10 Reasons to Remember Agnès Varda (1928-2019)

30 Saturday Mar 2019

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Career, Director, Documentaries, French New Wave, Jacques Demy, Photographer

Agnès Varda (30 May 1928 – 29 March 2019)

Often regarded as both grandmother and mother of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda originally intended to become a museum curator. Instead she decided to focus on photography, and soon established a successful career as the official photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire in Villeurbanne. She was always fascinated by images, both still and moving, and their composition, a fascination that prompted her to make her first movie without any experience or training whatsoever. It was a bold move, and one that was an immediate critical success, it’s blend of documentary and fictional elements helping Varda to explore the lives of ordinary people, a facet of her movie making style that she would return to many times throughout her career. However, lauded as it was, La Pointe Courte failed to achieve any financial success, and though Varda remained at the Théâtre National Populaire with her reputation intact, she made only short documentaries in the seven years between her first movie and her second.

If anything though, that second movie, Cléo from 5 to 7, ostensibly about a woman facing up to the fact of her own mortality as she awaits the results of a biopsy, was the movie that cemented Varda’s reputation as a movie maker, with its deeper understanding of the objectification of women, an issue that Varda would also return to in her career. This led to her being regarded as a feminist auteur, but Varda always insisted that she made her movies not with any defined political or feminist agenda, but under her own terms and just “not… like a man”. She continued to make the movies that interested her first and foremost, and eventually, in 1977, founded her own production company, Cine-Tamaris, to ensure that she had control over how her movies were shot and edited. Varda worked mostly in the documentary genre, where she maintained her appreciation for the trials and problems of ordinary people while continuing to experiment with form and format. She made inventive and often challenging movies that offered different and differing perpsectives on a variety of subjects, from the Black Panthers to her husband Jacques Demy, to murals found in Los Angeles and the North Vietnamese Army during the time of the Vietnam war.

Varda’s idiosyncratic approach to her movies was always the best thing about them, and this usually meant that her projects offered unexpected surprises, whether she was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Cinémathèque Française, or her eightieth birthday by revisiting places from her youth. In the last decade she began to be recognised for her impressive body of work, and she received, amongst others, a lifetime achievement award from the Cannes Film Festival, as well becoming the first female director to be given both an honorary Palme d’or and an Academy Honorary Award. And in 2018 she became the oldest person to be nominated for an Oscar for Faces Places (beating fellow nominee James Ivory by eight days). But perhaps it’s her response to the nomination that sums up Varda best: “There is nothing to be proud of, but happy. Happy because we make films to love. We make films so that you love the film.”

1 – La Pointe Courte (1955)

2 – Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

3 – Le Bonheur (1965)

4 – One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977)

5 – Vagabond (1985)

6 – Jane B. for Agnès V. (1988)

7 – Jacquot de Nantes (1991)

8 – The Gleaners and I (2000)

9 – The Beaches of Agnès (2008)

10 – Faces Places (2017)

10 Reasons to Remember John Carl Buechler (1952-2019)

18 Monday Mar 2019

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Career, Director, Empire Pictures, Magical Media Industries Inc, New World Pictures, Special effects, Troll (1986)

John Carl Buechler (18 June 1952 – 18 March 2019)

If you’re a fan of ultra-low to no-budget horror movies – particularly from the Eighties and Nineties – then you’ll be aware of the work of John Carl Buechler, actor, writer, producer, director, and above all, special effects maestro. It was in this arena that Buechler (pronounced Beekler) found his true calling, having got into the movie business providing special prosthetic effects for Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980). He stayed with special effects make up, and began to make a name for himself as someone who could be relied upon to give a creature feature something of a boost thanks to his ability to come up with practical effects that often belied the paucity of a movie’s budget. He made his directing debut in 1984, contributing the segment Demons of the Dead to The Dungeonmaster, but it was his next outing as a director that cemented his reputation – for good and for bad. The movie was Troll (1986), widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made (and now something of a cult classic – how tastes change). Despite its reputation at the time, Buechler remained as busy as ever, and in 1988 alone he made varying contributions to nine different movies, including Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (which he also directed), A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.

Buechler worked almost exclusively in the fantasy and/or horror genres, and had long stints with Charles Band’s Empire Pictures and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (Corman regarded him as “the best in the business”), but occasionally he would land a gig on a mainstream movie, even providing uncredited animatronic effects on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). He formed his own company, Magical Media Industries Inc, and through the Nineties worked more as a designer than a special effects technician, though still on movies with perilously small budgets and minimal resources. Though most of his output since the late Nineties has been available only through home video releases (and some deservedly so, such as the movies he worked on for Donald F. Glut), Buechler maintained his standing within the industry and was an inspiration for many up and coming young special effects artists. He was an affable figure, well respected, and in his own way exceptionally talented. Outside of the world of low budget horror, Buechler may not be particularly well known, but for anyone who has ever watched the likes of Crawlspace (1986) or Scanner Cop (1994) and wondered just who was responsible for their surprisingly impressive special effects, then the very skilled John Carl Buechler is the answer.

1 – Ghoulies (1984)

2 – Troll (1986)

3 – From Beyond (1986)

4 – Cellar Dweller (1988)

5 – Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

6 – Re-Animator 2 (1989)

7 – Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

8 – Carnosaur (1993)

9 – Curse of the Forty-Niner (2002)

10 – Hatchet (2006)

10 Reasons to Remember Stanley Donen (1924-2019)

23 Saturday Feb 2019

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Career, Choreographer, Comedies, Director, Gene Kelly, Hollywood, Musicals, On the Town, Singin' in the Rain

Stanley Donen (13 April 1924 – 23 February 2019)

Though Stanley Donen decided at a young age to be an atheist, his Jewish heritage often led to his being bullied by anti-Semites when he was a child. To escape this unwanted attention he went to the movies, and though he liked Westerns, comedies and thrillers, it was Flying Down to Rio (1935) that had the most effect on him. He took dance lessons soon after, and though he had a brief flirtation with studying psychology, he moved from his home town of Columbia, South Carolina to New York City in 1940 to pursue a career as a dancer. He soon secured a role in the original stage production of Pal Joey; the star was a talented dancer and actor called Gene Kelly. It wasn’t long before Kelly asked Donen to be his assistant choreographer, and when both men wound up in Hollywood in the early Forties, Donen worked as a choreographer, often on the movies Kelly was making. It was during this period that Donen came up with two dance sequences that helped cement Kelly’s reputation, and Donen’s own: the dance routine in Cover Girl (1944) where Kelly’s reflection jumps out of a mirror and dances with him, and perhaps one of the most famous dance routines of all, when Kelly dances with the cartoon mouse, Jerry, in Anchors Aweigh (1945).

Donen continued to perfect his knowledge of music and sound and photography, and in 1949 he was given the chance to co-direct a movie with Kelly. The result was an instant classic, On the Town. The movie was innovative in its use of location photography in a musical, and for the way in which its New York, New York sequence was edited. The movie won that year’s Best Picture award at the Oscars, and Donen’s reputation (as a director now) was secured. The Fifties saw Donen work on a number of high profile musicals, and in 1952 he reunited with Kelly for another instant classic, Singin’ in the Rain (though it didn’t receive the best notices at the time). Further success with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers actually placed Donen on a better footing within Hollywood than Kelly, and though they worked again on It’s Always Fair Weather, their relationship deteriorated, and working together was described by Donen as a “one hundred percent nightmare”. The movie was the last production he worked on exclusively under his contract with MGM, and in 1957 he became an independent director and producer, and formed Grandon Productions along with Cary Grant.

The Sixties saw Donen working and living in the UK, and switching from musicals, which were waning in terms of public popularity, to comedies and romantic comedy thrillers. Donen continued to be successful, both with audiences and critics, and he found working away from Hollywood to be something of a relief, so much so that his work during this period, particularly on Two for the Road, showed a director displaying supreme confidence in the materiel he was working with. He returned to Hollywood in 1970, but that decade saw him release just three movies, none of which were successful, and as time went on he worked less and less, until he made his last theatrical movie in 1984, Blame It on Rio. Donen’s career as a director spanned fifty years in total, but it will be the musicals he made in the Fifties and the comedies he made in the Sixties that he will be remembered for chiefly. His contributions to the movie musical form were invaluable in terms of what musicals could achieve by breaking away from the stagebound environment that had been the norm until On the Town. Innovative, ground-breaking, breathtaking – his work during the Fifties was all this and more, but it was the way in which he “re-invented” his career in the Sixties that was just as remarkable. If he fell out of favour later in his career, he wouldn’t be the first. But what he gave us will always endure, because what he gave us was a new way of looking at musicals that continues to inspire movie makers today – and the world over.

1 – On the Town (1949)

2 – Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

3 – Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

4 – It’s Always Fair Weather (1955)

5 – The Pajama Game (1957)

6 – Funny Face (1957)

7 – Charade (1963)

8 – Arabesque (1966)

9 – Two for the Road (1967)

10 – Bedazzled (1967)

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018)

04 Sunday Nov 2018

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Director, Documentary, John Huston, Morgan Neville, Movie making, Oja Kodar, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Review, The Other Side of the Wind

D: Morgan Neville / 98m

With: Orson Welles, John Huston, Gary Graver, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Rich Little, Danny Huston, Cybill Shepherd, Beatrice Welles

In 1970, Orson Welles began shooting a movie that he had been thinking about as far back as 1961, about an aging movie director making his latest feature against a backdrop of the changing social, political, and sexual mores of the period. The Other Side of the Wind was intended to be an experimental movie for the most part, with scenes from the movie the director is making woven into the larger story – a movie within a movie. But as with many of Welles’ later projects, money proved to be a problem, from the lack of consistent funding to his own tax problems (which required him to take breaks from production while he took various other jobs to raise money). There were also casting problems: Rich Little was replaced by Peter Bogdanovich after filming nearly all his scenes, and John Huston was only brought on as the fictional director in early 1974. Forced to contend with an intermittent shooting schedule, Welles’ didn’t complete principal photography until 1976. But his problems didn’t end there. The editing process proved difficult as well, and by 1979, Welles had only forty minutes of finished footage out of a planned two hour movie. Would it ever get released…?

The first thing to say about They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (a quote made by Welles to Bogdanovich), is that it’s all about the production of The Other Side of the Wind, and the remaining years before Welles died with the project uncompleted. It’s not about what happened to the movie after Welles’s death in 1985, and how it came to be released in 2018. If you’re interested in that aspect of the movie’s history, then this isn’t the documentary for you. What it is, however, is a fascinating look at Welles himself and his approach to movie making during a period when he was still fighting to get projects made on his own terms, and had learnt how to circumnavigate many of the issues and problems that were put in his way (there’s a great example of Welles’ skill as a director from Chimes at Midnight (1965), where a punch is thrown – and we learn the reaction shot was filmed two years later; and the two shots are seamless). What the documentary makes clear is that Welles knew what he was doing in his head, but it also makes the point through contemporary interview footage that Welles wasn’t always able to articulate what was in his head. Watching this, you might be hard pressed to work out just what The Other Side of the Wind is all about.

One of the key strengths of Morgan Neville’s admirable documentary is its cast of characters, the people who worked with Welles on the project, some of whom have vastly different recollections of what happened, how, and why. Little’s departure from the movie is a case in point, with the man himself somewhat reticent on the matter, while Oja Kodar’s influence (she co-wrote the movie with Welles and appeared in it) is regarded as either essential, restrictive of Welles’ talent, or isn’t understood at all. These differences in memory prove strangely illuminating. As Welles himself would always state, “everything is a lie” (and he does so at the beginning of the documentary), so whether one person is right or wrong soon becomes irrelevant. What Neville teases out is the mystery of a movie that, until recently, no one has seen in its finished form. As a companion piece to The Other Side of the Wind, this is required viewing, an apéritif if you will, before the main course, and a terrific reminder of Welles’ skill as a movie maker, something Neville does through the equally skilful use of clips from Welles’s career and revealing clips of the man himself.

Rating: 8/10 – thanks to lively contributions from those who were there, and a wealth of archive footage shot at the time, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is an enthralling look at a movie maker who was still willing to take risks, and the perils of independent movie making; best watched before seeing The Other Side of the WInd, this isn’t just for cinéastes or fans of Welles, but anyone with an interest in how movies can get made despite any number of adversities.

A Brief Word About Danny Boyle and Bond 25

22 Wednesday Aug 2018

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Bond 25, Creative differences, Daniel Craig, Danny Boyle, Director, Eon Productions

Yesterday, it all ended with a tweet: “Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig today announced that due to creative differences Danny Boyle has decided to no longer direct Bond 25.” And with that simple admission, the possibility that the Bond franchise, already on a creative downward spiral again – is it really twelve years since Casino Royale? – might find a way out of its self-imposed doldrums vanished completely. Say what you like about Boyle and his movies, but even his misfires are still more interesting than the successes of many of his contemporaries. Boyle at the helm of a Bond movie, even one with the increasingly uninterested Craig in the lead role, was an exciting prospect. But “creative differences” have reared their ugly head (again), and the chance to see what the idiosyncratic director would have made of his first proper action movie has fallen by the wayside.

