Author Archives: afs.admin

1. Happy 90th Birthday to the Legendary Angela Lansbury

   October 16, 2015 7:55 pm Leave a Comment

   Happy 90th Birthday to the truly great Dame Angela Lansbury. Here she is singing “Goodbye, Yellow Bird” from THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY 70 (!) years ago.

   There are stars who are gifted with personalities that shine through everything they do, and she is certainly so gifted. Then there are performers so intelligent and hard-working that they continually seem to get even better, even when that scarcely seems possible. This also applies to Lansbury. She was not a movie star in the classic mold, but she made such an impression in roles such as the Cockney maid in GASLIGHT (1944) and singing Sibyl Vane in THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945, see below) that the public saw her worth well before the studios did.

   You would have to have your head in a bag not to see what was so special about Lansbury in this scene from THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, made when she was barely out of her teens. The eyes have it. She’s one of the great ones and we’re lucky to have her. It was this performance that prompted Pauline Kael to muse: “I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend who didn’t treasure that girl and that song.”
   
   

2. Watch This: John Carpenter talks Directorial Style, Hawks, Ford & Horror Films

   4:52 pm Leave a Comment

   “Style is all about instinct. It’s all about how a director sees things. If you watch any of the directors that you admire… you can see what their concerns are and how they approach things, how they approach the characters, how they approach the world they’re in. So it’s an instinctual type thing. A director makes movies about himself. All the time. In some way or another. It’s finding a way to express in visual terms the instincts that you have, the feelings that you have inside.”

   Here’s a nice interview with a writer/director whose films are synonymous with this time of year. John Carpenter went to USC film school in 1968, where he wrote and edited an Oscar winning short film. Another student film was enlarged and released as the sci-fi parody DARK STAR (1974), and he was off to the races. His next film, the urban action film ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), combined elements of westerns and horror films in some startlingly effective ways. The runaway success of his third feature, HALLOWEEN (1978) set the (insistent, pulsing) tone for the rest of his career, and for the next ten years of horror films.

   In the interview below (just follow along to part 2, etc.) Carpenter shares his philosophy of filmmaking as well as a little bit about his beginnings and early influences.

3. Nappy Birthday to Director Mira Nair

   October 15, 2015 5:00 pm Leave a Comment

   Director Mira Nair, born on this day in India in 1957, first came to international prominence with her striking 1988 feature SALAAM BOMBAY!, which takes viewers into the streets of Mumbai to observe the particulars of life of homeless children. The film won a number of awards and was widely screened in art houses around the world.

   Her next few films were made in the U.S., her adopted country. It was her return to India however that inspired her greatest success to date, MONSOON WEDDING (2001) which takes viewers behind the scenes of a traditional Indian arranged wedding, with very funny and keenly observed portraits of the participants. The film was a major international hit and set a record as the highest grossing Indian movie of all time.

   In the years since she has directed a number of films including a 2004 adaptation of VANITY FAIR, THE NAMESAKE in 2006 and the Amelia Earhart biopic AMELIA (2009).

   Here she is on the film that changed her life, and it’s a somewhat surprising choice: Gilles Pontecorvo’s BATTLE OF ALGIERS:

4. John Sayles to Write New DJANGO Western with Franco Nero to Star

   October 14, 2015 4:28 pm Leave a Comment

   The Hollywood Reporter posted yesterday that John Sayles has been engaged to write a new DJANGO film. The first DJANGO film was made by the great Sergio Corbucci in 1966. While there are a couple of semi-official sequels, the name Django caught on with quick buck exploitation producers and they slapped it on many films with no connection to the original character or film, much like the way the name Bruce Lee was appended to numerous films that had nothing to do with Bruce Lee at all.

   It’s a major coup to land not only Sayles but also Nero, who, though in his seventies now, is a fine actor and a link to the authentic spaghetti western past. No director has been announced, but perhaps those of us who love Westerns All’Italiana may be forgiven for holding out hope that Enzo Castellari gets the assignment. Castellari has worked with Nero many times and may just be, along with the less action-oriented Sergio Martino, the greatest living Italian genre director.

   You can see rare, and hysterical, footage of Castellari on set below (starting at about 5:22). It’s a corny, staged (and weirdly dubbed) interview, but you get an idea about Castellari’s vigorous style.

   The whole doc is pretty great actually. Enjoy, and start getting excited.

