Vitro Nasu

Guardian Obit – RIP Peter Brook

(English theatre and film director Peter Brook was the first person to win the International Ibsen Award, in 2008.)

Moderato Cantabile

This was Peter Brook’s second movie, coming seven years after his first, The Beggar’s Opera (1953); it’s surprising that it seems largely to have dropped off the radar, especially since it brought Moreau the Best Actress award at Cannes that year (shared with Melina Mercouri for Never on Sunday [1960]), with Brook being nominated for the Palme d’Or. It features also an exceptional performance from Belmondo, gloriously miscast and rising to the challenge: instead of his customary extrovert swagger we have here a rendition of great restraint.

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They Say Nothing Stays Same (Aru Sendou no hanashi)

Odagiri’s somber observations about transition within tradition make for a meditative, rewarding viewing experience.
Ten years after his debut feature, Looking for Cherry Blossoms (2009), actor-turned-director Joe Odagiri‘s belated follow-up, They Say Nothing Stays the Same, was selected in a sidebar of 2019’s Venice Film Festival.

Joe Odagiri

photo by Masatoshi Nagase

Immunodeficiency – MUBI (See photos of Chris Doyle, Tilda Swinton and Joe Odagiri.. future project?)

As an actor Odagiri joe was directed by Kim Ki Duk, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hirokazu Koreeda.

Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami June 22, 1940 – July 2016 (previous post)

Billy Wilder

was born on June 22, 1906[6] to a family of Polish Jews in Sucha Beskidzka, a small town which, at that time, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Ranking the films of Billy Wilder

Kris Kristofferson
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Happy birthday Kris Kristofferson!
His film career.
He appeared in Blume in Love (1973) directed by Paul Mazursky, and three Sam Peckinpah films: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), and Convoy (1978) and Michael Ritchie’s Semi-Tough (1977) with Burt Reynolds. He continued acting in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Vigilante Force (1976), and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976), the romantic drama A Star Is Born (1976) with Barbra Streisand, for which he received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor soon followed.

Film titan Jean Louis Trintignant dies aged 91

Actor and amateur racer passes away at his home in south-west France after cancer battle

Jean Louis Trintignant A Life in Pictures

(The Conformist)

(The Conformist with Dominique Sanda)

Jean Louis Trintignant

He made his theatrical debut in 1951, going on to be seen as one of the most gifted French dramatic actors of the post-war era, known for his starring roles in many classic films of European cinema. He worked with many prominent auteur directors, including Roger Vadim, Costa-Gavras, Claude Lelouch, Claude Chabrol, Bernardo Bertolucci, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Krzysztof Kieślowski and Michael Haneke.

(“Red” directed by Kieslowski, J.L. Trintignant starring with Irene Jacob)

Robbe Grillet
Trans Europe Express a film directed by Alain Robbe Grillet

Jean Louis Trintignant surprises in Amour

Eric Rohmer directed Jean Louis Trintignant in My Night at Maud

(Il Sorpasso – directed by Dino Risi – with Vittorio Gassman)

(Catherine Spaak with Vittorio Gassman and Jean Louis Trintignant)
(Il Sorpasso – directed by Dino Risi)

Amy Tan pays tribute to James Redford

It’s always a sad day when a parent outlives their child, and such a tragic event has occurred in retired acting legend Robert Redford’s household.

Robert Redford and James Redford

Author Any Tan and her mother in a still used in James Redford’s documentary “Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir.”

“I was very reluctant to do it, but Jamie was a very charming person,” Tan said. “… When I watched this documentary, I said, ‘Gosh, I look like I’m on the verge of crying all the time,’ and I think that I was, because it was just talking to him and very openly. He was somebody that I trusted so much that I felt he was never going to judge me, he was never going to pity me, he was just going to listen.”
The two became close during the nearly three years spent making the film.

“He got a little obsessed with Amy, I have to say,” said Kyle Redford, with a laugh. “We couldn’t get into a car without playing one of Amy’s stories. No music, no NPR anymore, just Amy on audio!”

Kyle Redford said her husband was drawn to making a documentary about Tan because he needed a break from “problem” documentaries, which he felt had saturated the market —and yet her story appealed to his sensibilities.

(Liverpool – MUBI )

Eureka – Viggo’s new film with Jauja director Lisandro Alonso

The first part of the film, titled “Western” and set on the U.S.-Mexico border, will have echos of Jauja but is not a sequel, following Mortensen playing a father named Murphy searching for his daughter (Agger), who has been kidnapped. The second part of the film, titled “Pine Ridge,” is set in South Dakota on a Native American Reservation in the present-day. While there aren’t details on Part 3 yet, Part 4, titled “Amazonia,” will follow a character named Ubirajara, “a member of a far happier indigenous settlement in the Amazon who goes off to dig for gold, contracting, literally, gold fever.”

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Happy birthday Lisandro Alonso

Photo via Frank Zappa Hot Rats Anniversary Collection

“Zappa” documentary directed by Alex Winter
(Streaming at Kanopy)

Alex Winter’s Documentary Hauntingly Captures the Skewed Passion of Frank Zappa, a One-of-a-Kind Rock Legend
The film finds an emotional through line by taking Frank Zappa as seriously as he took himself.

Zappa and Vaclav Havel – see the photo of them, here.
(Zappa’s visit to Prague was covered in this documentary).

Letter to Edgard Varese, Zappa was 16 years old

Dear Sir:

Perhaps you might remember me from my stupid phone call last January, if not, my name again is Frank Zappa Jr. I am 16 years old … that might explain partly my disturbing you last winter. The reason for my letter at this time is that I am visiting relatives in Baltimore and as long as I am on the East Coast I hope I can get to see you.

