Visual Index ~ "Cries and Whisper" Best Shot(s)

Tuesday night means Best Shot. This week we're looking at Ingmar Bergman's biggest success stateside both at the box office and with Oscar voters. If Cries and Whispers is not quite his most famous classic today, it remains one of the true essentials within his celebrated filmography. This mysterious and utterly gorgeous film won Bergman's longtime DP Sven Nykvist the first of his two Oscars for best cinematography. It concerns three sisters, one of whom is dying, and the family's maid. Naturally it's very depressing. But great art always transcends.

If you're running late with your choice for Best Shot, take heart and finish watching. My own entry in this "best shot" party will be up tomorrow so yours can be too. I have a good excuse. Today I finalized all the prep work for both the '73 Smackdown festivities (running from Thursday to Saturday here) and all the bookings for this year's Toronto International Film Festival so that you can be assured coverage of that festival this year. This year I'll be staying for the entire festival so there will be more coverage than even last year. I'm so happy about that I practically broke into a hearty round of "O Canada".

But Canada can wait. Tonight we head to Sweden for an unmissable classic... 

CRIES AND WHISPERS - BEST SHOTS
9 participants. Click on the photos for the corresponding articles 
this post will be updated again tomorrow night with any late entries received 

a reprieve from the bold crimson but one which nevertheless shows the emotional damage...
-Lam Chop Chop

 

the single best film in Bergman's canon, merciless but profound, bleak but beautiful...
-Antagony & Ecstasy

Anna, the housekeeper, seems to be the only one capable of true human connection...
-Coco Hits NY

my best shot for purely aesthetic reasons... 
-Film Actually

 

Maria's flashback, though, finds yet another use for the color red...
-The Entertainment Junkie 

Bergman even stated that in the screenplay red represented the interior of the soul... 
-The Film's The Thing 

She tried to make her pain aware to the movie itself, but it did not hear her... 
-Pop Culture Crazy 

 

Tinted in crimson (the color of the soul, according to Bergman)... 
- Best Shot in the Dark

It's not the eyes that are the window to the soul so much as the face as the soul...
- The Film Experience 

... at least one more article to come but please do enjoy these a.s.a.p.

ICYMI last week's episode was very well intended as we looked at this year's most experimental arthouse hit, Under the Skin with Scarlett Johansson. Here's what's coming next. Only four more episodes left this season so join us. I promise it's both challenging and rewarding to participate.

Interview: Adapting "Guardians of the Galaxy" for the Screen

Anne Marie interviewed Nicole Perlman, the screenwriter of Guardians of the Galaxy which opens this weekend

Nicole Perlman, Screenwriter"Nicole Perlman" has been a name shrouded in mystery since Marvel announced Guardians of the Galaxy two years ago. Though the screenwriter has received awards for her writing, Guardians will be her first official screen credit. (She shares co-screenwriting credit with Guardians director James Gunn). I sat down with her over the weekend at Comic Con to learn a little more about the woman who turned Guardians of the Galaxy from cult comic hit to Marvel's biggest blockbuster experiment. We talked about Guardians, her new project with Cirque du Soleil, and how screenwriters make terrible movie audiences.

ANNE MARIE: You started with getting your Challenger screenplay on the Black List, which is really cool, and then did a complete jump into Marvel. Tell me about that!

NICOLE PERLMAN: I had moved to Los Angeles after Challenger. It was on the Black List, it won the Tribecca Grant for Science and Film, and I was getting a lot of science-related screenplay projects, which was great, and I love science-related stuff. So I was happy about it.

I did a Neil Armstrong biopic for Universal, and I was doing things in that realm. And I would go out and pitch on projects that were science fiction or action and I got a little push back about it. I got, 'This doesn't seem like your genre, or your world.' There was a little bit of that like 'This is a really masculine movie. We don't know if you could handle it.' And I'm like, 'But you thought I could handle it enough that I could pitch on it, so that's interesting.'  But it was mostly a feeling of [having a] question mark, of could I handle something like that.