5. Happy Birthday to Master Provocateur Dusan Makavejev

   October 13, 2015 4:45 pm Leave a Comment

   Dusan Makavejev is one of our greatest and most important filmmakers. Born in Serbia on this day in 1932, he studied psychology before he began making films. His initial efforts trod the boundary line of social and political acceptability, mainly due to their sexual content. With 1971’s W.R. MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM, he obliterated that line, with extremely frank sexual content and a playful, satirical approach to politics that went right over the heads of even the relatively liberal Yugoslavian government. His next film, made in Canada was the legendarily profane and divisive SWEET MOVIE (1974), which is very likely the most graphic and transgressive film to play in international arthouses. As an international exile he continued making movies in Western Europe and elsewhere

   Here is a multipart interview with Makavejev in which he ruminates about his aesthetic choices and beliefs. He seems like a nice man, and not at all like a bomb-throwing anarchist, except for a slight twinkle in his eye.

   An excerpt:

   “Creative people don’t need to know exactly what they are doing. I’m not saying that God is talking through them but something is talking through the artist. I think that the work of the artist is a form of art. You create an interplay between certain forms. Now, is it characters in a story, through the action, or is it interplay between background and foreground… , is it people in landscapes, close-ups and wide shots, zooms, movements? But it’s all formal games. It’s all formal work, what you do. Of course you always claim that, ‘OK, this is the story I want to say’ but the story’s always a pretext, the story’s always a trigger, the story is something that will help you and the crew to get into creative work.”

6. Director Brian Trenchard-Smith on the Life and Legacy of Bruce Lee

   October 12, 2015 5:05 pm Leave a Comment

   There’s a nice Bruce Lee article on the site Talkhouse this week. Brian Trenchard-Smith is a very prolific director of (mostly) low-budget fare. Don’t let the downmarket pedigree fool you though, he is a very smart man and a clever, talented filmmaker.

   His piece on Bruce Lee, still the most influential martial arts star ever despite his comparatively minuscule filmed output and early death at the age of 32, has some nice insight about Bruce and his place in film and cultural history, and the director recalls his ill-fated trip to meet Lee and pitch the film that eventually became Trenchard-Smith’s gonzo action thrill-ride THE MAN FROM HONG KONG.

   Most interestingly is Trenchard-Smith’s perspective as a director and it’s Lee the director as much as Lee the star he mourns.

   “He was only 32, with a grasp of the dynamics of action staging that was ahead of the curve. He planned to put spiritual content and Asian values into his forthcoming Hollywood movies. What might his oeuvre have contained if he was still directing today in his seventies and beyond, like Scorsese, Eastwood and Ridley Scott?”

   Lee only signed one film as director but he is as much auteur of his films as a great comedy team is of theirs. You can see his mark in the staging of action, the casting and even in aesthetic decisions made for non-action scenes. It is easy to pick out which scenes in his early films were not directed by Lee because of their lack of dynamism and reliance on cheap corner-cutting techniques. As he grew older he would probably have become primarily a director, and we are all the worse for not having decades of Bruce Lee films to enjoy.

7. Happy Birthday Guillermo del Toro: Watch His Spellbinding Texas Film Awards Speech

   October 9, 2015 5:10 pm Leave a Comment

   Every year at the Texas Film Awards, all of us AFS staffers are busy running around, doing our jobs,  trying to appear convivial and have fun while simultaneously doing what we can to make the show run well. As a result, we don’t often get to see the speeches and presentations onstage except in hurried, overheard, incomplete sections. But there was one speaker this year who made us all stop in our tracks, hit pause, and listen.

   Guillermo del Toro, who was presented with an Honorary Texan Award that night, gave an acceptance speech that did no harm to his reputation as a warm, witty and engaging extemporaneous speaker. His speech is by turns funny and heartfelt. You can watch the whole thing here, including the presentation by Robert Rodriguez and the highlight montage, on the occasion of his 51st birthday today. Happy birthday GDT!

8. Klaus Kinski Was So Difficult That One of His Producers Plotted to Kill Him for the Insurance Money

   October 7, 2015 8:48 pm Leave a Comment

   Klaus Kinski, who died back in 1991, had a well-deserved reputation for being a difficult actor. He could be a pussycat in meetings or in social situations but as soon as he was on set he was undercutting everyone, starting fights, sowing discord and being a very bad team player.

   Werner Herzog’s documentary MY BEST FIEND tells the Kinski story best, but David Schmoeller’s short film PLEASE KILL MR. KINSKI (1999) is comfortably in second place. Here Schmoeller tells the story of hiring Kinski for his 1986 horror film CRAWLSPACE, realizing that Kinski was uncontrollable, being refused permission by the distribution partner to fire Kinski, and being confronted with the Italian producer’s drastic Plan B: to kill Kinski and collect the insurance money.