It might seem strange but ever since I was 13 I have been interested in your music. The whole thing stems from the time when the keeper of this little record store sold me your album “The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Vol.l.” The only reason I knew it existed was that an article in either LOOK or the POST mentioned it as being noisy and unmusical and only good for trying out the sound systems in high fidelity units (referring to your “IONIZATIONS” [sic]). I don’t know how the store I got it from ever obtained it, but, after several hearings, I became curious and bought it for $5.40, which, at the time seemed awfully high and being so young, kept me broke for three weeks. Now I wouldn’t trade it for anything and I am looking around for another copy as the one I have is very worn and scratchy.

Kronos

See Frank Zappa art

Zappa Homepage

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(Kamikaze Girls – singer Anna Tsuchiya as Ichigo – the biker girl, she was ferocious.)

Lolita Fashion, Biker Gangs and the Power of Friendship

One thing about this film that really stood out to me is the stylish editing and cinematography.

Kamikaze Girls wiki

Kamikaze Girls was awarded Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, and two other awards at the 26th Yokohama Film Festival.[8] It also won Best Film and Best Director at the 14th Japan Film Professional Awards.[15] For her performance in the film, Anna Tsuchiya was named Best New Actress at the Awards of the Japanese Academy, the Blue Ribbon Awards, and the Hochi Film Awards

Fred with Ann Archer

219G-148-001
SHORT CUTS PORTRAITS

Via Adrian Martin from FB. (I did not know that Fred Ward was directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet)

R.I.P. Fred Ward. A great actor, and what an incredible range of directors he managed to work with: Roberto Rossellini, Walter Hill, Jonathan Demme, Don Siegel, Beth B, Philip Kaufman, Dennis Hopper, George Armitage, Rachel Talalay, Errol Morris, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, Michael Apted, Howard Zieff … and Alain Robbe-Grillet ! … and I haven’t even made it yet to the delightful SECRET ADMIRER.

Henry & June

Fred Ward wiki

Freddie Joe Ward was born in San Diego on December 30, 1942.[1][2] He was part Cherokee.[3] His father was an alcoholic who was frequently incarcerated, and his parents separated when he was three. His mother remarried, to a man who worked in a carnival, and the family moved frequently.[4]> Before acting, Ward spent three years in the United States Air Force. He was also a boxer (breaking his nose three times) and worked as a lumberjack in Alaska,[5][6] a janitor, and a short-order cook. He studied acting at New York’s Herbert Berghof Studio after serving in the U.S. Air Force. While living in Rome, he dubbed Italian films into English and appeared in films by neorealist director Roberto Rossellini

Guardian obit

Veteran actor Fred Ward, star of The Right Stuff and Tremors, dies aged 79

The character actor was part of the ensemble casts of Robert Altman’s films Short Cuts and The Player, and had a career in film and television that spanned five decades

One of the most captivating documentaries about a journalist I’ve seen in a long while. If you are parents of teenagers, show this film, they can learn important history of America, not just Rock’n Roll.

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(Ben Fong-Torres (left) and Art Garfunkel (right) mimic a famous album cover)

Ben Fong Torres wiki

He conducted interviews for Rolling Stone of entertainment figures including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, comedian Steve Martin and Linda Ronstadt’s first cover story in 1975. He also profiled Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Bonnie Raitt, Paul McCartney and Rodney Dangerfield. A Fong-Torres interview with Ray Charles was awarded the Deems Taylor Award for Magazine Writing in 1974.

Fong-Torres was also a rock DJ for San Francisco radio station KSAN-FM in the 1970s. He later hosted a live, weekly entertainment and talk show, Fog City Radio, on NPR affiliate KQED-FM. On television, he is the five-time Emmy Award-winning co-anchor of the Chinese New Year Parade broadcast on KTVU (Fox) in San Francisco.

Little Joe Jessica Hausner Sci-fi Plant Horror Drama

Emily Beecham won the best actress award at Cannes 2019

Colin Marshall..

Jeanne Dielman understands what all the best works of cinema do: implication and occurrence are two different things. Where so many mediocre films deal in visual shorthand that merely suggests to us that certain events have happened, this one has its events actually take place. That this builds their importance far beyond any quick-cut battle for the very future of humanity might point toward an answer to the feminist question: these are domestic duties we’re watching, and the film treats them with a gravity that somehow goes beyond aesthetics. You could call its story tragic, but just by existing it demonstrates an artistic fact that’s sadder than anything going on in its content. By letting its content dictate its form — or rather, by letting its content and form exist in symbiosis — the film achieves what most films could if they did the same. But almost no film does.

Lourdes

Jessica Hausner is an Austrian film director and screenwriter.

Aleksey Gorbunov and Sara Giraudeau who played a Seismologist and agent. In the series, she visited Ukraine in an episode from The Bureau.

Concert.UA – Alexey Gorbunov

Alexey Gorbunov is a Ukrainian theater and film actor, musician and People’s Artist of Ukraine. As a musician, Alexey writes albums and performs with the group “Sad pilot”.

Oleksiy Gorbunov – his wiki.

He has been named an Honored Artist of Ukraine (1991) and a People’s Artist of Ukraine (2016).

(Aleksey Gorbunov as Mikhail Dmitrievich Karlov, and Mathieu Kassovitz on the right – film still from The Bureau)

Aleksey Gorbunov also starred with Emir Kustrica in Spy Thriller “Farewell”

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