When I was having a general meeting with Marvel Studios, they mentioned they had a writers program, and they wanted to know if I wanted to be a part of it. And of course I leapt at the chance, I wanted that stamp on my resume. And I also wanted to show that like I could do the fun big action movies that I loved, and the science fiction movies. And it worked out really well, so thank goodness! 

Yeah, clearly! The President of Marvel has stated he never thought of Guardians of the Galaxy as movie material until he read your stuff.

Oh that's nice! That's really lovely.

So what made you choose Guardians out of all of the list of options for projects?

[more...]

Click to read more ...

A Dame To Shill For

JA from MNPP here. My boyfriend likes to tease me that he loved Eva Green first, and he did - he loved her the first time she showed up on some red carpet wearing long glamorous sleeves in a sea of bared skin. It's not that you can exactly call Eva Green demure - the first time any of us saw her she was taking a bath with her on-screen brother while pawing at Michael Pitt's genitalia after all, and earlier this year she toplessly mounted Sullivan Stapleton while swinging around a sword for god's sake. Not to mention the bizarre throwback moral brouhaha that's currently been greeting every piece of art-work associated with her Sin City: A Dame To Kill For character - hide the children, there are breasts!

So no, demure's not really the word for her. But dive as she does, time and again, into these depths of gorgeous depravity, she still always manages to keep her long glamorous sleeves clean. She's a class act. So my boyfriend might've been there first but am I ever there now - watching Penny Dreadful's first season was for me a contact sport. I cheered and threw my fists in the air like it was the World Cup I was watching whenever she was on-screen. (That seance!) I need to print up a jersey with her name on the back for when the show returns. That's where I am with her.

I figure some of you can relate. So with that Green-flecked giddiness on the tip of our tongue, we greet the news that she's going to work with Tim Burton again. She's set to star in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an adaptation of a children's book (anyone read it?) about a group of super-powered orphans battling evil creatures intent upon their doom. Eva will play the titular Miss Peregrine, the children's guardian.

I know Nathaniel was as big a fan as I was of her first performance for Burton in the otherwise notsomuch Dark Shadows - she brought it and then she brought it ten more times in that movie... far more than was called for, she was bringing it. And I think we all have high hopes for Burton's film Big Eyes with Amy Adams. If that one sticks, maybe he can swing around a dreary few years of movie-making, so let's keep our hopes up. Eva demands it!

Curio: Suspect and Fugitive

Alexa here with your weekly arts and crafts.   Nathaniel's banana Bond boredom from last week reminded me of a project that Seattle-based artist Kris Garland/Rakka Deer did back in 2008.  Titled Suspect and Fugitive, the series involved making one item a day from suspect (questionable) and fugitive (non archival) materials. This involved Rakka combining pop culture portraiture with food (and sometimes other materials) in new and clever ways every day for one year.

Like this pancake Cate Blanchett...

Pancake Blanchett

Maybe Nathaniel should try this.  Favorite actresses and foodstuffs maybe?  In any case, here is some more inspiration courtesy of Rakka from Donnie Darko to Doris Day after the jump

Click to read more ...

Podcast: Charming Musicians, Frosty Survivors, Talking Apes

It's one-on-one podcast time this week. Nathaniel and Nick discuss two movies they're sympatico on (Begin Again and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) and one which halfway divides them (Snowpiercer). 

You can listen at the bottom of the post or download the conversation on iTunes. Continue the conversation in the comments.

Index
00:01 Intro & Scene Stealing
01:30 Begin Again: rough starts, Mark Ruffalo's abrasiveness, Keira Knightley overall excellence, how it compares to Once.
14:00 Why we're not talking Boyhood. Plus the difficulty of grading ambitious movies.
20:00 Snowpiercer: allegory, structure, and the fight over the final cut, Tilda Swinton of course. Plus Bong Joon-ho and Korean cinema.
35:00 Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: highlight scenes, amazing imagery, franchise politics, Jason Clarke, and Caesar vs. Koba.
45:00 "Lost Stars" 

What is this picture doing here? You'll have to listen to find out.

Begin Again Snowpiercer Dawn of...