There has been talk of a falling out over the casting of the movie’s chief villain, with Craig putting his foot down over Boyle’s choice of Polish actor Tomasz Kot (Craig apparently also has the final say over the casting of the female lead – what’s that about?). If this is true, then it raises a larger question: why on earth would Eon Productions have hired Boyle in the first place, someone who has made a number of disparate yet successful movies that carry his own unmistakable stamp on them, and ask him to direct their latest mega-budget installment? Why ask someone who has a clear vision in regard to the movies he makes to come on board as a director for hire? And leading on from that, what was Boyle thinking? Here’s something he said in an interview just last year: “I love scale and I love films that will play for everyone, and those are the films I like watching more than anything, so James Cameron – I bow down in front of him, absolutely. But I can’t handle those kind of budgets; I like having a much lower ceiling that you’re constantly battling.”

Perhaps then it’s all for the best. If Eon can’t let a director of Boyle’s calibre make basic decisions relating to casting, then what is he there for? And what hope now for Bond 25?

A Brief Word About R. Lee Ermey and Vittorio Taviani

16 Monday Apr 2018

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Actor, Careers, Director, Full Metal Jacket, Movies, Padre Padrone, Paolo Taviani

With the recent death of Miloš Forman, this past weekend has been made even sadder by the passing of actor R. Lee Ermey, and director Vittorio Taviani.

R. Lee Ermey (24 March 1944 – 15 April 1987)

A character actor whose career blossomed thanks to his portrayal of Gny Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), Ermey was the epitome of the gruff, no-nonsense soldier he so often portrayed. He was also a much in demand voice actor, lending his easily recognisable tones to the likes of Starship Troopers: The Series (1999-2000), Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2009-2011), and of course, the Toy Story trilogy. Ermey’s military background made him somewhat typecast, but he did have solid supporting roles in movies such as Fletch Lives (1989), Dead Man Walking (1995), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). His signature role as Hartman, though – one of the few occasions where Kubrick allowed an actor to improvise his dialogue – will always be remembered for its vitriolic intensity, and some of the most inventive insults ever committed to screen: “Private Pyle, your ass looks like about a hundred and fifty pounds of chewed bubblegum!”

Vittorio Taviani (20 September 1929 – 15 April 1987)

With his brother, Paolo, Vittorio Taviani was repsonsible for some of the most impressive Italian movies of the last fifty years, including Under the Sign of Scorpio (1969), the Palme d’Or prize-winning Padre Padrone (1977), The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982), Good Morning, Babylon (1987), and Caesar Must Die (2012). Also a writer, a producer and an editor like his brother, Taviani favoured a poetic, visually arresting style that is both attractive to watch, and an often powerful backdrop for the stories he and his brother told. He began his career as a journalist, but switched to making movies in the Sixties, a decision that allowed him to express his own personal political beliefs through features such as A Man for Burning (1962) (which the brothers co-directed with Valentino Orsini). Inspired to make movies by a chance viewing of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), Taviani and his brother have given us a wonderful selection of movies that explore human truths with honesty and sincerity, and which have held up a mirror to the irrepressible nature of Italian culture.

10 Reasons to Remember Miloš Forman (1932-2018)

15 Sunday Apr 2018

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Amadeus, Career, Czechoslovakia, Director, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Oscar winner

Miloš Forman (18 February 1932 – 13 April 2018)

Miloš Forman once said, “It all begins in the script. If what’s happening is interesting, it doesn’t matter where you shoot from, people will be interested to watch. If you write something boring, you can film from mosquitoes’ underpants and it will still be boring.” Forman knew the value of a good script, and even a cursory look at the movies he made reveals a grasp of that essential provision. Though he was a master visualist, and an expert at creating the relevant mood for each of his projects, his affinity for the written word always made his movies stand out from the crowd. Through dialogue he could reach the emotional heart of a character and show that emotional heart to audiences around the world. From his beginnings in his native Czechoslovakia, through to the movies he made as a continual outsider within the Hollywood system, Forman was a director who pursued the projects that interested him, and through doing so, ensured that his body of work would remain fascinating and thought-provoking.

At a young age, he wanted to be a theatrical producer. He attended boarding school with the likes of future Czech president Václav Havel, and future movie makers Ivan Passer and Jerzy Skolimowski. He studied screenwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and later worked for Alfréd Radok, the creator of Laterna Magika. He began making movies in the early Sixties, creating a comedic style that brought him to the attention of festival programmers around the world, and soon to much wider audiences than could be found in Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring of 1968 pushed Forman into leaving his home country, and he wound up in the US, where after a good but inauspicious start, he was hired to direct an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckkoo’s Nest – Forman always said that he was hired because he was within the producers’ price range. He won an Oscar for his efforts on the movie, and from there on, the future of his career was assured (he won a second Oscar for his work on Amadeus).

Forman continued to make intelligent, critically well received movies across a variety of genres. But though his movies didn’t always do well at the box office, his standing within the movie community increased with every project. Even a “lesser” Forman movie, such as Goya’s Ghosts (2006), had moments where his artistry and skill as a director helped transform the material into something better than originally envisaged. He worked particularly well with actors, and steered the likes of Jack Nicholson, Brad Dourif, Elizabeth McGovern, F. Murray Abraham, and Woody Harrelson to Oscar nominations (Nicholson and Abraham, of course, won). Forman was also a staunch advocate of individual freedoms, and was wise to the irony of fleeing one country (Czechoslovakia) where censorship was directly applied by the State, to another country (the US) where indirect censorship applied by the studios, often meant it was more difficult to make the kinds of movies he was interested in making. But what was most important to him was that he liked to have fun when making a movie, even if he was making a serious drama, and in that respect, his movies retain an engaging, sprightly quality to them, a liveliness that helps keep them feeling fresh even after repeated viewings.

1 – A Blonde in Love (1965)

2 – The Fireman’s Ball (1967)

3 – Taking Off (1971)

4 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

5 – Hair (1979)

6 – Ragtime (1981)

7 – Amadeus (1984)

8 – Valmont (1989)

9 – The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)

10 – Man on the Moon (1999)

Spielberg (2017)

18 Sunday Mar 2018

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Biography, Career, Director, Documentary, E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Munich, Review, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg

D: Susan Lacy / 147m

With: Steven Spielberg, Leah Adler, Francis Ford Coppola, Daniel Day-Lewis, Brian De Palma, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Dreyfuss, Sally Field, Tom Hanks, Michael Kahn, Janusz Kaminski, Tony Kushner, George Lucas, Janet Maslin, Dennis Muren, Martin Scorsese, A.O. Scott, Anne Spielberg, Arnold Spielberg, Nancy Spielberg, Sue Spielberg, John Williams, Vilmos Zsigmond

Spielberg opens with a confession from the man himself: that when he saw Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for the first time, it made him realise he couldn’t be a director. The scope and the depth of David Lean’s extraordinary movie was so far beyond Spielberg’s own capabilities as a budding movie maker that it was overwhelming. But not even Lean’s masterpiece could deter him completely. The next week he saw it again, and again the week after that, and the week after that… Awake to the possibilities that cinema could offer and provide, Spielberg continued to make short movies of his own, including Amblin’ (1968). This brought him to the attention of Sid Sheinberg, then president of Universal, who took a chance on him. A short stint in television led to his first feature, Duel (1971), and just four years later, he changed the face of cinema forever by making the first summer blockbuster, Jaws (1975). The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Susan Lacy’s celebratory documentary focuses on the various highs of Spielberg’s career, while studiously ignoring the lows. This is to be expected perhaps, but while the likes of Jaws, E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Schindler’s List (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Munich (2005), and Lincoln (2012) are studied in some detail, once 1941 (1979) is dealt with (“Why couldn’t I make a comedy?”), the focus settles on establishing Spielberg as a predominantly serious movie maker, and not the populist movie maker who, at his best, can still inspire the kinds of awe and wonder that other directors can only dream of. Lacy looks to how Spielberg has grown as a director, and how he’s used each new experience behind the camera as a way of augmenting and perfecting his craft. Even now, after more than fifty years as a director, Spielberg comes across as someone who’s still learning, and is eager to do so. It doesn’t hurt that he’s an engaging and often self-deprecating interviewee, and throughout he makes references to growing up and being a child of divorce, something that has infused much of his work since.

His recollections and reminiscences are supported by a range of collaborators and interested parties, but none are as interesting as those supplied by his family, from his mother Leah, father Arnold, and sisters Anne, Nancy and Sue. Their memories of his childhood, coupled with his feelings about being Jewish, help broaden our understanding of Spielberg the person, and what has driven him in his work over the years. But while he’s open and honest about his parents’ divorce and the effect it had on him, and the importance of his own family now, the absence of Kate Capshaw is curious (and unexplained). That aside, and though the movie overall is a fascinating endorsement of his career and achievements, it’s perhaps a little too safe in its approach. Though a plethora of behind the scenes footage, and photographs from his childhood and early career is welcome, and Spielberg is a worthy subject, there’s a sense that his observations about those movies which weren’t so successful – Hook (1991), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), or The BFG (2016) – would have been equally welcome. Lacy correctly focuses on Spielberg’s strengths as a director and the high regard he has amongst his peers, but even that brings up another issue: with Spielberg having had a considerable influence on a range of movie makers over the last forty-plus years, why are their contributions as noticeably absent as Capshaw’s?

Rating: 7/10 – a documentary that isn’t as wide-ranging as it could have been (and despite its running time), Spielberg is still an entertaining journey through the director’s life and career that is informative and convivial; having Spielberg revisit many of his movies is illuminating, and there’s enough here that’s new or previously unrevealed to make this – for now – the place to go to find out how and why he makes the movies he does.

10 Reasons to Remember Lewis Gilbert (1920-2018)

27 Tuesday Feb 2018

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Career, Director, Documentaries, James Bond, Lewis Gilbert, Movies, World War II

Lewis Gilbert (6 March 1920 – 23 February 2018)

With his family’s music hall background (Gilbert first appeared on stage with them aged five), and a handful of movie roles as a child in the Thirties (mostly uncredited), it would have seemed appropriate for Lewis Gilbert to seek a career in front of the camera, but though Alexander Korda offered to send him to RADA, Gilbert elected to study direction instead. The first movie he worked on as an assistant? Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939). Not a bad start, but with the onset of World War II, Gilbert joined the Royal Air Force’s film unit and worked on several wartime documentaries. Further experience came when he was seconded to the First Motion Picture Unit of the US Army Air Forces, where he was allowed to shoot much of the work assigned to American director William Keighley.

After the war, Gilbert continued to make documentaries, but it was in the Fifties that he began to make his mark as a director of features. Working for low-budget outfits such as Nettlefold Films, Gilbert honed his craft, and made a number of well received movies that brought him greater attention and the chance to work on a succession of true stories from the recent war. For a while, Gilbert was the go-to director for these kinds of movies, and between 1953 and 1962 he made half a dozen war-related movies, all of which increased his standing within the movie community, and allowed him to make a range of other movies during the same period that highlighted his versatility. But it was Alfie (1966) that really put him on the map, earning him his sole Academy Award nomination, and proving once and for all that his strongest suit was in relationship dramas.

Anyone following his career up until this point, would have been surprised when his next movie proved to be the fifth Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (1967). But Gilbert proved himself to be at home amidst all the over-sized sets and the absurdity of a Bond movie, and returned twice more to make The Spy Who Loved Me (1977 – terrific) and Moonraker (1979 – uh-oh). In between his first and second Bonds, Gilbert made a number of movies that didn’t fare so well with critics or audiences, and with some, like The Adventurers (1970), Gilbert would later claim that they shouldn’t have been made. But after his Roger Moore one-two at the end of the Seventies, the Eighties saw Gilbert make two bona fide British classics in Educating Rita (1983) and Shirley Valentine (1989). He made his last movie, the enjoyable but slight Before You Go in 2002, but at eighty-two, retirement wasn’t exactly a surprise.

If he had one regret, it was always that he was unable to direct Oliver! (1968), a movie he had developed with its composer, Lionel Bart, but which he was unable to make due to contractual obligations. Gilbert was a director who, Bond movies aside, always looked to the characters first, and it was this focus that allowed him to make so many wonderful movies over more than fifty years. He was honest about his work, and some of his collaborators, but always tried to do the best he could do with the material provided. He wasn’t an auteur in the accepted sense, but his ability to draw out excellent performances from his casts, and to move easily between comedy and drama – often in the same scene in a movie – was a constant throughout his career. And he was a realist. Of Alfie, he had this to say: “Paramount backed Alfie because it was going to be made for $500,000, normally the sort of money spent on executives’ cigar bills.”

1 – Time, Gentlemen, Please! (1952)

2 – Reach for the Sky (1956)

3 – The Admirable Crichton (1957)

4 – Carve Her Name With Pride (1958)

5 – Sink the Bismarck! (1960)

6 – Alfie (1966)

7 – You Only Live Twice (1967)

8 – The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

9 – Educating Rita (1983)

10 – Shirley Valentine (1989)

10 Reasons to Remember Tobe Hooper (1943-2017)

27 Sunday Aug 2017

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Career, Director, Horror, Poltergeist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper (25 January 1943 – 26 August 2017)

Like many of his horror movie contemporaries, Tobe Hooper began his career with a bang, but then saw fewer and fewer of his movies gain a similar kind of recognition. And like so many of his contemporaries, he retreated to television, where he worked steadily for around fifteen years. His career was one he might not have been able to predict, though, as during the Sixties he worked as a college professor and documentary cameraman. It wasn’t until he assembled a small cast of college students and teachers and made a small, yet hugely influential feature based upon the infamous Ed Gein, that Hooper stepped into the limelight as a movie maker. The movie, the uncompromisingly titled The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), broke new ground in the horror genre, and is still as uncomfortable to watch today as it was over forty years ago. It also introduced audiences to a new horror icon in the form of Leatherface.

