One From the Heart to Francis Ford Coppola

Glenn here. As Jason already established, today is Francis Ford Coppola's 75th birthday today. Talia's brother, Sofia and Roman's dad, Nicolas and Jason's uncle, and Gia's grandfather presides over a clearly very talented family that keep kicking artistic goals. We're only four months into this new year and Sofia has (apparently) been hired for her first big studio film, Jason Schwartzman has appeared on screen in indie box office hit The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Gia's directorial debut, Palo Alto, is about to hit cinema screens. What's Frances up to? Well the five-time Oscar winner is laying low it seems after none of his ultra-arty projects - Twixt, Youth Without Youth, Tetro - took off the way he likely expected his artistic return to.

It's then a perfect opportunity to dig a bit deeper into his extensive filmography and find something you've never seen. I know it's perhaps the smallest minority in cinema history, much to the derision of everyone I have admitted it to, but my personal favourite Coppola title is not any of The Godfather films, or The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, or even Bram Stoker's Dracula. No, rather, it's the man's 1982 musical oddity One from the Heart. Yes, the film that sent him bankrupt and forced him into a director-for-hire for two decades (pro: The Rainmaker; con: Jack) is actually my favourite. One of many weird, high-concept musical follies from the era that I unequivocally love more than I probably ought to. My love isn't some misguided contratianism, but rather One From the Heart just has many things that I love in movies: a knowing artificiality, a beautiful messiness, and Teri Garr. Who doesn't love Teri Garr?

Click to read more ...

Beauty Vs. Beast: Ladies of the Night

JA from MNPP here, back from vacation with a brand new round of "Beauty Vs. Beast." So here's the question (or rather the first question): what's your favorite Francis Ford Coppola movie? The legendary helmer's turning 75 today and so we look back through his work - the Godfathers, the Conversations, the Peggy Sues... the super sad undead love stories... listen, I'm not going to argue that his 1992 version of Dracula is his best film - I'd rather make it through the day without y'all calling the men in white suits to my door, thank you very much. But it's surely the movie of his I've watched the most times and have gotten the most pleasure from (give or take some Rob Lowe coming out of the shower in The Outsiders). The old fashioned effects work, Eiko Ishioka's astounding costumes - I wore my copy of the behind-the-scenes book down to a nub.

So this is the movie I'm going with for this week's competition. And instead of going the obvious route and pitting Gary Oldman's head bloodsucker against somebody (certainly not Keanu, but Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing perhaps) I felt like centering us on the objects of Drac's affections instead. Slip yourself into his velvety slippers and choose!

poll by twiigs.com

They may seem to be two beauties at first but they've both...

... got some beast in them. Ahem. So per usual you have exactly one week to vote and to make your arguments for and against your picks in the comments. Let's hear who gets your undying devotions!

PREVIOUSLY We've got two rounds to close up here since while I was away last week Nathaniel had some superhero-sized fun and asked you guys his own query Avengers-style - twas Black Widow who triumphed, dropping down from the rafters and wrapping her leather-clad thighs around The Hulk's throat til he went limp, taking a full 3/4s of the vote. No smash for him. As thefilmjunkie put it:

"I'll have to reevaluate everything I thought I knew about life if Black Widow loses on THIS site of all places."

Looking two weeks back to our Talented Mr. Ripley showdown y'all found the cruel sexy stylings of Dickie Greenleaf too irresistable to, uh, resist - we're all no better than Tom; all we want is Dickie's sunlight upon us. Henry summed it up nicely:

"It was Dickie all the way. I'll take a beautiful bitch (been there, done that) over a plain bitch (been there, done that) any day."

April Showers: "Shutter Island"

We're going to be in for some weather...

Click to read more ...

Box Office: Marvel Strikes Again

Amir here, with the weekend’s box office report.
Captain America defeated Noah to the top spot. There has to be a joke in there about America and freedom and jingoism and religion but I haven’t seen the former film yet, so I’ll hold my tongue. Captain America’s opening doesn’t meet the high bar set by any of the Iron Man films or The Avengers but it set a new record for Apil releases and the reviews are arguably the best ever for the Marvel franchise. With the recent announcement that this multiple phase, universe recreation charade is going to drag all the way until 2028 – by which time this youthful, cynical, belligerent writer will only be a cynical, belligerent writer – Marvel is going to need the good reviews to avoid fatigue. Or at least pretend like it’s avoiding fatigue, depending on whom you ask. Arguably, the bigger story of the weekend is the continued success of God's Not Dead. The film now has $32m in the bank and I have yet to come across a single person who's actually seen it. There's God's miracle right there.

