Oscar Contenders, Coffee Table Movies, and Prestige Pictures

After an appalling barren spring and summer, we’ve finally reached the season of milk and honey for Hollywood releases. We’ll now have the chance to see the best (according to them, anyway) the studios have to offer, including Scorsese’s The Departed, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and Todd Fields’ Little Children.

'The Departed': Choppy craftsmanship?

Check out the discussion on Jim Emerson's blog I'm involved in surrounding remarks that the outstanding film scholar David Bordwell made on his own blog regarding Martin Scorsese's The Departed. What makes a well-edited film anyway?

Schrader's canon

In the September/October 2006 issue of Film Comment, writer-director/critic Paul Schrader offers an interesting contribution the recent discussion regarding the necessity of film canons, defining and defending his own personal vision of the canon and the aesthetic tradition that supports it. Schrader posits seven aesthetic criteria on which to base the canon: beauty, strangeness, unity of form and subject matter, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, and morality. You can read the preface and introduction to Schrader’s article at the magazine’s website. Below is a list of the 60 films that comprise the author’s version of the canon, which Schrader has arranged hierarchically into tiers of twenty films each, each with a “medal” level of gold, silver, and bronze, respectively (I've bolded the films on the list that I have seen, in case you're interested):


Gold
The Rules of the Game – Jean Renoir (1939)
Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu (1953)
City Lights – Charlie Chaplin (1931)
Pickpocket – Robert Bresson (1959)
Metropolis – Fritz Lang (1927)
Citizen Kane – Orson Welles (1941)
Orphee – Jean Cocteau (1950)
Masculin-Feminin – Jean-Luc Godard (1966)
Persona – Ingmar Bergman (1966)
Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock (1958)
Sunrise – F.W. Murnau (1927)
The Searchers – John Ford (1956)
The Lady Eve – Preston Sturges (1941)
The Conformist – Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)
8 1/2 – Federico Fellini (1963)
The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola (1972)
In the Mood for Love – Wong Kar Wai (2000)
The Third Man – Carol Reed (1949)
Performance – Donald Cammell/Nicholas Roeg
La Notte – Michelangelo Antonioni (1961)

Silver
Mother and Son – Alexander Sokurov (1997)
The Leopard – Luchino Visconti (1963)
The Dead – John Huston (1987)
2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick (1968)
Last Year at Marienbad – Alain Renais (1961)
The Passion of Joan of Arc – Carl Dreyer (1928)
Jules and Jim – Francois Truffaut (1962)
The Wild Bunch – Sam Peckinpah (1969)
All That Jazz – Bob Fosse (1979)
The Life of Oharu – Kenji Mizoguchi (1952)
High and Low – Akira Kurosawa (1963)
Sweet Smell of Success – Alexander Mackendrick (1957)
That Obscure Object of Desire – Luis Bunuel (1977)
An American in Paris – Vincente Minnelli (1951)
The Battle of Algiers – Gillo Pontecarvo (1966)
Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese (1976)
Ali: Fear Eats at the Soul – Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)
Blue Velvet – David Lynch (1986)
Crimes and Misdemeanors – Woody Allen (1989)
The Big Lebowski – Joel Coen (1998)

Bronze
The Red Shoes – Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (1948)
Singin’ in the Rain – Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (1952)
Chinatown – Roman Polanski (1974)
The Crowd – King Vidor (1928)
Sunset Boulevard – Billy Wilder (1950)
Talk to Her – Pedro Almodovar (2002)
Shanghai Express – Josef von Sternberg (1932)
Letter from a Unknown Woman – Max Ophuls (1948)
Once Upon a Time in the West – Sergio Leone (1968)
Salvatore Giuliano – Francesco Rosi (1962)
Nostalghia – Andrei Tarkovsky (1983)
Seven Men from Now – Budd Boetticher (1956)
Claire’s Knee – Eric Rohmer (1970)
Earth – Alexander Dovzhenko (1930)
Gun Crazy – Joseph H. Lewis (1949)
Out of the Past – Jacques Tourneur (1947)
Children of Paradise – Marcel Carne (1945)
The Naked Spur – Anthony Mann (1953)
A Place in the Sun – George Stevens (1950)
The General – Buster Keaton (1927)

Major Shakeup at Village Voice Leaves Only J Hoberman Standing - Cinematical

In what (for me anyway) is a major blow to film criticism, the new management at the Village Voice (a publication that's been in a downward spiral for quite some time now) has fired film editor and critic Michael Atkinson, leaving J. Hoberman as the only critic left to make the Voice's Film section worth reading:

Major Shakeup at Village Voice Leaves Only J Hoberman Standing - Cinematical

Incidentally, the Voice also purged longtime music critic Robert Christgau, one of the most important pop music critics of the last half-century.

With Roger Ebert still on the mend, that leaves frightening few outstanding critics current writing reviews accessible on the 'net. There's Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader and Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. Anyone have any other suggestions?

While I'm away . . . film festivals

Due to some major league procrastination, I’m unbelievably busy this weekend, but  here are a couple of interesting pieces written by two of my favorite critics about two recent film festivals:

• Manohla Dargis on the New York Film Festival

• Jonathan Rosenbaum on the 42nd Chicago International Film Festival

Viva Pedro

If you're in the neighborhood, and haven't experienced the films of the unique Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, this month the Galaxy Cinema in Cary, North Carolina is having "Viva Pedro," a retrospective of the eight of Almodovar's films. Included are Matador and Law of Desire, neither of which has ever been released on DVD in the U.S.

http://www.mygalaxycinema.com/viva.asp

village voice > film > The Varied Provocations of a Mainstream Auteur by Elliott Stein

Here's a nifty introduction to the films of Otto Preminger (occasioned by a retrospective of the director's work at New York's Museum of Modern Art) by Elliot Stein from this week's Village Voice:

village voice > film > The Varied Provocations of a Mainstream Auteur by Elliott Stein