The movie was such a success that Hooper’s future career seemed assured, but projects didn’t always come his way, and some that he took on, such as The Dark (1979) and Venom (1981), led to his being fired once filming had begun. Around this time, Hooper redeemed himself enough to land the job directing a script written by Steven Spielberg, called Poltergeist (1982). To this day, Hooper’s credit as the movie’s director has been continually challenged, with members of the production crew adamant that Spielberg directed the movie and not Hooper. Hooper himself always said that Spielberg did some second unit work “to help out”, but whichever way the truth lies, the movie bolstered Hooper’s reputation but still not enough for him to be working regularly. It wasn’t until he signed a three-picture deal with Cannon Films that it appeared he was fully back on track, but those pictures were heavily cut by Cannon during post-production, and Hooper’s intentions for all three movies were dealt a series of savage blows that helped critics afford Hooper some of the worst reviews of his career so far.

Following his terrible experiences with Goram and Globus, Hooper turned to television where his credits included work on series such as Freddy’s Nightmares, Tales from the Crypt, and Masters of Horror. He made the occasional movie during this period, but a couple of better than average shockers aside, he made the kind of horror movies that made audiences question how the same director could have made something as visceral and uncompromising as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. However he felt about the way his career had turned out, Hooper never complained about his seeming lack of good fortune over the last thirty years, and appeared content to be regarded as the creator of a genuinely disturbing horror movie, and a handful of cult classics.

There was always more to Hooper than most people gave him credit for, and he was always aware that his career could have been so much better in terms of the quality of his movies. But he always persevered and did the best he could with often very limited resources (as he did back in 1974), but there were too many occasions where his skill as a director was at odds with the needs of his producers, and Hooper’s work was bowdlerised in the process. Nevertheless, he continued to work exclusively in horror and science fiction, and unlike, say, George A. Romero or Wes Craven, he never tried to work outside those two genres. Hooper knew where his talents lay; it was just a shame that few producers – including Spielberg – were ever prepared to let Hooper have free rein. If they had, perhaps there would be more classic movies on his resumé than just the one that launched his career.

1 – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

2 – Death Trap (1976)

3 – Salem’s Lot (1979)

4 – The Funhouse (1981)

5 – Poltergeist (1982)

6 – Lifeforce (1985)

7 – Invaders from Mars (1986)

8 – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

9 – Crocodile (2000)

10 – Toolbox Murders (2004)

10 Reasons to Remember George A. Romero (1940-2017)

16 Sunday Jul 2017

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Career, Director, George A. Romero, Horror, Movies, Zombies

George A. Romero (4 February 1940 – 16 July 2017)

Although best known for his series of zombie movies, George A. Romero’s desire to make movies came about when he saw The Red Shoes (1948), a movie so far removed from the genre that made him famous that it’s intriguing to wonder just where his career would have taken him if he’d followed in the footsteps of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and not fallen in with the low budget horror arena where he spent pretty much all his career. He was also a huge fan of The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), a movie he would rent on 16mm from the very same rental company that Martin Scorsese used.

But a career creating those kind of artistic endeavours wasn’t to be. Romero started out by making TV commercials and industrial training movies in and around his home town of Pittsburgh. In 1968, he and some friends all contributed $10,000 so he could make his first feature. The result was an unqualified success, and Night of the Living Dead became a movie that would influence an entire sub-genre of horror. From then on Romero was pigeon-holed as a horror director, and though he made a number of movies that didn’t involve zombies or extreme gore effects (usually courtesy of Tom Savini), Romero was always grateful that his first feature allowed him to have a movie making career.

Romero would return to zombies five more times in his career, and though the law of diminishing returns had set in by number five, Diary of the Dead (2007), there was still enough of Romero’s patented social commentary to make the last three in the series interesting to watch at the very least. But Romero’s work away from marauding members of the undead, often provided examples of the best that he could do. Martin (1978) is a creepy, unsettling modern vampire tale, with a great performance from John Amplas, and Knightriders (1981) is a counter-culture movie that features probably Romero’s best assembled cast, and a knowing, mordaunt sense of humour. He was capable of so much more but spent too much time developing projects that inevitably never got off the ground, such as a TV version of Stephen King’s The Stand, or movies such as Resident Evil (2002) where he was slated to direct. An affable, knowledgeable, and likeable figure within the industry, Romero will be missed for all the subtexts he put in his movies and for the way he made zombies “cool”.

1 – Night of the Living Dead (1968)

2 – Season of the Witch (1972)

3 – The Crazies (1973)

4 – Martin (1978)

5 – Dawn of the Dead (1978)

6 – Knightriders (1981)

7 – Creepshow (1982)

8 – Day of the Dead (1985)

9 – The Dark Half (1993)

10 – Bruiser (2000)

10 Reasons to Remember Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

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Career, Director, Documentaries, Jonathan Demme, Movies

Jonathan Demme (22 February 1944 – 26 April 2017)

Like many of his contemporaries, Jonathan Demme started his movie career working for Roger Corman. He wrote several screenplays, including The Hot Box (1972) and Caged Heat (1974 – which he also directed), and had several modest successes as a director in the mid-Seventies. He learned his craft well, and over the next decade Demme made a succession of well received movies as well as a string of music videos for bands such as Talking Heads and New Order (a group whose songs featured in pretty much all his movies from the Eighties onwards). Demme chose his projects carefully and as a result he wasn’t the most prolific of directors when it came to features, but he was a committed documentarian, making over a dozen during his career.

It was a certain Oscar-winning movie in 1991 that gave Demme his biggest exposure as a director, but though he could have used that success to helm any movie he wanted to, he continued to choose projects that most other directors would have passed on, from intimate documentary portrait Cousin Bobby (1992), to literary adaptation Beloved (1998), to the well intentioned but unsuccessful remake of Charade (1964), The Truth About Charlie (2002) (on the subject of remakes he never thought it was “sacrilegious to remake any movie”; for Demme it was “sacrilegious to make a bad movie”). He kept returning to music documentaries, and ventured into television, ensuring that he continued to have a varied, and sometimes eclectic career.

He was known primarily for his use of close-ups, for finding roles for his “stock company” (actors such as Charles Napier and Dean Stockwell), and for his work having had a profound influence on the writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson. If anything, Demme was a mercurial director who never quite received the acclaim that his body of work deserved, but for anyone who has followed his career since those heady days working for Roger Corman, he was an intelligent, perceptive director whose talent and skill behind the camera meant that whatever project he was working on, it would always be worth watching.

1 – Caged Heat (1974)

2 – Melvin and Howard (1980)

3 – Stop Making Sense (1984)

4 – Something Wild (1986)

5 – Swimming to Cambodia (1987)

6 – The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

7 – Philadelphia (1993)

8 – Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006)

9 – Rachel Getting Married (2008)

10 – I’m Carolyn Parker (2011)

10 Reasons to Remember Raoul Coutard (1924-2016)

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

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Career, Cinematographer, Director, Jean-Luc Godard, Nouvelle Vague, Raoul Coutard

Raoul Coutard (16 September 1924 – 8 November 2016)

A key influence on the look and style of movies made during the Nouvelle Vague period (covering the late Fifties and the Sixties), Raoul Coutard was a cinematographer known primarily for his work with Jean-Luc Godard, but he also worked with the likes of Jacques Demy, François Truffaut, and Costa-Gravas.

Coutard served in the Indochina War (1946-1954), and ended up living and working in Vietnam for eleven years as a war photographer. In 1956 he was asked by Pierre Schoendoerffer to work on a documentary called The Devil’s Pass (1958); Coutard accepted due to a misunderstanding: he thought he was being hired to take stills shots. From there he shot two more movies for Schoendoerffer, and in 1959 was hired by Godard’s producer Georges de Beauregard to work on Godard’s first feature, Breathless (1960). Godard had had somebody else in mind for the job but the end result saw Coutard shoot all of Godard’s movies bar Masculin, féminin (1966) from then until 1967. Coutard was adept at using handheld cameras for Godard’s low-budget black and white movies, but he really impressed the director when it came to shooting his widescreen, colour movies: Coutard created a lighting rig that enabled shooting inside places without enough natural light.

Coutard’s career slowed down in the Seventies, though he did direct his first feature, Hoa Binh (1970); it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won the prize for Best First Work at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. He reunited with Godard in 1982 on Passion, and from then on Coutard began to work more consistently. His work continued to be distinctive and an asset to the projects he worked on, right up until his last work on Philippe Garrel’s Wild Innocence (2001). But he will always be remembered for the movies he made in the early to mid-Sixties, a selection of classic French movies that have stood the test of time not just because of the passions and fearlessness of their writers and directors, but also because of the way that Coutard illuminated those passions and that fearlessness through the immediacy of his visual style.

1 – À bout de souffle (Breathless) (1960)

2 – Une Femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman) (1961)

3 – Jules et Jim (1962)

4 – Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963)

5 – Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) (1964)

6 – Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) (1965)

7 – Pierrot le Fou (1965)

8 – Weekend (1967)

9 – Z (1969)

10 – Passion (1982)

10 Reasons to Remember Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016)

11 Tuesday Oct 2016

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Andrzej Wajda, Career, Director, Movies, Poland

Andrzej Wajda (6 March 1926 – 9 October 2016)

The most prominent movie maker to come out of Poland, Andrzej Wajda was also a director with a strong European sensibility, even as he was chronicling the turbulent political times he lived in. His father was killed in the Katyn Massacre in 1940 (an event Wajda would revisit in 2007), but he survived along with his mother and brother. After the war he went to Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts, and then in the early Fifties the Łódź Film School, where he was an apprentice to the director Aleksander Ford. He made his first movie, A Generation in 1955; it was also the first in a trilogy of movies that would take an anti-war stance then unpopular in Poland itself, which was still under Soviet rule.

He worked in the theatre as well, but focused more and more on movie making. His work gained international recognition – Kanal (1956) shared the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1957 with Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal – and he was able to explore more of the topics that interested him, as in Lotna (1959), a tribute to the Polish Cavalry that his father had been a part of. Throughout the Sixties he made movies that were more and more allegorical and symbolic, and his reputation increased accordingly. He was most successful in the Seventies, making a string of films that cemented his position as the foremost Polish movie maker of his generation.

In the Eighties he continued to make movies but more and more of his time was taken up with supporting Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement. This involvement angered the Polish government to such an extent that it forced the closure of Wajda’s production company. Undeterred, Wajda continued to make the movies he wanted to make, and his career continued to go from strength to strength. In 1990 he was honoured by the European Film Awards with a Lifetime Achievement award (only the third director to have the honour, after Fellini and Bergman). Wajda won numerous other awards during his lifetime, and he was a tireless innovator who held a light up to the social and political upheavals and troubles that were occuring in his beloved Poland. His movies had a rigid formalism to them that was always undermined (and deliberately so) by Wajda’s own innate sympathy for humanity. He was a passionate, discerning movie maker who could make audiences laugh, cry, be angry or sad, but never bored or uninvolved.

1 – A Generation (1955)

2 – Kanal (1957)

3 – Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

4 – The Birch Wood (1970)

5 – The Promised Land (1975)

6 – Man of Marble (1977)

7 – Man of Iron (1981)

8 – Danton (1983)

9 – Korczak (1990)

10 – Katyn (2007)

Robert Zemeckis’ 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

10 Monday Oct 2016

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Career, Director, International Box Office, Robert Zemeckis, Top 10

Robert Zemeckis has been making movies for nearly forty years. He’s been at the forefront of a variety of technical firsts, from motion capture (on The Polar Express) to digital effects (Lieutenant Dan’s missing legs in Forrest Gump), but despite all this he’s still an actors’ director at heart, and he loves to tell a story. Even when his aim is to tell a serious story, such as in The Walk (2015), he still wants to entertain the audience, and to take them on a journey to a place they’ve never seen or experienced before. Along the way he’s made a handful of movies that are bona fide modern classics, and made a little town called Hill Valley into a place we’d all like to visit. For providing us with so many wonderful movie memories, here’s how we’ve repaid him at the international box office.

10 – Beowulf (2007) – $196,393,745

The middle picture in Zemeckis’ motion capture trilogy, Beowulf sees him trying to stretch the boundaries of both motion capture and 3D but with predictably mixed results. While his use of 3D is exemplary, the problems that prevented The Polar Express from being completely effective – the dullness of the eyes, the subtleties of lip movement – remain to make for some awkward moments. Nevertheless, the final showdown with the dragon is still one of the best fantasy sequences yet committed to screen (in any format), and Angelina Jolie is a great choice for Grendel’s mother.

9 – Back to the Future Part III (1990) – $244,527,583

The last in the trilogy was always going to divide audiences. Some were always going to love it for its Western setting, others were going to hate it for exactly the same reason. Whatever your leaning, what is unassailable is the movie’s appreciation for the genre, and the very satisfactory way in which Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale have wound up the overall story. Few trilogy closers are this triumphal, and fewer still are as emotionally astute – only Toy Story 3 (2010) springs to mind – but when you’re having this much fun saying goodbye, it seems right and proper to such a degree that you never think about just how much you’re going to miss the characters when it’s done.

