The Unbearable Linkness of Being
Sunday, October 23, 2011 at 11:00AM The Hollywood Reporter Dianne Wiest to headline The Corrections. I know this will be old news to some but I can't believe I haven't mentioned it. A lead role for Our Miss Wiest, only one of the greatest living actresses in the world.
Tom Shone grades the movies. I love when critics explain their grading systems as it's always such a personal and inexact science. Only six "A+" ever.
Film Studies For Free looks back briefly at Brokeback Mountain, which happens to be one of Mr. Shone's six "A+" films.
Salon offers up a library of film criticism essentials
They Live by Night great piece on the super complicated editing challenges of The Tree of Life.
We had folders for Earth, Sky, Water, Animals, Miscellaneous, and then within those, bins that were more specific."
Guardian on Amélie's (2001) cultural endurance. The whimsical worldwide hit is now ten years old.
Laughing Squid "Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses"
Felix in Hollywood "can someone please explain this picture to me?"Tallulah Bankhead lol.
Awards Daily They aren't reading the Best Picture nominees in alphabetical order this year. Nor will the board show us how many titles will be announced. Suspense!
Kaufman on the set of Quills (2000) with Kate WinsletFinally, a very happy 75th birthday to the writer/director Philip Kaufman, who people unfortunately rarely talk about these days. Why this is is surely a combo of his infrequency of working (only 12 features in a 47 year career), his lack of masterpieces, and his films being soundly of the adult persuasion in an era when the movies have become increasingly 'you know... for kids.' (I mean, even Scorsese is making family pictures now.) My favorites from Kaufman's oeuvre are three: The Right Stuff (1983) which was nominated for 8 Oscars though Kaufman was oddly not one of them - they had to make room for Ingmar Bergman in Best Director which we shan't ever complain about but it's strange that the competition that wasn't dropped came mostly from what one might call "actor's films" which are usually the first to go when the lone wolf directorial nod comes-a-calling; The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, Kaufman's sole nomination - Best Adapted Screenplay); and the NC-17 scandal that was Henry and June (1990). This trinity of "bests" is not-so-coincidentally composed of consecutive projects. When artists are on a roll, they're on a roll. It always seems to come in waves, doesn't it?
He's finally made another movie. His thirteenth film is Hemingway and Gelhorn (2012) which stars Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen.
Have you seen any Philip Kaufman pictures?
Reader Comments (15)
"Amalie" would be another great one to do a "HIt Me With Your Best Shot" project - having that and MR in one year was an embarrassment of riches in terms of gorgeous visuals and saturated colors. Which pop all the more since desaturation has been pretty much de riguer since the late 1960's. The aesthetic of the young filmmakers of the day, the end of Technicolor, and the emergence of television seem to have recalibrated our palette permanently, so films that are so beautiful to look at (beyond their other fabulous qualities) become treasures and all the more so than they might have been 50 years ago.
I don't know if I could ever give a movie an A+. I guess I just associate that metric with school tests where you gave every single correct answer. It's pretty easy to determine whether a school test is flawless. But a movie?
Take for example one of my all-time favorites, "Singin' in the Rain." In the Gene Kelly/Cyd Charisse-in-the-green-dress number, there's a majorly obvious goof, a rough edit that completely changes Charisse's position in an instant. Does it affect the quality of the movie? No, not in my opinion. But to the school nerd in me, A+ = perfection, and I don't know if I've ever seen a perfect movie, one that would not benefit from the tiniest tweak in one area or another.
That's not a bad thing, and I don't want to sound like I'm nitpicking and looking for things to dislike. But I think I'm just too tentative to give an A+ to a movie. I pretty much stop at an A. And really, it's not like there aren't different levels within that grade. An A for "Speed" and an A for "L.A. Confidential" don't necessarily mean that they're equal, just great movies each in their own way.
And thank you for the link to "Film Studies for Free" - as if I don't have enough ways to procrastinate. *lol* I didn't know the site existed, so hours of pleasure await.
The three Kauffman films you mentioned are all awesome. How he managed to nail Unbearable Lightness (a devilishly tricky book) is insane.
Grading films can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, but it's also hard to stop when you've developed that compulsion. I only give the highest grades to films that I can really personally relate to or care about. That is why all sorts of consensus lists are usually the dullest - I understand that, say, The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, etc are generally agreed upon to be "objectively"/technically perfect, but they also leave me more or less cold.
Coincidentally, I think I also have six A+ films at the moment.
I'm so happy for Dianne Wiest! I love her so much. Can't wait.
I used to own Quills--I'm not in love or like with the film, so the DVD had to leave. Rising Sun stands out for being a raunchy Sean Connery film in a series of raunchy films throughout his filmography. I dislike pretty much everything about Henry & June but the cinematography and Uma Thurman's performance which is underrated by many--including people here.
I haven't seen all of The Right Stuff, I just remember how hot the almost all male cast was. I do own The Unbearable Lightness of Being--I bought it for an odd reason. It's the Critieron version: I wanted Kaufman's preferred cooler color timed transfer.
I really liked Kaufman's The Right Stuff, and yes, that cast was great. I especially liked Fred Ward as Gus Grissom. I'm looking forward to Hemingway and Gelhorn. I just recently read The Paris Wife about Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, and their time in Paris in the 1920s. Then I re-read A Moveable Feast.
Martha Gelhorn, his third wife, is ranked as one of the top 5 war correspondents of the 20th century. She was the reporter Hemingway wanted to be (and pretended to be). Apparently he was jealous of her, and tried to prevent her from covering D-Day by getting her press credentials suspended. But she hopped on board a ship carrying explosives and made it to Europe anyway. Hemingway missed D-Day because he caught pneumonia. Gelhorn dropped by the hospital to tell him their marriage was over.
Wait...Lars Ulrich...what?
/3rtful -- what do you mean Uma's performance is underrated here -- i nominated her myself that year ...albeit before i was running a website ;)
Adri - I hope that scene in the hospital is included in the new movie. (I've not had a great feeling from anything I've seen so far, but I think it's probably a mistake to show too much "in production", and hope it's better because I'm not feeling this project - yet.)
I just read Gelhorn's "Travels with Myself and Another" about some of her travels to China and Africa - the "hell trips", the ones full of disasters. Great read, and her voice as a writer was so so distinct. She was definitely an old school "dame" - I can see Rosalind Russell playing her, but frankly not Nicole. I don't know that any actress today can evoke that particularly quality.
And no, I've not seen any of Kaufmann's films but your post got me thinking Nathaniel about what happens to certain careers and certain people; how is it that someone can be at the top of their game and then just...disappear, so to speak?
"The Corrections" will be adapted into a television series, not a feature film. That's somewhat surprising.
Personally, I have 61 A+s. 3 straight horrors, 3 horror comedies, 13 thrillers, 12 English language dramas, 7 Foreign language dramas, 2 fantasies, 2 action films, 3 crime films, 3 war films, 3 westerns, 1 unaccounted for Sci-fi, mostly because calling it anything else would be to say that it does anything spectacularly aside from being beautiful (It's 2001), 2 dramedies, 2 epics and 1 relatively light comedy.
Janice- thanks for the reading recommendation. I don't feel that the quality of dame-iness is lost, as much as set aside, and we're not being allowed to see it. I also think it takes some practice to get good at it, that the first few tries might be a bit tentative. But sometimes when I'm watching under-utilized actresses, I think they could do Myrna Loy roles, Amy Smart, Kat Dennings, Ali Larter, Sandra Oh. And Amanda Bynes could do Rosilind Russell parts, if any existed. So much talent, so small a view of women's narratives.
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