One more for the rogue

Alan Rickman - The Age au

Everyone thinks Alan Rickman is a bad guy, but the silver-tongued thesp tells Stephanie Bunbury he's more like the kindly drifter in his latest film.

Ingmar Bergman, Swedish Director, Dies at 89

NY Times:

Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today, Swedish news reports said. He was 89.

NY Times: Making Jane Sexy

Jane Austin on film

The Independent has some interesting thoughts on recent movie remakes.

Movie remakes are nothing new, but the current crop contains some bizarre choices

Zen and the art of Dudeliness

The Guardian UK:
Jeff Bridges on the Big Lebowski

I've been alone most of my life

UK Times On Line:

I've been alone most of my life

... Hollywood survivor Lauren Bacall looks back, at 82, on lost friends, Bogey, and why a good man is so hard to find

Images from heyday of British cinema found in filing cabinet

UK Times On Line:

A photograph of Alec Guinness in the character of Fagin, taking a break with a cigarette during filming of David Lean’s Oliver Twist 60 years ago, is among a treasure trove of unpublished photographs from the heyday of British cinema that has been unearthed.

Noir and the City: Dark, Dangerous, Corrupt and Sexy

NY Times:

Noir and the City: Dark, Dangerous, Corrupt and Sexy
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

GUILT, desire, fear, ambition and the bad behavior those human frailties give rise to are the favored themes of the sort of film we now call noir. So it’s hardly surprising that a fair number of these pictures are set in New York City, where guilt, fear, desire, ambition and bad behavior are pretty much a way of life. Any city will do, of course, because all cities generate a certain amount of the anxiety that film noir feeds on. And all cities, somewhere, have dark, scary streets that can, in noir’s violent allegories of moral ambiguity, stand in for the dimmer, grubbier recesses of the soul. But New Yorkers pride themselves on having more of everything than people in other cities do. If noir is the great urban style of the movies — and it is — then New York City is surely the noirest place on earth.

As proof Film Forum has put together a series (starting Friday) it calls N.Y.C. Noir, which features a whopping 47 movies through Sept. 6; they collectively portray this city as dangerous, corrupt, frazzling, beautiful and dangerously sexy, and who could argue? It would be as pointless as arguing with J. J. Hunsecker, the gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster in “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957), when after a late supper at “21” he emerges onto a still-bustling West 52nd Street and whispers — to no one in particular, as if in prayer — “I love this dirty town.”

“Sweet Smell of Success,” directed by Alexander Mackendrick from a witheringly cynical script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, is the opening film of the series, and it sets exactly the right tone, although it’s an atypical film noir. There are no shootings in the film, no elaborate heists, no chases or desperate races against time, no spectacular betrayals by femmes fatales; except for a couple of sinister cops, nobody even wears a hat. The crimes committed in “Sweet Smell of Success” are of a kind not covered by federal, state or local statute and are no less shocking for that.

The sleaziness and emotional violence of Hunsecker’s campaign to sabotage his young sister’s romance with a jazz musician are breathtaking. And the way Hunsecker drags the movie’s protagonist, an overeager press agent named Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), down into the ethical sewer with him is as brutal as what Richard Widmark does to the old lady in Henry Hathaway’s “Kiss of Death” (1947). (If you are unaware of that unfortunate woman’s fate, the series provides an attractive opportunity to find out: “Kiss of Death” shares a double bill with Samuel Fuller’s terrific 1953 Widmark vehicle “Pickup on South Street” on Aug. 1 and 2.)

It’s the nakedness of the newspaperman’s exercise of power, and the inability of the other, less monomaniacal characters to fight it, that make the picture unmistakably noir, even without gunplay. A sense of powerlessness — often disguised by tough-guy bravado — is a common trait in the heroes and heroines of film noir, and this is a feeling that New Yorkers know a thing or two about. We know too that the threat of physical violence is far from the only means the masters of our fates employ when they want us to know there’s no way out. In this dirty town, where people come to Make It, our desire to succeed and our terror of failure are usually all the ammunition the powerful require to keep us right where they want us.

Not many of the films of noir’s classic period — roughly the mid-’40s to the late ’50s — are as unsettling as “Sweet Smell of Success.” Most of them, overwhelmingly, are crime thrillers, in which the guns, knives, garrotes and blunt instruments help distance the viewer, to some extent, from the potentially depression-inducing fatalism of the worldview.