8 – What Lies Beneath (2000) – $291,420,351

Zemeckis tries his hand at a psycho-drama with supernatural overtones, ropes in Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford as the leads, and manages to pull off a number of effective sequences, but ultimately, What Lies Beneath is a movie that doesn’t quite work in the way that Zemeckis and screenwriter Clark Gregg want it to. The tone of the movie fluctuates too often, leaving viewers uncertain if they’re watching a bloodless horror, a taut thriller, or a domestic drama gone awry. There are elements of all three on display, but it’s when they’re all combined in the same scene that things go badly wrong. Still, the scene where Pfeiffer is paralysed in the bathtub is unbearably tense, and Zemeckis handles it with accomplished ease.

7 – The Polar Express (2004) – $307,514,317

Best seen in its IMAX 3D format, The Polar Express (now a Xmas staple) sees Zemeckis experimenting for the first time with motion capture and gives Tom Hanks the chance to emulate Alec Guinness’s eight role appearance in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). It’s a heartwarming tale, with a plethora of breathtaking visuals and sequences – the train racing across a frozen lake as the ice breaks up is simply stunning – and if it’s a little too smothered in saccharine at times, then it’s a small price to pay for a movie that in terms of its original look (and the problems that come with it) is endlessly fascinating to watch.

6 – A Christmas Carol (2009) – $325,855,863

Zemeckis teams with Jim Carrey for a version of Dickens’ classic tale that dials back on The Polar Express‘s sometimes overbearing sentimentality, and offers all kinds of visual tricks and complexities as the director tries once more to convince audiences that motion capture is the way of the future. But even though many of the issues surrounding facial expressions and physical movement that hampered The Polar Express and Beowulf have been addressed, there’s still an inherent “unreality” to the characters that, in the end (and despite the movie’s success), audiences couldn’t ignore, or overlook.

5 – Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) – $329,803,958

When Who Framed Roger Rabbit was first released, there were plenty of people who were fooled by the opening Baby Herman cartoon into thinking the whole movie was going to be animated. That might have been a good move on Zemeckis’ part, but how less satisfying it would have been than this perennial crowd-pleaser, both an homage to the Golden Age of Animation, and the most expensive movie (animated or otherwise) made in the Eighties. It’s an almost perfect blend of comedy, drama, pathos and nostalgia that moves at a cracking pace, and has so many visual gags in it you can’t catch them all in a single viewing. Roger is adorable, his wife Jessica Rabbit “isn’t bad… [she’s] just drawn that way”, and when revealed, Judge Doom is one of the scariest villains in any movie, period.

4 – Back to the Future Part II (1989) – $331,950,002

Many people felt that Back to the Future Part II was too complex, too convoluted, and too much of a head-scratcher, especially when Marty travelled back to 1955 to ensure his parents got together – again. But it’s the movie’s complex understanding of time travel, and the consequences that can arise when time is tinkered with, that makes this first sequel such an unexpected joy to watch. It’s also darker and more cynical than the first and third movies, but Zemeckis handles the material with confidence and no small amount of flair. For some fans, this is the best movie in the trilogy.

3 – Back to the Future (1985) – $381,109,762

The movie that made Zemeckis’ career, Back to the Future is a delight from start to finish, a beautifully rendered love poem to a bygone era, and one of the smartest sci-fi comedies ever made (if not the smartest). Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd make for an inspired teaming, and the whole thing is both whimsical and irresistible, with some classic lines of dialogue (“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”), and a whole raft of smart, enagaging performances. A movie you can watch over and over again and never tire of it.

2 – Cast Away (2000) – $429,632,142

If all you take away from Cast Away is that Tom Hanks lost an awful lot of weight to convince viewers his character was living on a desert island, and that he talked (a lot) to a volleyball called Wilson, then you’re missing the point of a movie that paints a vivid, unsentimental portrait of a man believed missing at sea who learns the art of survival the hard way. Hanks gives one of his best-ever performances, but the script includes too many longeuers for comfort, and the final third fails to match the impetus of the opening scenes. Zemeckis shows a keen eye for the practicalities of surviving on a desert island, and along with a committed Hanks, ensures the audience is just as invested in Hanks’s character getting off the island as he is.

1 – Forrest Gump (1994) – $677,945,399

Unsurprisingly, it’s the Oscar-winning home run that is Forrest Gump which sits atop this list. A perfect combination of director, script and star, the movie blends so many disparate elements, both thematically and visually (and with such confidence), that it’s easy to forget just how much of a surprise this movie was when it appeared over twenty years ago. Hanks, arguably, has never been better, and the same can be said of Zemeckis, who displays a fearlessness in handling the material that he’s never quite managed to recapture in his work since then.

10 Reasons to Remember Curtis Hanson (1945-2016)

21 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Career, Curtis Hanson, Director, Screenwriter

Curtis Hanson (24 March 1945 – 20 September 2016)

Like many of his contemporaries, Curtis Hanson grew up with an appreciation of movies made in the Golden Age of cinema (1930-1960), so much so that in his own movies he made references to the period, or had his characters watch movies made and released back then. Early on, after dropping out of high school, Hanson found work as a freelance photographer and editor for Cinema magazine. His first movie credit might come as a surprise: he co-wrote the screenplay for The Dunwich Horror (1970). Two years later he was able to get his first project made as writer and director and producer, the unsuccessful psycho horror thriller, Sweet Kill (1972). It was an experience that appears to have hampered Hanson’s career insofar as he didn’t direct again until 1979. The early Eighties saw him struggle to make any headway, with projects such as Losin’ It (1983) failing to gain the kind of response that would have boosted his career (and despite the presence of a young Tom Cruise).

But Hanson persevered, and in 1992 had a breakthrough hit with another psycho horror thriller, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. It proved to be the fillip he needed, and from then on his career was assured. His choices became more varied, and he moved from genre to genre with an ease and a versatility that belied his previous work. His ability to work on projects that were outside of his own personal experience, in particular, and to find the core truth of them was always impressive. He was also able to extract some amazing performances from the actors he worked with, from Russell Crowe to Michael Douglas, Toni Collette and Paul Giamatti. Hanson was an intuitive director, intelligent and creative, visually astute and emotionally honest with his characters. Watching his movies will always be a joy – well, maybe not Evil Town (1987); no, really, don’t bother, there’s a reason he’s credited as Edward Collins – but now they’ll come with the bittersweet thought that Hanson’s particular approach to movie making won’t be repeated any more, and we’ll have to bear his loss along with all the other talented individuals 2016 seems intent on taking from us.

1 – White Dog (1982) – co-screenwriter only

2 – The Bedroom Window (1987)

3 – The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)

4 – The River Wild (1994)

5 – L.A. Confidential (1997)

6 – Wonder Boys (2000)

7 – 8 Mile (2002)

8 – In Her Shoes (2005)

9 – Too Big to Fail (2011)

10 – Chasing Mavericks (2012)

Tim Burton’s 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

07 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Career, Director, International Box Office, Tim Burton, Top 10

A consistently quirky and visually inventive director, Tim Burton’s career has followed a steady path through some of the most iconic settings in recent cinema history, from the cod-Gothic streets of Gotham, to a future(past?)-Earth ruled by apes, to the haunted woods of 18th Century New England, and the outer limits of Lewis Carroll’s vivid imagination. For over thirty years, ever since the release of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), the wild-haired director has taken us on startling journey after startling journey, and kept us entertained throughout. If his more recent output hasn’t exactly overwhelmed critics and audiences in the way that previous movies have, Burton still has the capacity to excite and stimulate his admirers in a way that few other directors can. This explains the level of anticipation surrounding his latest feature, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (due later this year), a movie that seems a perfect fit for Burton’s own “peculiar” sensibility. Whether or not it will be as successful as the movies listed below, no one knows – yet* – but if it is, then it will be interesting to see just how successful it is… and how far up the list it lands.

10 – Corpse Bride (2005) – $117,195,061

A companion piece to Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) with its songs, portrayal of a darker world beyond ours, and stylised animation, Corpse Bride has a lyrical quality to it that highlights the sweetness of the relationship that develops between the nervous Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp) and the Corpse Bride herself, Emily (Helena Bonham Carter). Burton’s love of animation and its visual possibilities shines through here, as he depicts a world at once familiar and yet also removed from our own, and tugs at our heartstrings in often surprising, yet affecting ways.

9 – Big Fish (2003) – $122,919,055

A terrific cast – headed by Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney – and Burton’s use of fantasy to illustrate the differences (and similarities) between a father and son, helps Big Fish to branch out in unexpected dramatic directions for most of its running time. After the critical debacle of Planet of the Apes, Burton’s foray into what could be loosely termed the Great American Saga is a winning, immensely enjoyable fable that mixes drama, comedy and a delightful imagination to create a uniquely heartfelt story, and is one of Burton’s shamefully under-appreciated features.

8 – Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) – $152,523,164

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp – making a musical together? While the subject matter may well have been a good fit for Burton given his love of Hammer horror movies, an adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler Broadway success looked like it would fall as flat as Depp’s singing voice. But an arresting production design, plenty of gory throat cuttings, vivid presentations of the songs, and a well-chosen supporting cast all help to make Burton’s incursion into the world of the musical a triumphant success, and one of the best of its kind in recent years.

7 – Sleepy Hollow (1999) – $206,071,502

One of Burton’s more enjoyable romps, Sleepy Hollow is another movie that seems to have been tailor-made for him. The bleak New England setting, the palpable sense of fear amongst the townfolk, and a memorable villain in the Headless Horseman, all contrive to make the movie an ominous yet light-hearted escapade that has a great deal of energy and purpose about it. The period setting, and its science versus the supernatural angle, is deftly handled, and Johnny Depp gives one of his better performances as the in over his (potentially decapitated) head policeman, Ichabod Crane.

6 – Dark Shadows (2012) – $245,527,149

A big fan of the original televison show that ran from 1966-1971, Burton’s take on the Collins’ clan of vampires and their home town of Collinsport, Maine proved to be a misfire that relied way too much on its comedic elements (which aren’t that funny to begin with), and never managed to find a consistent tone. Johnny Depp serves up a prime slice of ham, Eva Green tries to match him, and Burton’s direction feels like it was put together in the editing suite. Even the visuals have a flat, uninspired air about them, as if Burton and his team realised early on that their passion for the project wasn’t going to be enough.

5 – Batman Returns (1992) – $266,822,354

For some, Batman Returns will always be the best of the quartet of Caped Crusader movies made back in the late Eighties/Nineties, and in terms of the story and the plotting, they’d be right. It also sees Burton’s wild and wonderful imagination given even freer reign than on the first movie. Another triumph of production design, Burton’s Gotham is a heavily stylised, bleakly functional place that is the perfect backdrop for its tale of good versus evil. And any movie that features Michelle Pfeiffer in figure-hugging black leather…

4 – Planet of the Apes (2001) – $362,211,740

If there’s one movie in Burton’s oeuvre that really shouts “massive mistake!” it’s the often unbearable-to-watch Planet of the Apes. Remakes of beloved classics rarely turn out well, and this proved the rule. Whether it’s the miscasting of Wahlberg, the terrible script that couldn’t be its own thing and had to keep referencing the 1968 original, the recurring sense of déja vu that dogs the movie as a result, or the defiantly daft-as-a-box-of-frogs surprise ending, the problems are all topped by Burton’s almost complete lack of engagement with the material. There’s a sci-fi movie that Burton could direct out there somewhere, but this definitely isn’t it.

3 – Batman (1989) – $411,348,924

By the time Burton was earmarked to make Warner Bros.’ new take on Bruce Wayne’s alter ego, he’d achieved a modicum of success and respect thanks to his two previous features, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and Beetlejuice (1988). Batman, though, launched Burton’s career into the stratosphere. It was a brave move on the part of Warner Bros., but Burton rewarded them with a take on the Dark Knight that was at once visionary, bold, and inherently psychological. With strong performances from Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger (usually overlooked, and unfairly so), it’s biggest coup was Jack Nicholson as the Joker, a dazzling, out-there portrayal that in its own, surprisingly effective way, is a match for any other interpretation of the character that’s, well… out there.

2 – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) – $474,968,763

Roald Dahl and Tim Burton seem like an obvious combination, and it took a while for them to be “teamed up”, but the results were mixed to say the least. While financially successful, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory lacks a lot of the charm of the original, and some of the additions to the script shift the focus away from Charlie himself, and onto Willy Wonka (something Dahl probably wouldn’t have approved of). Along with the movie in the No. 1 spot, it’s also a movie that has been production designed to death, leaving each new “moment of wonder” much like all the rest, and blending into one. Burton reflects on notions of fatherhood and abandonment – a common theme in his movies – but here they feel tired, leaving only Freddie Highmore’s quietly impressive performance for audiences to respond to.

1 – Alice in Wonderland (2010) – $1,025,467,110

Burton’s most successful movie at the box office is not his best, and like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory features a riotous production design that helps paper over the cracks of a wayward script and equally wayward performances. Burton’s usual flair for the bizarre is firmly on display but in such a watered-down fashion that it’s difficult to work out if he was fully engaged with the material (he’s always seemed more at home working on a movie’s pre-production than on the actual shoot). Looking back at the movie, it’s hard to see why Alice in Wonderland has been so successful, as it’s colour-rich phantasmagoria lack the kind of emotional investment to make it all work as it should, and Johnny Depp provides yet another irritating performance. But ultimately it’s Burton’s distance from proceedings that hurts the movie most, and makes it a less than rewarding experience.

*Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has been as successful as everyone hoped. As of 21 October 2016 it’s made $200,165,118 at the international box office.

