Pride By Ray PridePride@moviecitynews.com
Pride’s Friday 5, 20 September 2013
Prisoners, After Tiller, Out 1: Noli me Tangere, Simon Killer and Gimme the Loot.
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At TIFF, To The Wolf; in NYC/LA, 99% The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film and Salinger; and on video, Shadow Dancer and The Company You Keep.
Read the full article »Interview: A Few Choice Details From Lee Daniels on THE BUTLER
“What are they doing to me? Y’know, the last thing I want to see is ‘Lee Daniels’ The Butler.’ Y’know, what are you doing to me? You’re drawing attention to, you’re trying to, you’re like… The MPAA, what are you doing? I don’t know, I have to look at it as a gift from the universe, I gotta not look at the negative. I tend to look at the negative, so I have to look at it as a gift from the universe. And just say, okay, let me go for this. Let me just go with this and let it just wash over me.”
Read the full article »DVD Interview: Ang Lee On Water
“I think nature is a great tool to visualize internal feelings, I am dramatically trained, not visually trained. All of these images come from what I need to express how the characters feel. It all came from there, hardly anything is purely visual [in a way] that I cannot explain why it came to me. It’s not like that. Because you feel peaceful, so you have this, it feels loss, so he has that. In turmoil, so you have the storm. It’s all about something. I admire people who just envision something, like the pen takes their hand to draw. My older son is like that, just drawing, I don’t know how people do that. To just draw. I am not like that, I am drama.”
Read the full article »DVD Interview: Benh Zeitlin on Water
“There’s a real humility that comes from this sort of feeling when you are there, that New Orleans is very close to death in this way. It’s a presence in a way that I have never experienced anywhere else before, and it is all about… Every time it rains, water has this reminder of what it can do, and that your existence is this precarious thing that can be taken anyway at any moment by the water. Then at the same time it’s also where all the best food comes from! It’s an endlessly fascinating relationship and when I started making this film, I saw this. You look at a map, and you see this place where the water and the land are sewn together, where there is no clear border. And I wanted to explore what was at the frontlines of that place. So I would drive as far as I could go out into the marsh on all these different roads, and at the end of one of these roads was the town that became the film.”
Read the full article »2012 = 10 + 23
With Zero Dark Thirty going wide only just this weekend and other films opening after Thursday’s Oscar nominations announcement, 2012’s not dead, it’s not even past. A top 10, plus twenty-three more movies, lightly annotated, with a documentary survey to come.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5: Looper, Drunkboat, Woman In The Fifth, Damsels In Distress,The Samaritan
This was a Sunday afternoon a long time ago, sometime near the end of the twentieth century. In years of theatergoing in Chicago and other cities, I’d seen some grand coups de theatre, but this one, this one that shaped itself beyond the actors’ pace, made an indelible mark. Outside, a sunny afternoon on the second floor above the Victory Gardens theater; inside, a variation on Fritz Lang’s M. Somewhere in the middle of the brief, striking piece, the sound of whistling rose from the Clark Street sidewalk a floor below. The character of The Detective stood at an open window, listening to the whistling, holding the pose, holding the scene…
Read the full article »#TheMaster70mm: Chicago
“You’re the bravest boy I’ve ever known,” is one of many memorable, belittling endearments Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “Master” issues to his singular and ultimate protégé Freddy Sutton (Joaquin Phoenix). He’s practically beaming after one of Freddy’s frenzies of violence: “Naughty boy, okay! All right?” There are memorable mouthfuls galore, but will any of them turn out to be an “I drink your milkshake?”
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5, August 10, 2012
The late-night Alexa allure of Los Angeles light in “Celeste and Jesse Forever” and “Ruby Sparks”; Tracy Letts remembers where “Killer Joe” began in Evanston, Illinois; the total surveillance awareness of “The Bourne Legacy” and “Searching for Sugar Man,” which begins with a magnificent subject.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5: August 3, 2012
The uniformly hair-raising stories in the August American Cinematographer of digital capture of recent movies; the attractive production design of “Total Recall”; the glorious gloom of Terence Davies’ “Deep Blue Sea,” now on video; Joseph Kahn’s megameta nihilisploitation genre maelstrom, “Detention”; and the “City of Gods” point-of-view of video-on-demand release “Ajami.”
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5 (July 6, 2012)
Where’s “Margaret”? “The Battle Of Algiers” is re-fought in Los Angeles and New York this week; Yang Chung’s “China Heavyweight” opens in New York City; The Overlook Hotel is constantly under construction; and Godard’s “Contempt” shows via Film Independent at LACMA.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5 (June 29, 2012)
Sarah Polley’s “lucid and lucent” “Take This Waltz”; “Magic Mike” and the love of “Saturday Night Fever”; the modern dance between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in “The Amazing Spider-Man”; Mila Kunis, in a towel, in “Ted,” and the grave beauty of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon A Time In Anatolia.”
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5 (June 22, 2012)
The tangled red of “Brave”; the sensation of “Gerhard Richter Painting”; gentle geek fable “Nate & Margaret” and its light, platonic “Harold and Maude” vibe; the family dynamics of “Declaration of War” and the bop Italiano of Woody’s latest late-career ensemble comedy.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5: June 7, 2012
Three movies, in theaters now; two books, downloadable today. “Oslo, August 31”; “The Color Wheel”; “Moonrise Kingdom”; David Bordwell’s lucid, frightening overview of the digital bend-over, “Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies”; and Paul Maher, Jr.’s oral history of the cryptic career of Terrence Malick, “One Big Soul.”
Read the full article »Picturing Ebertfest 2012 Day 2
Edifices, blue skies, books for sale, karaoke, Life Itself…
Read the full article »Picturing Ebertfest 2012
Looking at opening day and night of the 14th annual Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, Champaign, Illinois, March 25, 2012.
Read the full article »Film 2011: “Imagination Gangsters”
MOST MOVIE YEARS HAVE A GLEAMING EXCEPTION to list-making, a lucid, transparent exemplar of work that rises just out of reach year-end litanies. Last year, that film was Disorder; this year, what could it be but Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz’s The Interrupters? In the lengthy, unfinished edit presented at Sundance in January, its wallop…
Read the full article »Dispatches: Marrakech International Film Festival II: Terry Gilliam
Smack in the middle of the nine days of the tribute-laden 11th edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival in early December, three sentences kept popping up among English-speaking journalists: “We’re in Africa“; “That’s a lot of food” and “Where’s Terry?” As in… Terry Gilliam. (Insert characteristic giggle.) A packed late-afternoon masterclass of largely young…
Read the full article »Dispatches: Marrakech International Film Festival: I
From Chicago, it’s two planes, then you’re in Casablanca, and then one more plane, and then? You’re in Marrakech. Travel to the 11th edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival went smoothly, from hometown dusk to stark Casablanca sun to sudden nightfall in Marrakech, and with Morocco in the same time zone as Paris, jetlag…
Read the full article »Interview: Jodie Foster’s Tango With Depression In The Beaver
Jodie Foster’s directed a third feature. The one with Mel Gibson and the beaver hand-puppet? The Beaver is a rich fable about depression and fear and hope, piercing, personal, bruised. (I think it liked it more than a few opening week critics.) While Gibson’s two roles are his best (and most intense) in memory, other…
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