John Farrow’s tense, sprightly “Big Clock” (1948), for example, depicts a media environment just about as oppressive as the scummy pond in which Hunsecker swims (and Falco sinks). But there’s a nice lurid murder in it: Earl Janoth, the boss of what can only be called a magazine empire, kills his mistress and, observing the venerable corporate tradition of shifting the blame for a disaster to somebody else, orders the overworked editor of his Crimeways magazine to find the mysterious man in whose company the victim was last seen. This prime suspect, the audience knows, is none other than the editor (Ray Milland) himself.

The tricky plot (from a superb novel by Kenneth Fearing) generates plenty of suspense and anxious comedy, which make tolerable — even enjoyable — the movie’s vivid treatment of a peculiarly New York nightmare: the feeling of being trapped by a really, really good job. “The Big Clock” is on the tony end of the noir scale, a neighborhood also occupied by Otto Preminger’s much better known “Laura” (1944), which is sexier — the cop hero falls in love with the portrait of an apparent murder victim — but which has almost no identifiable Gotham atmosphere. Although it’s a wonderfully sleek and inventive picture, practically the only thing that indicates it’s set in New York is the presence of (yet another) extremely creepy journalist.

In general the noirs that attempt to recreate the city on the soundstages and back lots of Hollywood tend to concentrate — as “The Big Clock,” “Laura” and Fritz Lang’s elegant “Woman in the Window” (1944) do — on the interiors, the swanky rooms that swanky Manhattanites live in; the pitfalls of exterior sets can be seen with disturbing clarity in the risible “Greenwich Village” of Lang’s 1945 “Scarlet Street.” What the studio-bound noirs sacrifice in authenticity they make up for in a heightened claustrophobia: a quality so essential to the style that even when the movies began to be shot primarily on location, the smarter filmmakers tried to replicate that closed-in feeling by means of dim, expressionistic lighting, hemming their nervous characters in with walls of shadows.

“Kiss of Death” does that very effectively, and the less familiar 1949 low-budget sleeper “The Window” does it yet better. “The Window” is sort of an earlier, junior version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, “Rear Window”— also in the series — and like that film is based on a story by New York’s own Cornell Woolrich, who was pulp fiction’s most dedicated and ingenious purveyor of stark paranoia.

The director of “The Window,” Ted Tetzlaff, was once a cinematographer, and the movie has an extraordinary visual unity, indoors and out. The simple story concerns an imaginative boy who witnesses a murder committed by his upstairs neighbors and can’t get anyone to believe him. Tetzlaff has the wit to give all the picture’s settings — especially the abandoned building where the climactic action takes place — a uniform dark luster, the look of a playhouse just after lights-out, when ordinary, familiar objects can start to appear changed and menacing.

Although film noir is mostly a thoroughly adult kind of movie, the child’s-eye view of “The Window” suggests that the grown-up noir sensibility may have its roots in the unique terrors of a lonely city kid, seeing things he can’t explain at all hours of the day and night, hearing ominous noises from the street even as he’s trying to get to sleep — the messy life of the metropolis always pressing in a little too closely.

In the later movies in Film Forum’s series, like Alan J. Pakula’s “Klute” (1971) and Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” (1973) and “Taxi Driver” (1976), you can almost feel how profoundly that childlike horror has been absorbed into the city’s system, how much more noir we’ve become. Famously nothing shocks New Yorkers, and that urban sang-froid is precisely the spirit of N.Y.C. Noir. These ravishing pictures show us all the dirty things, outside and inside, that we’ve somehow learned to love.

This is fun

Gender Bending Quiz - the Guardian (I got 10 out of 10)

Get them by the throat

The Guardian - 10 opening scenes (I would add "The Insider" to this list)

NY Times Empire of the Sun Review

My comment --- Just magnificent. A remarkable achievement by Spielberg and especially by a young Christian Bale.

December 9, 1987, Wednesday
Film: Spielberg's 'Empire of Sun'
By JANET MASLIN

LEAD: GOD playing tennis: that's what Jim Graham (Christian Bale), a privileged British schoolboy living in high colonial style in the pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai of 1941, sees in one of his dreams. God taking a photograph: Jim thinks he sees that four years and seemingly several lifetimes later, as a starving, exhausted prisoner witnessing the brilliant light of the atomic bomb.

