Wes Anderson – Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

 Wes Anderson   Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

logoimdbb Wes Anderson   Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Film review by Philip French
The Observer
Saturday 26, May 2012

Wes Anderson’s films – seven of them since his debut with Bottle Rocket in 1996 – constitute a consistent oeuvre. They’re comedies tinged with a certain tragic sense of life. Various actors recur, most notably Jason Schwartzman as a geeky young man, Luke Wilson as a quirky thirtysomething and Bill Murray as a middle-aged curmudgeon. The films pursue groups of eccentric figures who make up families of a kind generally characterised as “dysfunctional”, invariably attracting references to Tolstoy’s dubious claim that happy families are all alike and unhappy families are unhappy in their different ways. They’re also exquisitely composed and lit and accompanied by an interesting, often surprising choice of music.

Initially I had reservations over Anderson’s whimsicality and wilful cultivation of the irrational. I was eventually won over by his last feature but one, the beautiful The Darjeeling Limited, in which three American brothers are brought together on a train journey across India a year after their father’s death. Continue reading

Edda Baumann von Broen – Durch die Nacht mit… John Landis & Terry Gilliam (2012)

 Edda Baumann von Broen   Durch die Nacht mit... John Landis & Terry Gilliam (2012)

(from arte.tv)

Quote:
Gilliam war der kreativste Kopf der unvergleichlichen Komikertruppe Monty Python, bevor er als Regisseur Meisterwerke wie “Brazil” und “12 Monkeys” schuf – aber auch ebenso große Flops. Mit seinem Projekt “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” scheiterte er spektakulär. Dokumentiert wurde der katastrophale Dreh und dessen Abbruch in dem inzwischen legendären Film “Lost in La Mancha”.

John Landis Filme wie “The Blues Brothers” und “American Werewolf” haben weit über eine Milliarde Dollar eingespielt – und Landis kennt Hollywood wie kaum ein anderer. Schon als Jugendlicher arbeitet er als Mailboy bei 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles, dann als Stuntman, Dialog-Coach, Schauspieler, Regie- und Produktionsassistent, unter anderem bei “Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod”. Und als ein gewisser Michael Jackson ihn um ein Video für einen Song namens “Thriller” anfragte, schrieb Landis Geschichte – der 15-minütige Clip gilt noch heute als das beste Musikvideo aller Zeiten. Continue reading

Joshua Oppenheimer & Anonymous & Christine Cynn – The Act of Killing (2012)

 Joshua Oppenheimer & Anonymous & Christine Cynn   The Act of Killing (2012)

logoimdbb Joshua Oppenheimer & Anonymous & Christine Cynn   The Act of Killing (2012)

Quote:
The Act of Killing (Indonesian: ”Jagal”) is a 2012 documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

When Sukarno was overthrown by Suharto following the tragic 30 September Movement in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.

Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers, and they are happy to boast about everything from corruption and election rigging to genocide. Continue reading

Jacques Rivette – Out 1: Spectre (1974)

 Jacques Rivette   Out 1: Spectre (1974)

logoimdbb Jacques Rivette   Out 1: Spectre (1974)

Quote:
“Very rarely seen, this is the ‘short’ version of the 12-hour Out 1. In editing out a more modest film, Rivette tried to make something as unlike the original as possible. Nevertheless, Spectre is one of the greatest achievements in the cinema of duration and narrative pattern. As much an admirer of Lang as of Renoir, Rivette sought to combine ‘storyness’ with the most evident virtues of real time. His films begin to respond to the affinity between real life and movie—going on, nearly forever, free and open to any event—while gradually guiding this mass of material towards the kinds of design that we, the viewers or the readers, cannot help but see. Out 1: Spectre begins as nothing more than scenes from Parisian life; only as time goes by do we realize that there is a plot—perhaps playful, perhaps sinister—that implicates not just the thirteen characters (including Léaud, as the mystery’s self-styled detective), but maybe everyone, everywhere. Real life may be nothing but an enormous yarn someone somewhere is spinning.”

—David Thomson Continue reading

Budd Boetticher – A Time for Dying (1969)

 Budd Boetticher   A Time for Dying (1969)

logoimdbb Budd Boetticher   A Time for Dying (1969)

Synopsis
This unique western centers on an innocent farm boy with a talent for handling guns who decides to make it big. He begins as a bounty hunter. Later he encounters a crazed gunslinger and ends up fatally shot. Before the fateful encounter, the young man is visited by a number of mythical western heroes including Judge Roy Bean, seen as a sentimental drunk, and Jesse James who gives the boy some good advice. Continue reading

Fred Haines – Steppenwolf (1974)

 Fred Haines   Steppenwolf (1974)

logoimdbb Fred Haines   Steppenwolf (1974)

Plot Synopsis: In the bourgeois circles of Europe after the Great War, can anything save the modern man? Harry Haller, a solitary intellectual, has all his life feared his dual nature of being human and being a beast. He’s decided to die on his 50th birthday, which is soon. He’s rescued from his solipsism by the mysterious Hermine, who takes him dancing, introduces him to jazz and to the beautiful and whimsical Maria, and guides him into the hallucinations of the Magic Theater, which seem to take him into Hell. Can humor, sin, and derision lead to salvation? Continue reading

pixel Fred Haines   Steppenwolf (1974)