Is the "One-Inch Barrier" Falling?

by Eric Blume

Since Parasite's historic Best Picture win this past Sunday, the heat surrounding it has not let up. Though the movie is already available on DVD and Blu-Ray, it will expand to 2000 screens this weekend in US theaters and a Criterion Collection release has also been announced (along with Memories of Murder, Bong's original breakthrough title). Given the hoopla, the industry trade magazines are falling over themselves to write stories about the change that may come for international titles.  The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting article proclaiming that we'll be seeing many more foreign film titles in the American marketplace in the next few years.

This article gives big credit to Netflix for "global programming" that is helping people get over the "one-inch barrier" (i.e., subtitles) that has plagued marketing of foreign product over the decades.  It's an interesting take...

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The New Classics - A Separation

Michael Cusumano back again with my new series on great scenes/films of the 21st Century. This week a title we will surely hear often when the best of the decade lists start rolling in...

 

Scene: Razieh is Fired (aka The Incident)
It’s rare for a movie, even a great movie, to sneak up on the audience the way Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation does.

The screenplay is centered around an inflection point. Everything pulling the characters inexorably toward, or ricocheting off of, the moment when a man shoves a woman out his front door. Yet this action is not granted any special emphasis. First-time viewers have no clue they’ve witnessed the action around which the entire story pivots. It is only a few short scenes later, when the man is on trial for causing the miscarriage of the women he pushed (a murder charge in Iran) that the weight of that shove comes crashing home...

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Spain's Three Finalists (and other foreign film Oscar updates)

Time to start updating the Foreign Film Oscar submission charts on the regular! With the Venice/Telluride/TIFF wave about to hit we'll be getting regular news on which international films will be aiming for Oscar this season. Recently Spain announced their three finalists. They are...

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Cannes News: Everbody Knows, The Poster Unveils, and Netflix Whines

It's still wintry here in NYC (groan) but Spring technically arrived a little while ago which means that the Cannes film festival is right around the corner. Here are three pieces of news involving the festival which will run from May 8th to May 19th.

The Poster
This year's poster, pictured above, is a quad rather than a horizontal for some reason. Usually they come in both formats or are just horizontal. It's based on the work of stills photographer Georges Pierre and the Jean Luc Godard film Pierrot Le Fou (1965). That's two posters based on Godard films in fairly quick succession. Last year's poster featured 1960s Italian sex symbol Claudia Cardinale but the year before that the poster was in tribute to Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963)! 'Maybe Cannes ought to look beyond the 1960s and Godard sometime soon?,' he suggested with ribbing affection. 

Opening Night film and the Netflix controversy after the jump...

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The Furniture: The Salesman Crafts His Own Stage

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail. Here's Daniel Walber...

Asghar Farhadi's Oscar winning The Salesman begins with a set. The opening credits appear over the quiet stage of a small Tehran theater, nearly ready to debut a new production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. We see the bed before the actors who will lie in it, neon lights illuminated for an empty house. It is a quite literal setting of the stage before the drama begins.

It’s not a play adaptation, but it often feels like one. There are few locations and the cast is small. And, as in many play adaptations, the production design does a lot of heavy lifting...

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