Steven Soderbergh’s 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

30 Tuesday Aug 2016

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Career, Director, International Box Office, Steven Soderbergh, Top 10

An indie movie maker through and through, Steven Soderbergh has made some of the most compelling and thought-provoking movies of the last thirty years. From his breakout Sundance hit sex, lies and videotape (1989), Soderbergh has tackled projects in a wide variety of genres and with an appropriately wide variety of results at the box office. Some have failed to make back the money they cost to make – Gray’s Anatomy (1997), The Good German (2006) – while others have underperformed (see the Top 10 below). But he has had some successes, mostly thanks to a certain franchise, but even outside of those movies, and despite his decision to retire from making movies in 2013, Soderbergh has remained a director you can never quite pin down. If nothing else, this list reflects the diversity of his output, and is a reminder of the quality of his work over the years.

10 – The Informant! (2009) – $41,771,168

A movie that never quite achieved the recognition it deserves, The Informant! uses its real life story in a way that refutes the “zany” approach presented in its trailers, and by doing so makes it much more rewarding. This is due to the combination of Scott Z. Burns’ clever screenplay, Soderbergh’s relaxed direction, and Matt Damon’s beautifully judged performance as deluded whistleblower Mark Whitacre. Ripe for rediscovery, it’s a tragic farce that has far more going on under the surface than most casual viewers will be aware of.

9 – Side Effects (2013) – $63,372,757

Soderbergh brings his usual intelligence and cool approach to thriller-dom with this convoluted and surprisingly well-constructed story set around medical ethics and the nature of psychopathology. While that may sound too highbrow for some, Side Effects revels in its Hitchcockian twists and turns – Soderbergh wanted to recreate the look and feel of old suspense movies for a modern era – and manages to keep audiences guessing all the way to its final reveal.

8 – Out of Sight (1998) – $77,745,568

The oldest Soderbergh movie on the list is also possibly his best, a funny, dramatic, odd couple romance (based on the novel by Elmore Leonard) that features a career-best performance from Jennifer Lopez, and George Clooney in the role that cemented his reputation as an A-lister. Soderbergh is clearly having fun with the material, and it’s easily one of his most visually entertaining movies as well, thanks to his use of stylised colour palettes and freeze frames to highlight significant moments in the story.

7 – Contagion (2011) – $135,458,097

A timely warning about the nature of pandemics and the ease with which they can spread, along with the inability of governments to deal with them in a constructive way, Contagion may have too many storylines (some of which don’t add much to the narrative), but is still an intelligently mounted, urgently prescient movie that uses its multi-national cast to (mostly) good effect – sorry, Marion Cotillard – while maintaining a focus on the pandemic’s impact on regular, individual lives.

6 – Magic Mike (2012) – $167,221,571

If you had any doubts about Soderbergh’s ability to tackle a variety of genres and stories, then this behind-the-scenes look at the lives of a group of male strippers should have dispelled any lasting uncertainty. Raucous, raunchy and down to earth, Magic Mike features a terrific performance from Matthew McConaughey, the kind of off-colour humour you’d expect given the characters, and a succession of stage routines that should have female viewers leaning forward in their seats – a lot.

5 – Traffic (2000) – $207,515,725

Another contender for Soderbergh’s best movie (and winner of four Oscars, including one for Soderbergh himself), Traffic is a jolt to the senses that grips from the beginning and never lets go. Examining the drug trade from both sides of the US/Mexico border, from the highest echelons of US law enforcement to the infrastructure of a Mexican cartel, Stephen Gaghan’s impressively detailed script is given more than due justice by Soderbergh, and features equally impressive performances from the likes of Michael Douglas, Don Cheadle, Dennis Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Oscar-winning Benicio Del Toro.

4 – Erin Brockovich (2000) – $256,271,286

2000 was an amazing year for Soderbergh, what with this and Traffic being released to critical and commercial acclaim. Based on the true story of its titular character, an Oscar-winning Julia Roberts has probably never been better as the no-experience paralegal who brings down a polluting Californian power company through a landmark class action suit. Threaded through the obvious drama are several moments of beautifully judged humour, and Roberts’ teaming with Albert Finney is inspired. All in all, a strong contender for Soderbergh’s most enjoyable and rewarding movie.

3 – Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) – $311,312,624

By the time this second sequel rolled around, Soderbergh and Clooney et al were determined not to make the same mistakes that made Ocean’s Twelve so underwhelming. While still not perfect, Ocean’s Thirteen is definitely more entertaining than its predecessor, even if it tries too hard to be as charming as the first outing, but audiences were willing to give the movie a chance. That it did as well as it did at the box office may well be due to brand recognition, and the popularity of its cast, but it’s also a movie that sees Soderbergh come as close to going through the motions as he’s ever done.

2 – Ocean’s Twelve (2004) – $362,744,280

A sequel to Ocean’s Eleven was always going to come along at some point, but when it did no one could have predicted it would be such a humourless, drama-free non-event. Easily the worst movie of Soderbergh’s entire career – yes, even worse than Underneath (1995) – Ocean’s Twelve is the very definition of a lacklustre movie. It’s almost as if Soderbergh and the returning cast decided to make a movie that was the very antithesis of Ocean’s Eleven, leaving it flat, unsatisfactory, unnecessarily confusing, and too reliant on “reveals” that are in no way foreshadowed anywhere else in the movie.

1 – Ocean’s Eleven (2001) – $450,717,150

Soderbergh’s most successful movie is probably his most well-known and well-regarded feature, a sharp, funny, engaging, clever, mischievous rascal of a movie that recreates the tone of the 1960 original and lends it a (then) modern sensibility that still holds up well fifteen years later. The scam is beautifully staged, the cast make it all look so easy, and the whole thing is handled with Soderbergh’s customary visual flair. It’s a movie that creates tension and expertly crafted edge-of-the-seat moments at every turn, and all of it while the movie is winking at the audience as if to say, “Well? Can you guess what’s happening?”

10 Reasons to Remember Arthur Hiller (1923-2016)

17 Wednesday Aug 2016

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Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Arthur Hiller, Canada, Career, Comedy, Director, Directors Guild of America, Rome Open City, Royal Canadian Air Force, World War II

Arthur Hiller (22 November 1923 – 17 August 2016)

Born in Edmonton, Canada to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Poland in 1912, Arthur Hiller grew up in an environment where a love of music and theatre was instilled in him from a young age. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force at the start of World War II, and became a navigator, flying numerous missions over Europe. In the early Fifties he began directing for Canadian television; this led to his being offered a job directing with NBC. Over the next ten years he worked steadily in television, contributing to shows such as Playhouse 90, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Route 66.

During this period he made his feature debut, the coming-of-age romantic drama The Careless Years (1957), but it wasn’t until he worked for Disney on Miracle of the White Stallions (1963) that his movie career began to take off. By then, Hiller’s ability to work within different genres was standing him in good stead, enough for him to move away from television (almost) altogether. After 1965, his TV work consisted of three episodes of the series Insight, episodes that were made over an eleven-year period. Hiller soon allied himself with screenwriters of the calibre of Paddy Chayefsky and Neil Simon, and developed a reputation for making comedies that had a surprising depth to them.

1970 saw the release of Hiller’s most famous, and enduring movie of all, Love Story. The success of the movie cemented his success, and throughout the Seventies, Hiller had a run of hit movies that made him an A-list director. His was a brisk, authoritative style, but there was also a looseness, a sense of fun to his movies that made them more enjoyable than most comedies of the era. He was inspired by a post-War screening of Rome, Open City (1945), and he never lost sight of the emotional truth of his movies, even if some of his later works, such as Carpool (1996) weren’t as effective – or as amusing – as they could have been.

In 1989, he took on the role of President of the Directors Guild of America, a position he held until 1993, when he became President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the next four years. He made one last movie, the less than pardonable National Lampoon’s Pucked (2006) (a career nadir for both Hiller and its star, Jon Bon Jovi), before retiring. Hiller will be fondly remembered for the way in which his movies resonated with audiences, their effortless likeability, and the almost timeless quality they carry, and the unassuming yet quietly confident way in which he directed them.

1 – The Americanization of Emily (1964)

2 – The Out of Towners (1970)

3 – Love Story (1970)

4 – Plaza Suite (1971)

5 – The Hospital (1971)

6 – The Man in the Glass Booth (1975)

7 – Silver Streak (1976)

8 – The In-Laws (1979)

9 – The Lonely Guy (1984)

10 – Outrageous Fortune (1987)

Ron Howard’s 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

04 Thursday Aug 2016

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Career, Director, International Box Office, Ron Howard, Top 10

Having successfully made the transition from actor to A-list director, Ron Howard has retained his populist focus ever since he made his first short movie, Old Paint, back in 1969. He’s also a director who moves from genre to genre, and while some of his detractors insist he doesn’t imprint his own particular stamp on any of them, he still has a recognisable style that’s all his own, whether it’s ramping up the tension as the Apollo 13 crew try to solve the problem of getting back home from the Moon, examining the life and times of one of Britain’s most iconic racing drivers, or indulging in some light-hearted fantasy romance involving a mermaid. In each of these there’s a subtle understanding that Howard takes it all very seriously but at the same time is having fun putting it all together, like a kid in a candy store who can pick anything he wants. He’s not the edgiest, or grittiest of directors, and sometimes the subject matter isn’t always a good match for his strengths (e.g. In the Heart of the Sea), but he isn’t afraid to take risks, and when he does connect with the right material, the effect can be breathtaking. Here then are his ten most successful movies at the international box office, and evidence (if it were needed), that you don’t have this much success unless you’re getting it right more times than not.

NOTE: As always, box office figures are all thanks to the good folks at boxofficemojo.com.

10 – Cinderella Man (2005) – $108,539,911

Howard’s biopic of the boxer James Braddock – apparently washed-up but with one last championship fight left in him – Cinderella Man reunites the director with Russell Crowe and makes the Depression-era Thirties as much of a character as any of the people depicted. It’s a powerful piece about pride and redemption, and of all the movies on this list is probably Howard’s most underrated project. A towering achievement, and in terms of recreating an age where people had to fight for so many things, including the right to a basic life, Braddock’s tale is a salutary lesson in self-belief and how not to give up.

9 – Parenthood (1989) – $126,297,830

Howard has always been able to assemble great casts for his movies, and Parenthood is no exception. A comic ramble through the ups and downs of, yes, parenthood, Howard deftly explores the stresses and strains, and quiet heroics, that make up being a parent, and along the way keeps things grounded yet heartfelt. It’s a small, unassuming masterpiece of a movie, with terrific performances from Steve Martin and Dianne Weist, and features early turns from Keanu Reeves and Joaquin Phoenix (back when he was known as Leaf Phoenix). And as Jason Robards’ character so aptly puts it, parenting is “like your Aunt Edna’s ass. It goes on forever and it’s just as frightening.”

8 – Far and Away (1992) – $137,783,840

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in a romantic drama set against the backdrop of the Irish famine – what could possibly go wrong? Critics were quick to answer, and while it’s true that Far and Away isn’t the best example of Howard’s work in this list (it lacks passion and sincerity, and never engages the audience as powerfully as it should), it still retains a certain flavour that helps overcome the movie’s soap opera narrative and the overly romanticized nature of much of the material. Howard plays up the central relationship but is hampered by (then married couple) Cruise and Kidman’s lack of chemistry, leaving him adrift in a way that wouldn’t happen again until In the Heart of the Sea.

7 – Backdraft (1991) – $152,368,585

In between Parenthood and Far and Away, Howard made this testosterone-fuelled homage to US firefighters, and in the process made a movie that easily fits the term “guilty pleasure”. A certain amount of romanticism is involved (witness Kurt Russell tackling raging infernos without a helmet or breathing apparatus), and it’s allied to a mystery concerning a string of arson attacks, but the movie scores highly when it puts its willing cast in amongst the flames, and when Howard dials back the heroics to examine just what it is that drives these men on in such dangerous circumstances. Nascent star William Baldwin has never been better, but he’s still overshadowed by the likes of Scott Glenn, Robert De Niro, J.T. Walsh, and Donald Sutherland as Backdraft‘s very own version of Hannibal Lecter (“Burn it all”).

6 – Ransom (1996) – $309,492,681

A cynical yet memorable thriller with stellar turns from Mel Gibson and Gary Sinise, Ransom sees Howard apply tension by the bucket load as he charts the response by Gibson’s mega-rich businessman to the kidnapping of his son. Howard pulls out all the stops, making the movie an often heart-stopping experience, and it’s a shame that he’s not found another project to bring out the same qualities he displays here. Helped immeasurably by his star’s commitment, the former Richie Cunningham dispels any idea that he can’t do “edgy” when the material requires it, making this one of the rare occasions in his career when Howard has actively refuted his critics.

5 – A Beautiful Mind (2001) – $313,542,341

The true story of asocial mathematician John Nash, A Brilliant Mind brought Howard and Russell Crowe together for the first time, and earned Oscars for both of them. A meticulous, solidly grounded exercise that explores with creativity and sensitivity the mind of a schizophrenic genius, the movie is far more audacious than perhaps even its supporters are aware, and its place in the list shows just how successfully Howard’s approach to the material scored a hit with, and resonated with, audiences around the world. A strong contender for the title of Howard’s best movie, and a testament to the notion that there are no stories – true or otherwise – that can’t be made if a director is confident enough to trust in the material (in this case, Akiva Goldsman’s succinct and sympathetic screenplay).

