Second Take: François Ozon's Ravishing "Frantz"

Editor's Note: Nathaniel previously reviewed Frantz at TIFF. Now with its US release a week away, here's Eric with a second look.

Frantz, director François Ozon’s most recent picture, opens in limited release in one week and is also part of Lincoln Center’s current "Rendezvous with French Cinema" series.  Ozon is one of France’s most profilic filmmakers (he makes a film almost every year), and he’s given us many fine pictures, including the Charlotte Rampling chillers Swimming Pool and Under the Sand, the actressy 8 Women, and his deepest film, Time to Leave.  But Ozon has never made a film as ravishing and complete as Frantz.

This film, which was nominated for 11 César Awards and won the Cinematography prize at the ceremony, contains a simple story which keeps unfolding in complex and surprising ways....

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Beauty Break: Stars on the Phone

A key "on this day" we forgot this morning. March 7th was the date, way back in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell got his patent for the telephone. So let's gawk at sexy photos of movie stars with telephones. It's really the only appropriate way to celebrate because who talks on the telephone anymore? Movie stars don't employ them much in photoshoots anymore either. 

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Doc Corner: 'Contemporary Color'

Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense is such an extraordinary piece of cinema that it is only natural that it casts a long shadow. That 1984 concert documentary of Talking Heads stuck in my mind a lot while watching Contemporary Color from directors Bill and Turner Ross. Not just because both films feature David Byrne as the primary artistic force behind them, but because they each suffuse music with performance with personality with theatricality. They both strive for an almost heightened sense of spirituality out of the creation of art. It’s just a shame that in the case of the Ross brothers' film, it just comes across as sloppy.

The film documents the performance of a special one-off performance at the Barclay Centre in Brooklyn. Spearheaded by Byrne and his newfound obsession with color guarding – a sort of synchronised swimming, but on land, and with way more prop rifles; Byrne describes them as “sophisticated folk art” – the event finds him inviting ten color guard teams and have them perform for a stadium audience alongside musical guests who wrote original songs as soundtracks. Songs, it must be said, that mostly sound like discarded album tracks and demos lifted out of storage and dusted off like it’s Woody Allen’s Irrational Man screenplay.

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Today in History: Joan Crawford's Oscar, Bel Powley's Rise, Loretta Young's Emmy

Need to feel festive today? Think on these anniversaries or birthdays today in showbiz history and celebrate accordingly. 

1914 Director Morton DaCosta was born in Philly. Though most of his career was on the stage he did direct three features: Auntie Mame, The Music Man, and Island of Love, the first two of which were Best Picture nominees!
1933 The game "Monopoly" was invented -remember that time when it seemed like every "brand" was going to become a movie and Ridley Scott was going to make this one?
1942 Televangelist wife and pop culture makeup icon Tammy Faye Baker is born. 

Much more after the jump...

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Spielberg Getting Topical with Streep and Hanks

Chris here, with one of the biggest powerhouse team-ups we've seen in ages. Steven Spielberg has signed up both Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks for The Post, a historical drama about the Pentagon Papers from a script by Liz Hannah. For the unfamiliar, the Pentagon Papers were classified documents used by The Washington Post to prove President Johnson lied to the public to advance the Vietnam public. So expect a solid dose of topicality to go with the star wattage, and do try to keep the Oscar talk at bay.

Can you believe this will be the first screen pairing of Streep and Hanks? Though Hanks is a Spielberg perennial, Streep has only done voice work for Spielberg on A.I. - it's somewhat depressing that it takes a project that reflects our own terrifying political climate to get this convergence of legends to finally happen. Without a start date announced, we can guess that we might be waiting a bit for the film considering Spielberg's packed schedule. A fifth Indiana Jones has been officially slated for summer 2019 with the director attached, plus Ready Player One in the can for next year and The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara set to shoot this year. The director isn't a stranger to jammed schedules, but he's about to be on his way to a well-earned nap.