Captain America and Black Widow, pondering the box office numbers

BOX OFFICE
01 CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER $96.2 *new* Review / Marvel Posterized
02 NOAH $17 (cum. $72.3)
03 DIVERGENT $13 (cum. $114) Review / Jai Courtney
04 GOD'S NOT DEAD $7.7 (cum. $32.5)
05 THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL $6.3 (cum. $33.3)

The only other wide-ish release of the weekend was Frankie & Alice, the Halle Berry go-go dancing vehicle that finally came off the studio shelves after a four-year delay. Remember when some of us predicted Berry’s second nomination for this one? LOLZ. On the limited side of things, the biggest story was obviously Under the Skin, Jonatha Glazer’s long-delayed follow-up to Birth. Considering the festival hype and the irritatingly, reductively prominent coverage of Scarlett Johansson’s alien sexiness, the film didn’t do that well per screen average. It’d be interesting to see how the studio decides to expand the film. Unbelievably, up here in The Great White North, Skin doesn’t even have a distributor yet. I was lucky enough to watch it at TIFF though and I’d be happily lured back into darkness by Scarlett Johansson no matter the grotesque consequences.

The other releases this weekend didn’t really get audiences (or critics) all hot and bothered but by way of completism, we’ll list their names: The Unknown Known (Errol Morris working in a similar vein to Fog of War), Dom Hemingway (Jude Law with a few extra pounds and a dash of violence), Afflicted (for horror fans, of which I’m not one) and Watermark (an environmentalist documentary which I’ve actually seen; I wasn’t a big fan overall but it’s message is admirable and well-argued and the cinematography is GorgeouS with a capital G and also a capital S for emphasis.)

What have you watched this weekend?

Team Top Ten: The Greatest Working Cinematographers

Amir here, to welcome you back to Team Top Ten, our monthly poll by all of the website’s contributors. For our first episode in 2014, we are looking at The Greatest Working Cinematographers in the (international) film industry. As long time readers of The Film Experience are surely aware, the visual language of cinema is something Nathaniel and the rest of us are very fond of discussing. Films and filmmakers that have a dash of style and understand cinema as a visual medium always get bonus points around these parts. We celebrate great works in cinematography on a weekly basis in Hit Me With Your Best Shot, but it was time to give the people behind the camera their due.
 

More than 50 cinematographers from all across the world received votes. If the final, somewhat American-centric, list doesn’t quite reflect that, chalk it up to the natural process of consensus voting. Cinematographers like Agnes Godard, Oleg Mutu, Mahmoud Kalari, Rodrigo Prieto and Eric Gautier all had their fans, as did Hollywood stalwarts like Dante Spinotti and Robert Richardson. Furthermore, Harris Savides’s name was attached to several ballots, with the unfortunate note that if he were still alive, he’d be on the list. That would have certainly been the case, so here’s Glenn Dunks with an honorable mention for Savides, and then on to the top ten:

“Does anybody doubt that Harris Savides would appear on this list if it weren’t for his death in 2012 at the age of 55? I would even hazard a guess that he could have been number one. I distinctly remember wanting to know who this man was and what his career had been after witnessing Birth. The way he mixed golden hues of UWS high society with the chilly silver of a New York winter captivated me. That film alone with its graceful tracking shots and magnetic opera sequence would be enough of a game changer if it weren’t also for his prior film-defining work with Gus Van Sant on Elephant, Gerry and Last Days. He would later work with David Fincher (Zodiac), Noah Baumbach (Greenberg) and his last great collaborator, Sofia Coppola (Somewhere and The Bling Ring). A mighty force taken too soon.”

TOP TEN GREATEST WORKING CINEMATOGRAPEHRS

10. Dion Beebe
“Who on Earth is Dion Beebe?” felt like a common question in the early-to-mid-2000s when the Australian cinematographer stormed onto the Hollywood scene. Whatever it was that director Rob Marshall had seen of his prior work that gave him enough faith to turn to him for Chicago I’m not sure – Australian films Praise and Holy Smoke! were hardly indications to hire him for a lavish musical – but beautiful work it was. Still, if his further collaborations with Marshall on Memoirs of a Geisha (for which he won an Oscar) and Nine (for which he should have been nominated) suggests perhaps little more than a handsome craftsman, then it was his sensual and sensorial work on Jane Campion’s In the Cut, visually representing erotic tingles with images, and Michael Mann’s digital masterworks Collateral and Miami Vice that proved he was a bold and innovative one, too. – Glenn Dunks

Click to read more ...