4 – How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) – $345,141,403

A rare foray into fantasy for Howard, and twelve years after the disappointment that was Willow. Adapting Dr Suess for a live action big screen outing may have seemed foolhardy at the time, but Howard enters into the spirit of things and makes the movie one giant confection to be enjoyed over and over again. With the inspired casting of Jim Carrey as the Grinch, and the good doctor’s off-kilter sensibility given free rein, Howard is free to indulge himself as much as the audience, and the result is a movie that sees him having fun with the garish environs of Whoville, the innate pomposity of the Whovian “intelligentsia”, and the waspish barbs uttered by the Grinch. A joy from start to finish.

3 – Apollo 13 (1995) – $355,237,933

Howard has always had a healthy attraction for true stories of courage, but he excelled himself with this gripping, incredibly well mounted account of the crew of Apollo 13’s attempt to get back home after their mission suffers from setback after setback after setback. Howard is aided by a string of impressive performances, from Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton as the beleaguered astronauts, to Ed Harris’s no-nonsense mission controller, and all the way down the cast list to people such as Kathleen Quinlan, and good luck charm Clint Howard. But it’s the verisimilitude achieved by Howard and his design team that registers the most, making Apollo 13 entirely credible and helping to make the astronauts’ predicament as taut as possible. Even if you know the outcome, Howard’s ability as a director will still keep you guessing if they actually get home – and that’s no small feat.

2 – Angels & Demons (2009) – $485,930,816

This and Howard’s most successful movie probably won’t be any surprise but what can’t be denied is that having a built-in audience is half the battle won. Reteaming with Hanks for what is actually a prequel to The Da Vinci Code, Howard retains the faithful adaptation approach he took with Dan Jones’ first outing for symbologist Robert Langdon, but still can’t do anything to combat the problems inherent in Jones’ wayward tale of corruption and murder within the Vatican. As a result, this seems more like Howard taking a back seat to the material and getting on board solely as a director for hire, rather than as an instigator.

1 – The Da Vinci Code (2006) – $758,239,851

The fan base was there, and a big screen adaptation was always going to happen, but of all the directors to take up the challenge of making Dan Jones’ literary behemoth, Howard probably wasn’t anyone’s first choice. Nevertheless, he does the best he can to replicate the pace and urgency of the novel, and elicits another committed performance from Hanks, but is hampered at every turn by the absurdities of Jones’s story; so much so that the book’s big revelation is a tepid affair at best, and risible at worst. But this was always going to be a success, and if you’re going to be attached to the movie version of a global phenomenon, that’s still no bad thing for your reputation. With third adaptation Inferno due to hit screens later this year, it’ll be interesting to see where it will fit into this list in a year’s time, though it’s unlikely to topple this first outing.

Ridley Scott’s 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

17 Sunday Jul 2016

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Career, Director, International Box Office, Ridley Scott, Top 10

In a career that spans nearly forty years, Ridley Scott has directed so many arresting and visually memorable movies, and in such a wide variety of genres, that it doesn’t seem to matter what projects he takes on, he’s pretty much guaranteed an audience when they’re released. He’s a meticulous, well-prepared director who likes to do as much as possible practically, though is more well-known for two movies whose use of CGI made them more successful than they perhaps would have been without it. The movies in this list have made over $3 billion at the international box office, so you can see why he’s a much sought after director, and never seems to take a break between movies. In his seventies now, he’s still preparing and making movies with the same energy and passion that he had nearly forty years ago. Let’s hope most, if not all, of his future projects are as successful as the ones listed below.

NOTE: Figures for Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), two movies you would have thought would make the list, are sadly unavailable.

10 – Body of Lies (2008) – $115,097,286

Terrorism in the Middle East, and the murky involvement of the CIA, are the focus of Scott’s taut thriller which reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe for the first time since Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995). It’s a complex piece of work with many subplots and layer upon layer of political expediency and moralising adding texture to the movie’s more overt thriller elements. If it doesn’t succeed entirely then it’s not for want of Scott trying, and there’s a standout performance from Mark Strong that overshadows the work of both DiCaprio and Crowe – and that’s saying something.

9 – Black Hawk Down (2001) – $172,989,651

Scott has always had a penchant for true stories, and Black Hawk Down, the tale of one hundred and twenty-three elite US soldiers making an incursion into Somalia and then finding themselves battling against a much stronger Somali force than their intelligence was aware of, is no exception. Scott brings an impressive sense of realism to the movie, and the fighting sequences are as intense as you’d expect, but what makes this movie work is the way in which Scott and screenwriter Ken Nolan manage to make the audience care about each and every one of those one hundred and twenty-three soldiers as if we’d known them all our lives.

8 – Kingdom of Heaven (2005) – $211,652,051

Unfairly maligned when it was first released, Kingdom of Heaven is a sprawling epic set at the time of the Crusades that feels like it was made to (belatedly) cash in on Scott’s success with Gladiator (2000). Happily, this is its own movie, and while some of the politicking of the time is overlooked in favour of too many battle scenes, Scott keeps things relatively simple and coaxes a better-than-expected performance from Orlando Bloom. That said, if you want to see the movie, choose the three-hour Director’s Cut instead of the theatrical version.

7 – American Gangster (2007) – $266,465,037

Another true story, this time centred around the life of drugs kingpin Frank Lucas (played by Denzel Washington), and set in the Seventies, American Gangster sees Scott reunited again with Russell Crowe, and holding back on the visual flourishes in order to tell a dramatic story on its own terms. It’s not quite the sweeping historical epic that its run time would have you believe, but it does feature strong performances from its two leads, and the clever tricks of Lucas’s trade make for fascinating viewing.

6 – Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) – $268,175,631

You can see the attraction for Scott in a movie based around the rivalry between Moses and his “brother” the Pharaoh Ramses, but thanks to a script that seems to have been patched together at short notice, Exodus: Gods and Kings is a dramatic mess that can’t even elicit good performances from Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton, and also features some of the least convincing (i.e. ropiest) CGI seen in recent years. A misfire then, but Scott still manages to invest the movie with his customary, and always worthwhile, attention to detail.

5 – Robin Hood (2010) – $321,669,741

Less of a swashbuckling approach to the Robin Hood myth than a retread (in part) of Robin and Marian (1976), Scott’s fifth collaboration with Russell Crowe aims for earthy realism, but in doing so, fails to include a lot of what makes the myth so popular and entertaining. Scott marshals the visual elements with his trademark flair but can’t seem to inject any energy into Brian Helgeland’s too-respectful script. This leaves the movie feeling uneven and less than engaging, and the relationship between Robin and Maid Marian (played by Cate Blanchett) seems more matter-of-fact than truly romantic.

4 – Hannibal (2001) – $351,692,268

Scott’s first sequel (and so far only one, until Alien: Covenant comes out next year) sees him inherit the services of Anthony Hopkins but not Jodie Foster as Hannibal details what the cannibal doctor did next. There’s an over-abundance of style that should seem out of place but somehow works, and though Julianne Moore struggles as Clarice Starling, nevertheless Scott imbues her scenes with Hopkins with a delicate mutual dependency that gives the storyline some much-needed depth. And then there’s that scene at the end…

3 – Prometheus (2012) – $403,354,469

When it was first announced that Scott was returning to the world of Alien, and with a prequel at that, fans of the series wept for joy. Alas, Prometheus left audiences with more questions than they had answers to, and in particular, what on earth happened that it turned out so badly? Scott may know the answer to that one, but his insistence on practical physical surroundings aside, this woeful exercise in late-bloom franchise expansion lacked subtlety, a coherent script, and featured a drab performance from Noomi Rapace – all things that Scott didn’t appear to have a solution for.

2 – Gladiator (2000) – $457,640,487

They said the days of sword-and-sandal epics was dead, that audiences didn’t want to see those kinds of movies anymore, where the hero had bigger breasts than the heroine, and the sets wobbled if anyone went near them. Thankfully, Scott and co-screenwriters David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson had other ideas and the result is a triumphant reminder that when Scott is on top form there’s very few directors who can match him. Stirring, impressive (the scenes in the Coliseum really do buzz with excitement), with a handful of terrific performances and a sense of its own destiny (along with its lead character), this is high concept movie making at its best.

1 – The Martian (2015) – $630,161,890

Despite his being known as a director of science fiction movies, The Martian is only Scott’s fourth outing in the genre, but thanks to a near-perfect blend of drama, comedy and thrills, along with a standout performance from Matt Damon, this tale of an astronaut stranded on Mars and needing to stay alive until a rescue mission can reach him, is gripping, tightly structured, and a few narrative concerns aside, absolutely commanding. That it’s Scott’s most successful movie so far is perhaps not so surprising given the subject matter and Damon’s performance, but when you consider this was made very quickly indeed, it’s a tribute to Scott and his cast and crew that it turned out as well as it did.

10 Reasons to Remember Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016)

05 Tuesday Jul 2016

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Career, Close-Up, Director, Iran, Minimalism, Non-actors

Abbas Kiarostami (22 June 1940 – 4 July 2016)

And so we say goodbye to yet another iconic figure from the world of movie making. As if 2016 hasn’t been bad enough so far, to lose Abbas Kiarostami as well is like being kicked in the stomach while you’re already on the floor. Kiarostami wasn’t just one of the most influential figures in Iranian film – if not the most – he was also one of the most influential figures in film worldwide, an artist who prompted Jean-Luc Godard to say, “Film begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.”

He began his career at the age of thirty after having set up a film section at Tehran’s Centre for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. He made his first movie, a short called Nan va Koutcheh (The Bread and Alley) in 1970, and continued his career during the Seventies by making an eclectic mix of short movies, features and documentaries. As he developed and refined his style, his movies became more and more minimal. Kiarostami kept stripping away everything he felt was extraneous or unnecessary, until he had the essence of the story he wanted to tell. Audiences across the globe began to connect with his movies with the release of Close-Up (1990), a mesmerising treatise on life and art and the blurring that often occurs at the boundaries of these two elements.

From there he went from strength to strength, his movies often appearing to great acclaim at film festivals around the world, while in Iran, they were largely ignored by the authorities, his way of reflecting Iranian social attitudes apparently providing little enticement for them to interfere or complain. Thus free of the constraints that have affected fellow movie makers such as Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rousolof, Kiarostami was able to make the movies he wanted to make, and his continued success, along with critical approbation, made the release of his movies something to anticipate and cherish. He often worked without a script and was keen to improvise, and he also enjoyed crafting performances from non-actors, using their inexperience to capture a more realistic mise-en-scene. His last work, the documentary Venice 70: Future Reloaded, was released in 2013. He leaves behind an impressive body of work, and the grateful thanks of movie goers around the world who have been captivated by his simple yet telling way of movie making, and the wholly human worlds he’s invited us into over the years.

1 – The Report (1977)

2 – Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987)

3 – Close-Up (1990)

4 – Through the Olive Trees (1994)

5 – Taste of Cherry (1997)

6 – The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

7 – Ten (2002)

8 – 10 on Ten (2004)

9 – Shirin (2008)

10 – Certified Copy (2010)

10 Reasons to Remember Michael Cimino (1939-2016)

02 Saturday Jul 2016

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Career, Director, Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino, The Deer Hunter

Michael Cimino (3 February 1939 – 2 July 2016)

Throughout his career, Michael Cimino was a divisive figure. To some he was a maverick movie maker who didn’t care about budgets, ignored studio heads in his efforts to make the best movie he could, and who once said of Francis Ford Coppola, “Why do you think Francis is re-cutting Apocalypse [Now]? He’s dried up. I’m going forward; he’s going backward.” To others he was a genius, one of the most controversial directors of his era, and someone whose movies contain aspects and representations of poetic realism. Whichever camp you fall into, he will always be remembered for two movies: The Deer Hunter (1978) and Heaven’s Gate (1980). The first was a multi-Oscar winning triumph, the second was a movie that supposedly caused the downfall of its studio, United Artists. Both are masterpieces in their own right, and both examine the American experience on different frontiers in powerful and striking ways. If Cimino had never made another movie after those two, he would still be highly regarded.

But after Heaven’s Gate, Cimino found it increasingly difficult to get funding for his projects, and he often butted heads with studio executives on the movies he was offered – Footloose (1984) was just one of many movies he could have directed but managed (maybe deliberately) to get himself fired from. Among the projects he tried to get made were adaptations of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (with Clint Eastwood as Howard Roark), Frederick Manford’s Conquering Horse (to be filmed entirely in the Sioux language with English subtitles), and Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate (to be filmed in Shanghai with Johnny Depp and Daniel Day-Lewis). He was always channelling various ideas and plans but thanks to the notoriety surrounding Heaven’s Gate he became an untrustworthy figure in Hollywood circles, though he did have his supporters. If he had been able to continue his career in the way he wanted, who knows how many other masterpieces he could have made. But he leaves us with a small body of work that is impressive on so many levels, from his early screenwriting credits all the way through to his contribution to the portmanteau movie To Each His Own Cinema (2007). Again, whatever your point of view regarding the man and his work, one thing’s for certain: he’s not a director who’ll be easily forgotten.