GOD playing tennis: that's what Jim Graham (Christian Bale), a privileged British schoolboy living in high colonial style in the pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai of 1941, sees in one of his dreams. God taking a photograph: Jim thinks he sees that four years and seemingly several lifetimes later, as a starving, exhausted prisoner witnessing the brilliant light of the atomic bomb.

What transpires in between, the sweeping story of Jim's wartime exploits after he is separated from his family, is set forth so spectacularly in Steven Spielberg's ''Empire of the Sun'' that the film seems to speak a language all its own. In fact it does, for it's clear Mr. Spielberg works in a purely cinematic idiom that is quite singular. Art and artifice play equal parts in the telling of this tale. And the latter, even though intrusive at times, is part and parcel of the film's overriding style.

Yes, when Jim crawls through swampy waters he emerges covered with movie mud, the makeup man's kind; when he hits his head, he bleeds movie blood. It's hard not to be distracted by such things. But it's also hard to be deterred by them, since that same movie-conscious spirit in Mr. Spielberg gives ''Empire of the Sun'' a visual splendor, a heroic adventurousness and an immense scope that make it unforgettable.

There are sections of ''Empire of the Sun'' that are so visually expressive they barely require dialogue (although Tom Stoppard's screenplay, which streamlines J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, is often crisp and clever). Its first half hour, for example, could exist as a silent film -an extraordinarily sharp evocation of Shanghai's last prewar days, richly detailed and colored by an exquisite foreboding. Jim is first seen singing in a church choir (the Welsh hymn ''Suo Gan'' will echo again hauntingly later in the story), then gliding through crowded streets in his family's chauffeur-driven Packard. At home, he asks his parents off-handed questions about the coming war. When the three of them, elaborately costumed, heedlessly leave home for a party on the other side of the city, it's clear that their days there are numbered just from the way the Chinese servants wave goodbye.

That first glimpse of the choirboys will prompt audiences to wonder which of these well-groomed, proper little singers is to be the film's leading man. Mr. Bale, who emerges from the choir by singing a solo, at first seems just a handsome and malleable young performer, another charming child star. But the epic street scene that details the Japanese invasion of the city and separates Jim from his parents reveals this boy to be something more. As Mr. Bale, standing atop a car amid thousands of extras and clasping his hands to his head, registers the fact that Jim is suddenly alone, he conveys the schoolboy's real terror and takes the film to a different dramatic plane. This fine young actor, who appears in virtually every frame of the film and ages convincingly from about 9 to 13 during the course of the story, is eminently able to handle an ambitious and demanding role.

Once ''Empire of the Sun,'' which opens today at the National and other theaters, follows Jim to the prison camp where he spends the duration of the war, it becomes slightly less focused. The pattern of events that occur within the camp is at times difficult to follow, in part because the emphasis is divided equally among so many different characters and episodes. When Mr. Spielberg - again, working almost without dialogue -outlines Jim's growing friendship with a Japanese boy from the airfield that adjoins the prison camp, or demonstrates Jim's profound respect for the Japanese pilots he sees there, the film takes on the larger-than-life emotional immediacy it seems designed for. But other episodes are less sharply defined. When Jim, who has proudly won his right to live in the American barracks, returns to the British camp in which he formerly lived, it takes a moment to remember why he's back - not because the motive is unclear, but because his departure from the one place and return to the other are separated by intervening scenes.

Still, there are many glorious moments here, among them Jim's near-religious experiences with the fighter planes he sees as halfway divine (in one nighttime scene, the sparks literally fly). And there is a full panoply of supporting characters, including Miranda Richardson, who grows more beautiful as her spirits fade, in the role of a married English woman who both mothers Jim and arouses his early amorous stirrings. It is the mothering that seems to matter most, for Jim's small satchel of memorabilia includes a magazine photograph of a happy family, a picture he takes with him everywhere. For a surrogate father, he finds the trickier figure of Basie (John Malkovich), a Yank wheeler-dealer with a sly Dickensian wit. Basie, who by turns befriends Jim and disappoints him, remains an elusive character, but Mr. Malkovich brings a lot of fire to the role. ''American, are you?'' one of his British fellow prisoners asks this consummate operator. ''Definitely,'' Mr. Malkovich says.

