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Wednesday
Oct142020

Monty @ 100: Forgotten gem "Wild River"

by Nathaniel R

Clift arrives in Tennessee, a Federal employee who the locals will not take well to.

When speaking about new movies, we often discuss the vagaries of film distribution and studio support both in terms of audience outreach and awards campaign. These things often effect how movies are received, for better and worse. Less discussed, probably because interest is always more niche when it comes to older films, is how important both continued availability and awards play, are to an enduring reputation, once a movie is "old". Some films are forgotten for a reason, but there are plenty that would be better regarded if they had remained readily available to the public. Such I'd argue is the case with Elia Kazan's Wild River...

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Wednesday
Oct142020

More International Submissions including Agnieszka Holland's "Charlatan" 

by Nathaniel R

We're up to 14 announced submissions for this year's Best International Feature Oscar so those submission charts are updated with the following films added

  • Algeria - Héliopolis 
  • Czech Republic - Charlatan
  • Ecuador - Emptiness
  • Kosovo - Exile
  • Singapore - Wet Season

We've only had the pleasure of seeing one of these five newly announced titles so far, Wet Season (which was a Golden Horse nominee last year). I liked it at TIFF in 2019 though I thought it erred on the side of being too much of a "slow burn" if you know what I mean. But a year later I'll admit that I think of it surprisingly frequently so even though I was a thumbs up, I underestimated it! It's an emotionally complicated story of an unhappy teacher who becomes way too involved with the life of her lonely student (they're pictured above). 

But back to the submissions, of the 14 films we know about so far 6 are from female directors! How about that? One of those female directors is a regular, in point of fact...

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Wednesday
Oct142020

Doc Corner: 'Totally Under Control'

By Glenn Dunks

There have been experimental Zoom horror movies on streaming services and there have been lockdown diaries where we get the news. Hell, Spike Lee’s New York, New York was ‘released’ so to speak on the filmmaker’s Instagram feed. But none feel quite as spontaneous and ambitious as Totally Under Control from directors Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger. A feature-length documentary that takes its title from one of many Donald Trump quotes that should theoretically haunt him for years to come (if he was capable of shame or regret, that is) and which examines the United States’ response to the still very present COVID-19 pandemic and just what went wrong.

The finished product isn’t quite as much of a bombshell as its initial trailer drop just a week and a half ago might have suggested. The truth is, there’s very little in here that will be breaking news to anybody who has followed along closely (some of the Jared Kushner stuff had passed me by, though, amid the never-ending doom-news cycle that is 2020).

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Wednesday
Oct142020

The 'Cancel the Oscars' thing is just plain bulls***t. Here's why

by Juan Carlos

I’ve been itching to discuss this for quite a while now. Ever since the pandemic, the way we watch films has dramatically shifted. Cinemas are now either closed down or maintained with stringent health safety measures. Drive-in cinemas have experienced a resurgence in popularity due to their safer conditions. Meanwhile, we have seen films dropping on streaming platforms, VOD, and virtual cinemas at such a rapid rate that it is quite hard to even keep track of what is being released. 

Meanwhile, AMPAS made several changes in its rules to adjust to the current world we are living in. So for the first time, the Academy allowed streaming-only films in as long as there was an intention to exhibit them theatrically (I still don’t know how they would prove intention, but that's another discussion). Also, they have extended the eligibility period: from January 1 to December 31, 2020, it will now extend until February 28, 2021, a move that seemed hastily done months ago and now makes even less sense since majority of the films that were supposed to screen in the last months of the year in cinemas have now moved to late 2021 anyway. 

And then this opinion piece from the Washington Post happened.

In an article that adds itself to the chorus of people saying that the Oscars should be cancelled in its entirety, the writer asserts that the Oscars should be cancelled because...

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Wednesday
Oct142020

The Furniture: All the World's a Circus in "Topkapi"

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Last week’s column on Suddenly, Last Summer was a bonus sidebar to our ongoing Montgomery Clift retrospective. Today, I offer a diversion from our wall-to-wall Monty programming, in the form of a tribute to someone else’s centennial: Melina Mercouri. None of this film star's movies were nominated for Best Production Design at the Oscars, but I adore her anyway. And one of her films, made at the peak of her fame, is a perfect fit: Topkapi (1964)

Mercouri’s brand, so to speak, was one of obstinate vitality. In Stella, her film debut, she played a nightclub singer who simply refuses to be married, even at the expense of love. Her character in Never on Sunday, for which she received her only Oscar nomination, insists upon her own chipper versions of the Greek classics. Medea, who didn’t really murder her children, gets her husband back and they all go to the seashore. Mercouri’s signature vivacity is always at odds with her surroundings, defying the rules of both tragedy and society.

But the visual climax of this attitude comes in Topkapi, for which the entire world seems to have been refashioned to fit the expectations of Mercouri’s persona. She even introduces it, casting the world as a funfair even before the opening credits...

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