   As is often the case, the truth is much stranger than fiction. Here’s Schmoeller to tell the story.

9. “She Was Cinema” Chantal Akerman’s J’AI FAIM, J’AI FROID

   October 6, 2015 4:12 pm Leave a Comment

   Chantal Akerman, whose death was announced yesterday, was one of a small number of filmmaking masters who could be considered a great artist worthy of mention with the best of all time. Though her best known film is the masterpiece JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES made in 1975 when she was only 25, she was a prolific filmmaker, often working in the medium of short films.

   The following short film, J’AI FAIM, J’AI FROID from 1984 gives an idea of the new, and influential, sense of pacing that Akerman brought to her films. A filmmaker’s tempo, in editing, performance and movement, is regulated by her “beats.” Each filmmaker has his or her own time units. Akerman’s time unit of choice, as her friend Nicola Mazzani recounted, was the breath. From Akerman’s New York Time’s obituary:

   Mr. Mazzanti recalled asking Ms. Akerman how she had edited “Hotel Monterey,” a silent film about a Lower Manhattan hotel that she had made in 1972.

   “She said, ‘I was breathing, and then at one point I understood it was the time to cut. It was my breathing that decided the length of my shots,’ ” he said. “That’s Chantal Akerman. She breathed through the films,” he said. “She was cinema.”

10. Watch Groucho Marx Get Completely Freaked Out with Hilarious Results

    October 2, 2015 4:59 pm Leave a Comment

    Groucho Marx, born on this day in 1890, is rightly considered one of the quickest wits ever to trod the boards. After a long stage and screen career, he, at an age when most people retire, became the host of a game show YOU BET YOUR LIFE, first on radio and then on TV. It is a terrific show, entirely because of Groucho’s improvisational talent. Also, his producers were skilled at finding contestants who would bring out the best in Groucho.

    Here’s one of the very best, a man who calls himself Albert Hall. His protruding eyes are like gasoline on the fire of Groucho’s comic genius and the results are pretty hot stuff.

11. Great Actor & Hell-Raising Hall-Of-Famer Richard Harris Born On This Day in 1930

    October 1, 2015 5:36 pm Leave a Comment

    The Irish actor Richard Harris, who died in 2002, would have been 85 years old had he lived, which, considering his well known excesses (he diagnosed himself as “excessive-compulsive”), was not likely or maybe even possible. He was one of the most naturally gifted actors of his time, with a reputation as a dissolute drinker, which he shared with his best drinking buddies Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. Drunk or not, he was a masterful stage and screen actor with a powerful, often menacing presence.

    Known in his later years for his role as Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter movies, he had a much more varied and interesting film career than many of his latter day fans may have realized, starring in big-budget Hollywood films as well as auteurist classics like Lindsay Anderson’s THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963) (his breakout role), Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964) and Peckinpah’s MAJOR DUNDEE (1965); as well as oddball classics like John Frankenheimer’s wiggy comic-book mess 99 & 44/100% DEAD (1974), the interesting mid-’70s Richard Lester films JUGGERNAUT (1974) and ROBIN & MARIAN (1976), surprise hit A MAN CALLED HORSE (1970) and its sequels; and many, many more, a good number of which were not up to his level, but which no doubt helped him with his alimony and bar tabs. The talent and presence were still there though, as he proved in his supporting performance as English Bob (bitter irony that for an Irishman who had faced his share of discrimination at the hands of the English) in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 UNFORGIVEN. Along the way he even had a hit record with his version of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park.”

    Here he is on the popular British interview show PARKINSON in 1973, talking about his life, career, and co-stars. Don’t miss his Marlon Brando impression that is at the same time an astute and actorly observation. Follow the links to see the later chapters of the interview.

12. Watch This: Ivan Cardoso’s 1982 Brazilian Horror Oddity SECRET OF THE MUMMY

    September 29, 2015 6:08 pm Leave a Comment

    This excerpt from the ultra-low budget 1982 horror by Brazilian basement auteur certainly holds up well today. Cardoso surfaced on the radar of American horror fans with an early ’90s Something Weird Video release called NOSFERATU IN BRAZIL which compiled a number of Cardoso’s films.

    Those expecting something more akin to the work of his countryman Jose Mojica Marins (who appears in this film), were disappointed. It’s more Kuchar than Coffin Joe, and it has a sincerity than will never go out of fashion. Most surprisingly, perhaps, is the presence of THE SECOND MOTHER standout Regina Casé.

    Looking forward to seeing the entire film someday. If anybody has it, send it along.