of the natural world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