''Gone With the Wind'' is playing at the biggest movie theater in Shanghai when the Japanese are seen invading that city, and ''Gone With the Wind'' is a useful comparison, at least in terms of subject and style. The makers of that film didn't really burn Atlanta; that wasn't their method. They, too, as Mr. Spielberg does, let the score sometimes trumpet the characters' emotions unnecessarily, and they might well have staged something as crazy as the ''Empire of the Sun'' scene in which the prisoners find an outdoor stadium filled with confiscated art and antiques and automobiles, loot that's apparently been outdoors for a while but doesn't look weatherbeaten in the slightest. Does it matter? Not in the face of this film's grand ambitions and its moments of overwhelming power. Not in the light of its soaring spirits, its larger authenticity, and the great and small triumphs that it steadily delivers. ''Empire of the Sun'' is rated PG (''Parental Guidance Suggested''). It contains some violence and occasional strong language.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN, directed by Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by J. G. Ballard; director of photography, Allen Daviau; edited by Michael Kahn; music by John Williams; production designer, Norman Reynolds; produced by Mr. Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall; released by Warner Brothers.

Running time: 145 minutes. This film is rated PG. Jim...Christian Bale Basie...John Malkovich Mrs. Victor...Miranda Richardson Frank...Joe Pantoliano Jim's Father...Rupert Frazer Jim's Mother...Emily Richard Mr. Maxton...Leslie Phillips

Celebs using the Web

An interesting article from Anne Thompson at Variety. More and more celebrities are getting involved with the web:

"The critics and the media no longer have the last word. Thanks to evolving technology, moviemakers and stars have new weapons to not only promote their projects directly to moviegoers, but to fight back against what they perceive as misinformation."


Celebs going online with viewers

The Guardian - Ain't it Cool has jumped the shark

After 11 years the ultimate movie geek blog has lost its way. Noooo come BACK@!!

'Sleuth' finds premiere in Venice

Variety: Branagh film likely to also play Toronto By SHARON SWART

'Sleuth' --- Michael Caine and Jude Law star in a 'Sleuth' remake, with Caine graduating from the lover (in the original) to the writer role.

Michael Caine-Jude Law starrer "Sleuth" will world preem in competition at the Venice Film Festival in early September. Caine, Law and helmer Kenneth Branagh are expected on the Lido. Movie's second fest pit stop will likely be Toronto.

O to be in England now that summer's here

Variety: Classics set for British cinemas

BBC, UKFC to show films on digital network

By STEVE CLARKELONDON — A joint initiative between the U.K. Film Council and the BBC will see seven classic British films play on 136 screens across Blighty later this summer.
Utilising the Digital Screen Network, seasons bows July 31 with Bond pic “Goldfinger” followed by David Lean’s “Brief Encounter.”

Other films are John Schlesinger's “Billy Liar,” Laurence Olivier's “Henry V,” Robin Hardy's “The Wicker Man,” Michael Anderson's “The Dam Busters,” and Bruce Robinson's “Withnail And I.”

Venture is linked to “The Summer of British Film,” a season broadcast by the BBC2 channel dedicated to homegrown cinema and featuring seven part documentary series “British Film Forever.”

Variety - Swing Vote casting

Tucci and Lane as campaign managers? I can't wait!

Costner fills out cast for 'Swing Vote'
Hopper, Lane, Grammer added to comedy
By MICHAEL FLEMING

Dennis Hopper for president?

Hopper, Nathan Lane, Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, George Lopez and newcomer Madeline Carroll are joining Kevin Costner in “Swing Vote,” the populist comedy that begins shooting in Albuquerque, N.M., on July 23. Joshua Michael Stern is directing a script he wrote with Jason Richman.

Costner, who’s financing the film and producing with longtime Tig Prods. partner Jim Wilson, plays an apathetic working-class single dad who’s thrust on the world stage when the presi-dential election comes down to his vote.

Hopper and Grammer will play the Democratic candidate and Republican incumbent, while Lane and Tucci will play their respective campaign managers.

Lopez will play the local TV station manager whose town is descended upon by the political machinery of both parties.

Robin Jonas, Costner’s partner in Treehouse Films, will exec produce along with Radar Pictures and G&M Films. Kathy Morgan Intl, is handling international sales on the film.

Rock'n'roll to the rescue (Spinal Tap)

The Guardian UK:

They rocked the world in 1984 - and now Spinal Tap are back to save it. As the spoof band prepare to re-form for Live Earth, Dan Glaister meets the film-maker who 'discovered' them, Rob Reiner

The Departed

Roger Ebert reviews The Departed in the Sun Times. Interesting lines on Scorsese's Catholicism.