So I was rooting around on IMDB the other day, and I came to Akira Kurosawa’s page, and here’s what I saw under “Director”:
Gendai no No (2010) (filming)
And I thought: You can’t fool me . . . Kurosawa’s been dead for years. Must be one of IMDB’s legendary mistakes. Just for yucks, I pressed the [...]
If you were asked what director had the most consistent, immediately recognizable style, what would you say? Although that sort of thing is hard to quantify, you’d be safe if you answered Yashujiro Ozu (right), the director of an astonishing 54 films over his 36-year career. He’s known for a style so minimalist as to [...]
Peter Bogdanovich has a great appreciation for Jean Renoir over at the New York Observer. He regards Renoir as “The Best Director, Ever,” and who am I to argue? He writes:
“In the 1950s, the Young Turks of the French New Wave—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, etc.—acclaimed Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock but reserved the [...]
What can I say about Jean Renoir? In my humble opinion, he is perhaps the best that ever was, if you discount, Kurosawa or Fellini or Bergman or . . . ok, ok, so I’m not ready to pronounce him the greatest, but based on his output before 1940, he’d have to be [...]
Note: This is part of the Invitation to the Dance Blogathon at Ferdy on Films.
To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a dance is just a dance . . . but sometimes it’s not. And among the more entertaining celluloid examples of when it’s not are by Federico Fellini. Actually, Freud doesn’t quite fit — [...]
What is there left to say about Federico Fellini? Possibly not much, but folks keep on trying. Several months ago I vowed … simply vowed … to visit all of his first movies, up through 8½, and then write some (possibly redundant) but hopefully interesting stuff about them. I thought I’d churn [...]
Do you love Ingmar Bergman but would also love to see an affectionate send-up? Do you hate him, think his films are the most pompous pieces of flammable celluloid ever to haunt the planet? Feel just . . . feh! about him but have nothing else to do? Well, have I [...]
Variety Lights ends where it begins, on a train with Checco Dal Monte (a third-rate singer played by Peppino de Filippo) leering at a young show-biz wanna-be. Well, it doesn’t quite begin there . . . there’s a prologue that shows the charmingly inept musical-comedy troupe Checco “headlines” doing their thing, to not very [...]
Federico Fellini famously named a film 8½, based on the fact that he’d directed seven and a half before that. So, as many a Fellini fan before me, I counted them: six feature-length films on his own (The White Sheik, I Vitelloni, La Strada, Il Bidone, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita), one (Variety Lights) [...]
Way back in August of ‘07, after the death of Ingmar Bergman, Jonathan Rosenbaum launched an attack on his legacy. Of course, that was his right, and I appreciate Mr. Rosenbaum’s criticism . . . it goes beyond the synopsis-and-a-three-stars-style of many critics. But his attack, which seemed mean-spirited so soon after Bergman’s death, sparked [...]
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