1 – Silent Running (1972) – screenplay

2 – Magnum Force (1973) – screenplay

3 – Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) – screenplay/direction

4 – The Deer Hunter (1978)

5 – Heaven’s Gate (1980)

6 – Year of the Dragon (1985)

7 – The Sicilian (1987)

8 – Desperate Hours (1990)

9 – The Sunchaser (1996)

10 – To Each His Own Cinema (2007) – segment, No Translation Needed

10 Reasons to Remember Guy Hamilton (1922-2016)

22 Friday Apr 2016

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Career, Director, Guy Hamilton, James Bond, Movies

Guy Hamilton (16 September 1922 – 20 April 2016)

Like so many of his contemporaries, Guy Hamilton got into movie making in the wake of World War II. He started off as an assistant director on They Made Me a Criminal (1947) and continued in that role for the next five years, honing his craft working with directors such as Carol Reed and John Huston. In 1952 he took the plunge into direction with The Ringer, a low-key thriller starring Herbert Lom and Donald Wolfit. He continued to work steadily through the Fifties until he got the call to work on a spy movie called Goldfinger (1964). It was to be the first of four Bond outings that Hamilton would direct – the others were Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973), and The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) – but it was also the first to fully establish the Bond template. The gritty seriousness of the first two movies was replaced with a more carefree, fantasy-lite approach that has been the hallmark of the series up until the arrival of Daniel Craig.

Goldfinger‘s success allowed Hamilton to make the movies he wanted to make, but his career was always sporadic, with periods where he seemed semi-retired. Late on he flirted with Agatha Christie, but by the mid-Eighties his career was winding down, and he made his last movie, the rarely seen Try This One for Size, in 1989. Hamilton was an urbane, intelligent movie director who was able to adapt his directorial style to the material at hand, getting the most out of it, and rarely failing to entertain the audience. And in relation to James Bond, he once made this very perceptive (at the time) comment: “One of the rules with the Bond pictures is that you’re not allowed to have a leading lady who can act – because we can’t afford them….If ever we were to have a real leading lady, the next time around we’d have to find another one. And in no time at all we’d have to have, oh, Jane Fonda for $2 million and up.”

1 – The Intruder (1953)

2 – An Inspector Calls (1954)

3 – The Colditz Story (1955)

4 – The Devil’s Disciple (1959)

5 – Goldfinger (1964)

6 – Funeral in Berlin (1966)

7 – Battle of Britain (1969)

8 – Live and Let Die (1973)

9 – Evil Under the Sun (1982)

10 – Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins… (1985)

10 Reasons to Remember Jacques Rivette (1928-2016)

29 Friday Jan 2016

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Career, Director, French New Wave, Jacques Rivette, Movies

Jacques Rivette (1 March 1928 – 29 January 2016)

Idiosyncratic, pioneering, challenging, fascinating, obscurist – François Truffaut once said of Jacques Rivette that the French New Wave began “thanks to Rivette”, and while that may be true, the fact is that Rivette had an uneasy relationship with the French movie industry, and despite an extraordinary talent as a director, never achieved the success of his contemporaries, well-known names such as Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard. He made long (sometimes very long) movies – Out 1 (1971) runs to nearly thirteen hours in its original version – and constructed them in such a way that audience attention was of supreme importance; complex story structures and innovative story-telling techniques made his movies look and sound unique.

Despite a career that began in 1949 with the short, Aux quatre coins, Rivette faced challenges that would have kept many directors from continuing their careers at all. While he made a steady stream of movies over the ensuing years, he encountered so many obstacles and setbacks that his perseverance is a testament to both his personal tenacity and his talent (in particular, a four-picture deal made in 1976 was never completed due to the poor reception of the first two movies). He wasn’t an instinctively commercial moviemaker, but he was influential in his own way, and his movies reflect an approach and an attitude about the boundaries attached to modern movies that should be applauded rather than dismissed. Watch any of his movies and you’ll find the work of a true artist, a moviemaker whose intelligence, wit and liveliness shone through with a clear-sighted consistency – even if he was doing his best to baffle his audiences at the same time.

1 – Paris Belongs to Us (1961)

2 – The Nun (1966)

3 – L’amour fou (1969)

4 – Out 1 (1971)

5 – Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

6 – Le Pont du Nord (1981)

7 – Merry-Go-Round (1981)

8 – Gang of Four (1989)

9 – La belle noiseuse (1991)

10 – The Story of Marie and Julien (2003)

The 2016 Oscar Nominations

16 Saturday Jan 2016

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2016, Actor, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Best Motion Picture, Director, Movies, Nominations, Original Screenplay, Oscars, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress

Is it the middle of January already? Is it time to start getting mildly excited by the prospect of another year where the Academy voters behave responsibly and predictably in their choices for Best Film, Actor, Actress etc. etc.? Well, you’re darned right it is! Except this year there’s some early controversy, especially if you’re a fan of Carol, rightly regarded as one of 2015’s best movies – if not the best – but not good enough in the Academy’s eyes to be nominated for Best Motion Picture of the Year. And they’ve snubbed Todd Haynes as well, Carol’s director. What is going on?

Elsewhere, director snubs seem to be the order of the day, with Ridley Scott failing to pick up a nomination for that well-known comedy The Martian, and Steven Spielberg being overlooked for Bridge of Spies. The thing it’s always hard to understand about the Academy is that when they do this sort of thing, it never makes sense: how can a movie nominated in the Best Motion Picture category not have its primary mover and shaker nominated for Best Director? Maybe the Spotlight team should investigate.

For the most part it’s another predictable year, with some early front runners – Cate Blanchett for Carol, Spotlight for Best Motion Picture – emerging out of the haze, but with so few movies receiving the most nominations the only interest will be in seeing who wins the most. Here then are my picks for the winners in the main categories. The ones highlighted in bold are the ones I think will win. The ones highlighted in italics are the ones I think should win. If there’s no movie highlighted in italics then the one in bold is my choice for both.

Best Motion Picture of the Year

The Big Short; Brooklyn; Bridge of Spies; Mad Max: Fury Road; The Martian; The Revenant; Room; Spotlight

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

Bryan Cranston – Trumbo; Matt Damon – The Martian; Leonardo DiCaprio – The Revenant; Michael Fassbender – Steve Jobs; Eddie Redmayne – The Danish Girl

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

Cate Blanchett – Carol; Brie Larson – Room; Jennifer Lawrence – Joy; Charlotte Rampling – 45 Years; Saoirse Ronan – Brooklyn

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

Christian Bale – The Big Short; Tom Hardy – The Revenant; Mark Ruffalo – Spotlight; Mark Rylance – Bridge of Spies; Sylvester Stallone – Creed

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

Jennifer Jason Leigh – The Hateful Eight; Rooney Mara – Carol; Rachel McAdams – Spotlight; Alicia Vikander – The Danish Girl; Kate Winslet – Steve Jobs

Best Achievement in Directing

Lenny Abrahamson – Room; Alejandro González Iñárritu – The Revenant; Tom McCarthy – Spotlight; Adam McKay – The Big Short; George Miller – Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Bridge of Spies; Ex Machina; Inside Out; Spotlight; Straight Outta Compton

Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published

The Big Short; Brooklyn; Carol; The Martian; Room

The 2016 BAFTA Nominations

08 Friday Jan 2016

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14 February, 2016, Adapted Screenplay, Award nominations, BAFTA, Director, Film, Leading Actor, Leading Actress, Original Screenplay, Outstanding British Film, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress

It’s that time of year again when the British Academy of Film and Televison Arts (or BAFTA – much easier) aims to give a much needed boost to an ailing movie industry that’s been suffering from poor box office returns and – oh, hang on, it’s all okay, isn’t it? Star Wars: The Force Awakens has come out, hasn’t it?

Seriously though, I’ve been watching the BAFTAs each year as far back as I can remember, and while they’ve always seemed like a pale imitation of the Oscars – not quite as many A-list stars there to collect awards, less glitz and glamour, no song and dance routines (thankfully) – the evening has always been entertaining for trying to count the number of times a British connection can be made to a movie from another country. And it’s always interesting, especially last year with Still Alice (2014), to see a movie nominated for an award but which wasn’t released in the UK in the previous year (I wonder how many there’ll be this year).

Here then are the nominations in each of the main categories. The ones highlighted in bold are the ones I think will win. The ones highlighted in italics are the ones I think should win. If there’s no movie highlighted in italics then the one in bold is my choice for both.

Best Film

The Big Short; Bridge of Spies; Carol; The Revenant; Spotlight

Outstanding British Film

Amy; Brooklyn; The Danish Girl; Ex Machina; 45 Years; The Lobster

Adapted Screenplay

The Big Short; Brooklyn; Carol; Room; Steve Jobs

Original Screenplay

Bridge of Spies; Ex Machina; The Hateful Eight; Inside Out; Spotlight

Leading Actor

Bryan Cranston – Trumbo; Matt Damon – The Martian; Leonardo DiCaprio – The Revenant; Michael Fassbender – Steve Jobs; Eddie Redmayne – The Danish Girl

Leading Actress

Cate Blanchett – Carol; Brie Larson – Room; Saoirse Ronan – Brooklyn; Maggie Smith – The Lady in the Van; Alicia Vikander – The Danish Girl

Supporting Actor

Christian Bale – The Big Short; Benicio del Toro – Sicario; Idris Elba – Beasts of No Nation; Mark Ruffalo – Spotlight; Mark Rylance – Bridge of Spies

Supporting Actress

Jennifer Jason Leigh – The Hateful Eight; Rooney Mara – Carol; Alicia Vikander – Ex Machina; Julie Walters – Brooklyn; Kate Winslet – Steve Jobs

Director

Todd Haynes – Carol; Alejandro González Iñárritu – The Revenant; Adam McKay – The Big Short; Ridley Scott – The Martian; Steven Spielberg – Bridge of Spies

For One Week Only: Women Directors – 2. Ida Lupino

07 Saturday Nov 2015

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Actress, Career, Collier Young, Director, Elmer Clifton, Hard Fast and Beautiful, Ida Lupino, Independent, Movies, Never Fear, Nicholas Ray, Not Wanted, On Dangerous Ground, Outrage, Producer, Screen Directors Guild, The Bigamist, The Filmakers, The Hitch-Hiker, The Trouble With Angels, Warner Bros., Women directors

Introduction

The Golden Age of Hollywood, regarded as the years between 1928 and 1943, was also the period in which there was only one female director working in Hollywood, and that was Dorothy Arzner. Although she never made a movie that was a complete box office and/or critical success, Arzner was respected by her male peers, and worked with some of the biggest stars of the era. But she made her last feature in 1943, after which there were no female directors working in Hollywood. Until 1949 that is…

Ida Lupino (1918-1995)

Ida Lupino’s importance as a female director can’t be downplayed. Although she only made eight movies (two of which she didn’t receive an on-screen credit for), Lupino’s rise from studio starlet to challenging actress – at Warner Bros. she was often suspended for refusing roles she was offered – to respected director came about by a strange combination of happenstance and good/bad luck.

During the occasions when she was suspended, Lupino would spend her free time observing other directors as they worked on set, and also how movies were edited. To her it seemed as if everyone else was “doing the interesting work” on a movie while she sat around bored between takes. She learnt the basics of directing throughout the Forties, but still didn’t attempt to get a directing job. When she left Warner Bros. in 1947, it was to become a freelance artist, and while she continued to work as an actress, she and her husband, Collier Young, formed a production company called The Filmakers.

In 1949, she and Paul Jarrico collaborated on a script for the company’s first production, a (for the time) searing drama about pregnancy out of wedlock and the psychological impact on the young mother when she gives up her baby. The movie was called Not Wanted and it was to be directed by Elmer Clifton. But when Clifton suffered a heart attack part way through filming, Lupino stepped in to finish the movie (Lupino refused a screen credit out of respect for Clifton). The result was a controversial movie that drew attention to the problem of unwed mothers, garnered a huge amount of public debate, and made people aware of Lupino’s role behind the camera.

In the same year, Lupino co-wrote, co-produced and directed Never Fear, another drama, but this time about an aspiring dancer who contracts polio. It was a modest movie, effective in its way, and enough for the Screen Directors Guild to offer her membership in 1950, which she accepted, becoming only the second female director in its ranks (after Dorothy Arzner). Her acceptance within the industry as a director was rapid though well-deserved, and Lupino continued to make challenging social dramas that cemented her reputation and were successful both commercially and critically.

Lupino’s attraction to “difficult” subject matters was confirmed with the release of Outrage (1950), about the rape of a young woman and the problems that arise because she doesn’t tell anyone what’s happened to her. It shows Lupino still learning her craft as a director, but also growing in confidence, and her decision to tackle such a topic is entirely laudable: it’s a movie that Hollywood would never have made at the time, and which was only possible because of Lupino’s independence from the studio system. (By coincidence, Akira Kurosawa tackled the same subject, but from a different angle, in the same year’s Rashômon.)

Lupino’s next movie seemed, at first glance, to be a step back from the powerful social dramas she’d already made, but Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) was a deceptively intriguing look at female jealousy and longing as experienced by the mother of a tennis prodigy. It features a great performance from Claire Trevor, and shows that Lupino was entirely capable of making the subtext of a movie more interesting than the main storyline. It was also Lupino’s first time directing a movie that was written by someone else.

Lupino’s next directorial stint was filling in for Nicholas Ray when he fell ill during the filming of film noir thriller On Dangerous Ground (1951), a movie Lupino had a role in. It’s a measure of Lupino’s regard within the industry at that time that she was asked to do this, and though it’s difficult when watching the movie to work out which scenes she shot specifically, that in itself is a tribute to Lupino’s skill as a director in that she was able to mimic Ray’s idiosyncratic style of directing.

