Here’s a tiny bulletin to those of our readers who are able to watch public Swedish television: consider watching Moebius Redux tonight on SV2. It’s a rather new documentary by Hasko Baumann, starring Stan Lee, Jodorowsky, Mike Mignola, H. R. Giger, Bilal, Jim Lee and others. It starts at 20.00. Art: Moebius, from Le Garage…
One of the greatest sensual dancers of the Hollywood musical has passed away. Indelible in Singin’ in the Rain, where she appears in just one scene — the deliciously surreal dream sequence set piece of the movie — and irresistible in The Bandwagon where she weaves silver screen magic with Fred Astaire (see exhibit A…
One of Hollywood’s elder statesmen, the director, actor and producer Sidney Pollack has died. He was one of Tinseltown’s consummate craftsmen, never flashy but always solid — a comfortable presence in American mainstream cinema that, much like his contemporary Sidney Lumet, never lost sight of quality and subtle auteurial voice. From the caustically satirical They…
Charles de Lauzirika, the filmmaker and producer who worked with Ridley Scott on Blade Runner: The Final Cut, has responded to my criticisms and talks about some of the choices behind the restoration in the BladeZone forum. Here’s a slightly condensed version of our exchange:
Lest you’d missed it, it is festival season. So here’s another round of hype. This time for the newly initiated Oslo Comix Expo, which was held for the first time last year. It was a considerable success — a really pleasant and unpretentious, but still ambitious and well-organised little festival (read more here and here).…
The long-awaited Blade Runner — The Final Cut, which was released last autumn in a new transfer in digital format, is in many ways a model example of how to restore and update a classic film. It contains none of the ill-advised anachronisms seen in such projects as the remastered Star Wars movies, and neither…
The picks of the week from around the web. Winsor McCay’s 1911 Little Nemo cartoon (above). For no other reason that it’s bloody awesome. McCay’s all the rage again, here’s a good article by Jeet Heer. Great DJ Shadow breaks mix. Kinda the Cliff’s notes to a bunch of Shadow classics, but first and foremost…
One of the fifty vignettes in Roy Andersson’s new film, Du Levande — or You, the Living in English — takes place in a basement-level office of what looks like a small-time service-provider, run in the old school fashion, on coffee and danish with dirty shirtsleeves, junk in the corners. A portly man sits at…
So Charlton Heston died yesterday. A major figure in the 50s and 60s Hollywood blockbuster tradition, serving up some of the most bombastic and histrionic moments in American film. He deserves some kind of respect for that, even if his role in the powerful and destructive American gun lobby will forever tarnish his reputation in…
Saw Geert Wilders’ piece of hate-filled garbage yesterday, just before it got pulled from Liveleak. Pretending to merely be a critique of the Koran, this is straight-up racist hate speech, equating as it does the worst excesses of Islamist extremism with the over one million muslims currently living in Holland. Seriously, the animation in the…
The picks of the week from around the web. Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers. Cool Swedish short. Tom Breihan: In Defense of Li’l Wayne’s “Lollypop.” This is a pretty impressive feat of criticism; writing substantially about a song that has nothing in it — no hook, trite sexual analogy, lots of synth/vocoder: unabashed…
As a little gesture to honor the creative work and vision of Anthony Minghella, whose untimely death last week marks a real and serious loss to the British film industry, I wanted to refer you to my favourite piece in his director’s oeuvre: Play, his unforgettable film version of the stage play by Beckett. The…
We MUST make this work. We MUST have a kind of integration where we can be both Christian and Muslim and live next door to each other. But we need unequivocal support for democracy. For our basic rights. For the equality of the sexes. And this applies to everyone in this country. — Villy Søvndal,…
The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a…
The picks of the week from around the web. Frank Rich: “The Billary Road to Republican Victory”. The New York Times‘ great op-ed columnist looks ahead at what a Hillary Clinton ticket for the presidency might mean for the presidential elections. An interesting corrective to the otherwise commonplace view that Hillary is the stronger candidate…