Centennial: Gillo Pontecorvo

100 year ago today in Pisa, Italy, the director Gillo Pontecorvo was born.

He only made five narrative features in his career, which is surely one of the reasons that he's overshadowed in cultural memory by the far more prolific mid 20th century Italian giants Vittorio de Sica and Federico Fellini. Still Pontecorvo's two best known films were both nominated for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards, the concentration camp drama Kapò (1960) and the resistance/war drama The Battle of Algiers (1966). The latter, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in its year, is still revered as a masterpiece. Have you seen either of these classics?

Silent Sunday: "A Virtuous Vamp"

Allow us this tangent for the centennial of the silent comedy The Virtuous Vamp (1919). It starred the then popular actress Constance Talmadge who claims to have been receiving over 60 scripts a week during this period in her career. This particular comedy is among the many honored titles in the Library of Congress National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The Virtuous Vamp is now in the public domain though we haven't found a way to screen it yet. From our understanding, it's not a "lost" film which is always a relief with silent pictures since the bulk of them vanished from existence through Hollywood's own negligence about their movies. Movies were always and remain cultural artifacts rather than disposable "product" to be tossed once they've stopped collecting immediate coin. 

The not-at-all sexist plot (joke) is about a virtuous girl who takes a job at an office of men which causes all sorts of trouble -- none of them can concentrate and do their work due to her beauty...

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10th Anniversary: The Young Victoria

by Cláudio Alves

It's difficult to follow the Oscar race each year without developing a prejudice against prestige biopics. At times it seems its the genre where creativity goes to die, where formulas thrive and the appearance of respectability is more important than genuine artistic merit. These words are perchance, too harsh, because specific qualities do manage to shine through the baseline of expected mediocrity on numerous occassions. Take The Young Victoria, Jean-Marc Vallée's perfectly serviceable retelling of Queen Victoria's early years and marriage to Prince Albert. Rewatching it ten years after its initial release, the film isn't as despairingly dry as you may have remembered. The Young Victoria is one of Emily Blunt's lesser efforts, but she's luminous nonetheless, bringing a sense of modernity that rubs abrasively against the historical setting. She never convinces as a 19th-century ruler, but that manages to feel more like a feature than a fault. As for Rupert Friend's Albert, he remains a charming romantic ideal, establishing great chemistry with Blunt.

And then, of course, there are Sandy Powell's Oscar-winning costumes…

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100th Anniversary: Felix the Cat

by Tim

This weekend marks the 100th birthday of cinema's first cartoon superstar. On November 9, 1919, Paramount released Feline Follies, produced by Pat Sullivan and animated by Otto Mesmer, a short gag-driven cartoon starring a black cat named Master Tom; the character was an immediate hit and by the time the third cartoon featuring the character came out five weeks later (they worked fast back in those days), he'd been renamed Felix. The rest is history: Felix the Cat was a bonafide phenomenon, igniting a craze for funny, mutable animals that hasn't let up at any point in the last century. Even Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, the cinematic icon to end all icons, was initially conceived as a blatant Felix knock-off swapping out the cat's pointy ears for circles that were easier to draw.

You might not guess that to watch Feline Follies, which feels like an artifact from a lost civilization. This is what cartoons looked like in the 1910s: empty white voids full of characters who move in straight lines with few distinct movements, speaking in speech bubbles imported directly from newspaper comic strips...

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Remembering “Precious” on its 10th Anniversary

by Cláudio Alves

Considering I haven't watched it in almost 10 years, it was amazing how much I could accurately recall from Lee Daniel's Precious. As I revisited the Academy-Award winning film to write this piece, I found myself startled at how much of it had seared into my mind. A few line readings were so vivid that, even before hearing them again, they felt like echoes from years ago. Individual scenes had metastazied into memories like vociferous ghosts, brighter than any recollections of my actual life.

The way Gabourey Sidibe says that nobody loves her still hurts, a dagger of vulnerability mercilessly plunged into the audience's heart. No less affecting is Paula Patton's desperate response, assuring Claireece 'Precious' Jones that she is loved. Notice how Mariah Carey shows her social worker's interiority through repressed horror. She wears an armor of acerbity, delivering her lines with a put-upon dryness that both masks and iluminates the hurt inside. Then there's Mo'Nique and her final monologue, a sobbed question tearing through her throat and reminding us that this monster is painfully human. The film even packs some comedic delights. Who can forget Xosha Roquemore telling the class that her favorite color is fluorescent beige?

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