Miyazaki To Retire (Again)

Anne Marie here, with some news I have been trying desperately to ignore all weekend: Hayao Miyazaki is officially retiring. It's worth noting that this isn't the first time the master animator has announced his retirement. But each time he threatens to leave, a little color goes out of the world.

My feelings at this exact moment.

Miyazaki is one of those unique artists who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary, and draws from a seemingly inexhaustable wellspring of imagination. My favorite film is Princess Mononoke only because it was the first Miyazaki film I saw, and I was thus completely overwhelmed by the movie.

What's your favorite Miyazaki film? Do you fear this retirement is the permanent one?

Interior. Link Post.

AV Club what if you could hit "pause" on pop culture -- what would you catch up on?
Daily Beast an uninhibited interview with the stars of Blue is the Warmest Colour on working with "fake pussies" and watching the movie with their families
Glenn Dunks enters Interior. Leather Bar 
Cinema Blend on Zach Snyder's continued defense of Man of Steel's insane body count -- which ruined the movie for a lot of people, my friends at Panel Culture included, because... seriously, what kind of hero is that?
Pajiba wants to get away from The Getaway 

The New Yorker on the list as the signature form of our time "a comic nightmare of futile enumeration"
Ultra Culture on an important underreported piece of info from that Lars von Trier Uma Thurman Nymphomaniac clip 
Awards Daily Sasha reviews Gravity which she calls a masterpiece. Here's the thing about festivals. They are both a blessing and a curse on the world. One wants to avoid the movies that have upcoming release dates but then you end up being the last person to see them -- i haven't read this for fear of spoilers I'm just saying a lot of reviews are out there now floating in space. How to resist seeing it at TIFF when there are movies that I'm much less likely to get the chance to see next month? 
In Contention on a Marilyn Monroe Bruce Dern prophecy that's coming true with Nebraska
LA Times Jason Reitman's Labor Day premieres - sucks that it isn't in theaters now during, uh, Labor Day.

Oooh, Maggie is staring at you.

That's one version of the new poster for the 50th annual Golden Horse Awards. It looks like a delicious VIP ticket, yes? Basically Maggie Cheung's eyes are the selling point on each poster. The Golden Horse Awards are Asia's oldest film awards and still its most competitive. Nominations will be announced on October 1st and will see how well this year's hot titles like Stray Dogs, A Touch of Sin, and The Grandmaster do. The awards ceremony will be held in late November. Ang Lee, who has won two Golden Horses as Best Director (Lust Caution, The Wedding Banquet) and two Oscars for Best Director (Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi), is president of the jury this year.

Review: The Grandmaster

Dancin' Dan here with my take on one of my most anticipated films of the year.

It's often easy to forget that the martial arts indeed are art, despite the fact that the word is right there in their given name. Practioners of kung fu, or karate, or judo hone their craft just as intensely (if not more so) as any painter, dancer, musician, actor, or filmmaker practices theirs. And to watch martial artists perform (that is, to fight) is quite often just as much of an awe-inspiring spectacle as it is to, say, watch Cate Blanchett navigate the course of Jasmine's unraveling. Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster, far more than any martial arts movie in recent memory, understands this.

One might expect no less from a film directed by Kar-Wai, cinema's premiere sensualist. And on this point, at least, he doesn't disappoint. [more...]

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40 Years a Dragon

Hey all, it's Tim. The twin altars of worship at The Film Experience are Actresses and the Oscars, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I take a moment to go as far as possible in the opposite direction from either of those points, all the way to the land of grind houses and the classic age of chop socky martial arts film. For this weekend marks the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. release of the iconic Bruce Lee vehicle Enter the Dragon, and with the imminent North American debut of Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, the story “of the man who trained Bruce Lee”, as the ads insistently proclaim, it seems the ideal moment to visit a legendary film that, to my shame, I had never seen before.

Stories don’t get a whole lot more basic: Han (Shih Kien) the shadowy crimelord owner of an island just barely grazing the edge of Hong Kong’s territorial waters has proclaimed a martial arts tournament, and among the many fighters in attendance are three whose private reasons for attending are revealed to us: Lee (Bruce Lee) has been sent by the British government, hunting for illegal arms and primed to get revenge for the life of his sister, killed by Han’s goons; Roper (John Saxon) is hoping to scare up a lot of money immediately before the mobsters he’s in debt to break his legs; Willam (Jim Kelly) is on the run from… racism? Anyway, he’s there too, and he’s old war buddies with Roper. In between scenes of the competitors fighting in the tournament, there are scenes of them fighting in the shadow recess of Han’s palace, attempting to take down his empire of evil. [more...]

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Let us now praise Japanese monsters

Hi everybody, it’s Tim, using the impending release of Pacific Rim as a bald-faced excuse to talk about one of the greatest guilty pleasures in the whole of cinema: THE GIANT MONSTER MOVIE.

Guillermo del Toro’s extravagant, costly tentpole picture is, of course, a well-publicized love letter to the Japanese genre known as kaiju eiga: the giant monster movies born from the iconic 1954 Godzilla. These quickly descended from the relative sincerity and social messaging of that film (or the contemporaneous American production Them!) into trashy action films that further descended into silly matinee pictures, borne on the wings of the legendarily awful Baby Godzilla, and his soullessly googly eyes. [more...]

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