The film noir approach of On Dangerous Ground may well have prompted Lupino to seek out a similar project for her next movie as a director. If so, the result was perhaps her most well-received movie yet, the tense and menacing The Hitch-Hiker (1953). With its claustrophobic car interiors and bleak desert vistas, Lupino’s strong visual style served as a compelling background to the psychological battle occurring between fishermen Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy, and psychotic William Talman (never better). It may be a short movie, a lean seventy-one minutes, but it’s one of the most compelling crime dramas of the Fifties, and Lupino’s grip on the material is so assured that her increasing skill behind the camera can no longer be questioned.

With audiences and critics alike impressed by The Hitch-Hiker, their response to Lupino’s next movie should have been even more emphatic, but despite being widely regarded now as her masterpiece, The Bigamist (1953) was coolly received. And yet it’s a movie that addresses its subject matter head on and is still as uncompromising in its approach even today. It was a first for Lupino in that she directed herself – as the object of the main character’s bigamous relationship – but her confidence as a director ensures that each character gets the screen exposure they need. The ending is particularly impressive, and has an emotional impact that is as unexpected as it is effective.

Sadly, Lupino’s short career as an independent producer/director came to an end after The Bigamist. Budgets had always been tight, and though Lupino was always well prepared and planned ahead on all her movies, the returns on her movies weren’t enough to keep The Filmakers going. Fortunately, in 1952, Lupino had been approached by Dick Powell who had started up a television production company called Four Star Productions; he wanted her to replace Joel McCrea and Rosalind Russell after they’d dropped out. Lupino began working in television in earnest, and it wasn’t until 1966 that Lupino made what would be her final movie as a director, The Trouble With Angels. A comedy about the students at an all-girls’ school who challenge the nuns that run it (including, ironically, Rosalind Russell), the movie received a mixed to negative reaction, but viewed today holds up remarkably well. Afterwards, Lupino continued acting and directing in television until her death, and along the way took supporting roles in horror movies such as The Devil’s Rain (1975) and The Food of the Gods (1976) (as many of her contemporaries did in the Seventies).

Lupino’s importance in the history of women directors is due to the fact that she did it all by herself: she founded the production company to make the movies she wanted to make, she wrote (at first) the screenplays for those movies, and she tackled topics that her male peers would have run a mile from (or just not been allowed to make). If she couldn’t completely undermine the conservative values of the time, it was enough that she challenged them and held a mirror up to some of the more uncomfortable social issues of the day. She was a tough, determined director who didn’t short change her audience, and she achieved industry and public approval on her own terms, as well as long-lasting respect. And more importantly, she helped inspire a new generation of female movie makers, a generation that would tackle many of the same issues Lupino had, and with the same sense of propriety.

10 Reasons to Remember Wes Craven (1939-2015)

31 Monday Aug 2015

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A Nightmare on Elm Street, Career, Director, Freddy Kreuger, Ghostface, Horror, Scream, Wes Craven

Wes Craven (2 August 1939 – 30 August 2015)

An innovator in the horror genre, and the originator of two of the most successful horror franchises in recent movie history, Wes Craven’s career was dogged by a series of ups and downs that only the movie industry could come up with. A good example of this is Deadly Friend (1986). If you were to see this as your first Wes Craven movie, you would find a movie that is hopelessly muddled in terms of tone and content, but which also contains clear signs that the director has a flair and a style that can’t be entirely hampered by what seems like a weak script but was actually heavy studio interference. If, however, your first experience is The Hills Have Eyes (1977) then you’ll be impressed by Craven’s brash, discomfiting approach to the material, and his aggressive visual style.

As his career developed, it seemed that for every good or well-intentioned movie he made there was an opposite, a movie that didn’t quite come off as well as it should have. Craven made twenty-two features (including Music of the Heart (1999), which bagged an Oscar nomination for Meryl Streep), three TV movies, directed a segment of the movie Paris, je t’aime (2006), and made a few forays into episodic television. But if his career stalled from time to time, or some projects appeared ill-advised, Craven was still a professional and often made more of a movie than would have been the case if he hadn’t been its director (one wonders how Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) would have turned out if he hadn’t experienced difficulties with Christopher Reeve). And of course he’ll be forever remembered for creating two of modern horror’s most iconic characters, Freddy Kreuger and Ghostface – and that’s enough of an achievement right there: to have frightened the life out of two separate generations of moviegoers.

1 – The Last House on the Left (1972)

2 – The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

3 – A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

4 – The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)

5 – The People Under the Stairs (1991)

6 – Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

7 – Scream (1996)

8 – Music of the Heart (1999)

9 – Red Eye (2005)

10 – Scre4m (2011)

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013)

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

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Actress, Affair, Bogdan Dumitrache, Bucharest, Corneliu Porumboiu, Diana Avramut, Director, Drama, Movie, Rehearsal, Relationships, Review, Romania, World Cinema Month

Original title: Când se lasă seara peste Bucureşti sau Metabolism

D: Corneliu Porumboiu / 85m

Cast: Diana Avramut, Bogdan Dumitrache, Mihaela Sirbu, Alexandru Papadopol

Paul (Dumitrache) is a writer/director making his latest movie. He hasn’t worked with his lead actress, Alina (Avramut) before, but he likes to challenge her over her interpretation and understanding of the script as well as her personal opinions on topics such as shooting on film as opposed to digitally. One day during the movie’s production, Paul fakes a stomach problem and lets his producer, Magda (Sirbu) know that he can’t work; instead he meets up with Alina. They rehearse a scene where Alina’s character gets out of the shower, and as she gets dressed, overhears a conversation involving the male lead character. She and Paul discuss the various reasons for her behaviour during the scene, and try and pin down the various actions that will be involved. Afterwards they have sex.

As the day progresses they have lunch at a Chinese restaurant, and much later, they run into Magda at a hotel where some of the cast are staying. Magda isn’t happy with the male lead’s behaviour from the night before, and she’s also unhappy with Paul because she doesn’t believe his assertion that he’s seen a doctor and had an endoscopy carried out. Afterwards, Paul and Alina continue to block out the shower/dressing scene, going over it time and again in their efforts to fine tune the motivation of Alina’s character. Later, they eat out at another restaurant, where they are joined briefly by Laurentiu (Papadopol), one of Paul’s fellow movie makers. He mentions that Alina has the look of Monica Vitti about her, but Alina doesn’t know who that is. Paul is surprised, and when they leave they talk about the differences between theatre – which is Alina’s professional background – and cinema.

The next morning they meet up before heading for the day’s shooting location. There, Paul gives Magda a copy of the endoscopy exam to watch with a doctor called to the set. Despite some irregularities, the doctor is satisfied, though Magda remains convinced Paul has falsified the recording, though she can’t figure out why. And in a conversation with a makeup lady, Alina reveals its her last day on the production.

The so-called Romanian New Wave has been responsible for a number of stark, minimalist movies in the last ten years, most of them poignant, subtle explorations of the effects of Communist rule on the lives of everyday people. Some movies, such as The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), have found an international audience and been critically applauded. And Porumboiu himself has been feted for his previous movies, including Police, Adjective (2009). Here, he adopts a rigid, formal approach to what is essentially a diffused romantic two-hander, as Paul attempts to both impress and manipulate Alina into giving the performance he’s looking for, and in the process, foster a relationship that, deep down, he knows will only be temporary.

Beneath his rigorous, intellectual demeanour however, Paul is a fraud: pompous, insecure, and insincere. He wants Alina to appear naked in his movie and uses the notion that she’ll be thankful fifty years on that she’ll have a permanent reminder of her youth and beauty. Alina turns the tables on him, though, and shoots down his argument by asking the simple question, what makes him think people will be watching his movies in fifty years’ time? It’s a lovely moment, Paul’s presumptuous ideas punctured without a trace of animosity, and showing just who has the upper hand in their relationship. As the movie progresses, and Paul’s continued attempts to gain some measure of control become less and less effective, Alina reveals more and more of the determination and poise that have been there all along, but which Paul has been too blinkered to notice. The moment when Alina reveals she’s never heard of Antonioni (let alone Monica Vitti) is a wonderful indication of how unconcerned she is by Paul’s cinematic posturing.

Both Avramut and Dumitrache excel in providing well-considered, measured performances, making even the blandest of Paul and Alina’s interactions more intriguing and suggestive than they appear on the surface. Avramut keeps Alina’s face in repose for most of the movie, deflecting Paul’s advances with cool detachment and engaging with him on her own terms. Dumitrache evinces disappointment and dismay, giving Paul the air of a man for whom this isn’t his first experience of being out-manoeuvred by his leading lady. Their relationship is one full of delicate cuts and thrusts, and Porumboiu directs their subtle feints and ripostes with a careful eye for the casual gains and losses inherent in such an unsatisfactory affair.

Unexpectedly absorbing as it is though, the movie does a visual aesthetic that could be off-putting to certain viewers. Porumboiu’s adoption of rigid camerawork and single shot set ups, while keeping things at a distance, actually works to force the audience to pay attention to what’s being said, and the way in which Paul and Alina move around each other, as if in a dance, reaps its own dividends. Particularly effective are the neutral backgrounds Porumboiu places his characters in front of, their non-committal colours and broad expanses reflecting the disinterest Alina and Paul really have in each other. It’s only when Paul and Magda run into each other in the hotel lobby that the environment changes, becoming more decorous and richly detailed. It’s a refreshing change for the viewer, but as Alina leaves them to it and Magda displays her anger, it becomes an indication that Paul’s personality needs an impersonal surrounding in order for him to feel comfortable, and to have a degree of control that reassures him (under Magda’s withering gaze Paul reacts like a chided schoolboy).

Rating: 8/10 – surprisingly emotional beneath its stringent visuals, Where the Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is deceptively simple and subtly rewarding; less a meditation on the nature of movie making (though with nods in that direction), and more an examination of two people using each other out of convenience, Porumboiu’s movie is an unexpected pleasure.

10 Reasons to Remember Mike Nichols (1931-2014)

20 Thursday Nov 2014

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Director, Five Rules for Filmmaking, Mike Nichols, Movies

A talented director who came to prominence in the Sixties with a brace of movies that heralded a prodigious talent, Mike Nichols had a distinct visual style and an even more distinctive rapport with his often very talented casts (he directed seventeen actors who were Oscar nominated for their roles). He made some very fine movies – see below – and even if later in his career, when the movies weren’t always as successful, or rewarding, his work still maintained a level of integrity that few directors have managed to achieve in the course of their careers. He also came up with the “Five Rules for Filmmaking”:

1 – The careful application of terror is an important form of communication.

2 – Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for.

3 – There’s absolutely no substitute for genuine lack of preparation.

4 – If you think there’s good in everybody, you haven’t met everybody.

5 – Friends may come and go, but enemies will certainly become studio heads.

1 – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

2 – The Graduate (1967)

3 – Catch-22 (1970)

4 – Carnal Knowledge (1971)

5 – The Day of the Dolphin (1973)

6 – Silkwood (1983)

7 – Working Girl (1988)

8 – Postcards from the Edge (1990)

9 – The Birdcage (1996)

10 – Angels in America (2003)

10 Reasons to Remember Richard Attenborough (1923-2014)

24 Sunday Aug 2014

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Actor, Director, Movies, Richard Attenborough

As well as being one of Britain’s finest directors – Gandhi (1982), Cry Freedom (1987) et al – Richard Attenborough will be remembered for an acting career that saw him play a variety of roles in a variety of movie genres but always with an innate sense of the character, and with a selflessness that was always impressive. Several of the movies listed below are rightly regarded as classics – what better testament to an actor who never once short-changed an audience.

1 – Brighton Rock (1947)

2 – The Angry Silence (1960)

3 – The League of Gentlemen (1960)

4 – The Great Escape (1963)

5 – Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

6 – The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

7 – The Sand Pebbles (1966)

8 – 10 Rillington Place (1971)

9 – The Chess Players (1977)

10 – Jurassic Park (1993)

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Tag Archives: Director

10 Reasons to Remember Agnès Varda (1928-2019)

10 Reasons to Remember John Carl Buechler (1952-2019)

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They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018)

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A Brief Word About R. Lee Ermey and Vittorio Taviani

10 Reasons to Remember Miloš Forman (1932-2018)

Spielberg (2017)

10 Reasons to Remember Lewis Gilbert (1920-2018)

10 Reasons to Remember Tobe Hooper (1943-2017)

10 Reasons to Remember George A. Romero (1940-2017)

10 Reasons to Remember Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)

10 Reasons to Remember Raoul Coutard (1924-2016)

10 Reasons to Remember Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016)

Robert Zemeckis’ 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

10 Reasons to Remember Curtis Hanson (1945-2016)

Tim Burton’s 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

Steven Soderbergh’s 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

10 Reasons to Remember Arthur Hiller (1923-2016)

Ron Howard’s 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

Ridley Scott’s 10 Most Successful Movies at the International Box Office

10 Reasons to Remember Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016)

10 Reasons to Remember Michael Cimino (1939-2016)

10 Reasons to Remember Guy Hamilton (1922-2016)

10 Reasons to Remember Jacques Rivette (1928-2016)

The 2016 Oscar Nominations

The 2016 BAFTA Nominations

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10 Reasons to Remember Wes Craven (1939-2015)

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013)

10 Reasons to Remember Mike Nichols (1931-2014)

10 Reasons to Remember Richard Attenborough (1923-2014)

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