Vitro Nasu

(Via

A,O Scott

In 2023, he moved to the The New York Times Review of Books.

In a 2009 interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Scott named the following five films as his favorites of all time. [15]
La Dolce Vita
The Godfather
Sullivan’s Travels
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Florida Project The Best film of the year 2017 NY times

A.O. Scott puts “The Florida Project” at No. 1 and writes that it “managed to be both the most joyful and the most heartbreaking movie of the year.” Scott praised director Sean Baker, supporting actor Willem Dafoe and leading lady Brooklynn Prince, who is 7 and lives in Winter Springs. Scott adds that Brooklynn’s performance as Moonee “has earned a place in the canon of American mischief alongside the likes of Eloise and Tom Sawyer.”

Dec 11, 2007 actor Ion Fiscuteanu
(The Death of Mr. Lazarescu)

Actor Ion Fiscuteanu, a Star of Romanian Stage and Film, Dies at 70 (NYtimes)
A, O Scott on Romanian New Wave

New York Times critic A.O. Scott has recorded several pieces on films coming out of Romania, called Romanian Cinema Rising, in light of the current hype surrounding Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.

Levitated Mass documentary film Michael Heizer

In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art debuted Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer. How it got there was a work of art in itself, and the topic of a documentary by Doug Pray. Derek Blasberg caught up with Pray to talk about his film.

Michael Heizer The City in the Nevada Desert (Previous Post) (See a photo of Michael Heizer with a short bio)

Isolated Mass / Circumflex (#2)
Artist: Michael Heizer
1968/1978
Mayari-R steel
146 × 1461 × 8 in. (370.8 × 3710.9 × 20.3 cm)
Place Created: United States, North America

De Menil
Michael Heizer Isolated Mass./Cucumflex 2 1968
https://www.menil.org/exhibitions/260-outdoor-sculpture-at-the-menil

The Dazzling Beauty of Elizabeth Taylor in Iran

Elizabeth Taylor was born on Feb 27, 1932

Elizabeth Taylor Her Place in the Sun”> (Previous Post)

Monty Clift was her best friend

(Taylor with James Dean)

HIV Activism
Taylor was one of the first celebrities to participate in HIV/AIDS activism and helped to raise more than $270 million for the cause.[65] She began her philanthropic work after becoming frustrated with the fact that very little was being done to combat the disease despite the media attention.[66] She later explained for Vanity Fair that she “decided that with my name, I could open certain doors, that I was a commodity in myself – and I’m not talking as an actress. I could take the fame I’d resented and tried to get away from for so many years – but you can never get away from it – and use it to do some good. I wanted to retire, but the tabloids wouldn’t let me. So, I thought: If you’re going to screw me over, I’ll use you

Crimes of the Future

(On David Cronenberg)[He] has helped me do really good work, better than other directors. Maybe because he understands my process and because we have some things in common in terms of our sensibility – the kinds of books we like to read, our sense of humor is similar.
It’s comforting to be working with someone you know will make a good movie. Some people will say, ‘Ahhh, he’s over the top, it’s gratuitous,’ [but] I disagree completely. He’s one of the most responsible filmmakers today as far as showing violence – which there’s very little of compared to other movies. It just stays with you because he shows very little of it. It just stays with you and he’s very direct about it. He shows you what happens, and what the consequences are physically and emotionally, in some cases; certainly he does in A History of Violence (2005), and also here [in Eastern Promises (2007)], that makes him very honest.

Viggo Mortensen with Cronenberg, another with Lisandro Alonso

Lea Seydoux was first offered to play the role Kristen Stewart played, Lea told Cronenberg that she prefers to play Caprice, the performance partner of Viggo Mortensen.

Amy Taubin interviews David Cronenberg about Crimes of the Future

GROSS CLINIC
Amy Taubin talks with David Cronenberg about Crimes of the Future

(artforum)

DAVID CRONENBERG’S Crimes of the Future is a stunning film: visually, emotionally, viscerally, and narratively. It is both hallucinatory and intensely real—an echo chamber of Cronenbergiana colliding with a city whose three-thousand-year history can be mined but never contained. It sounds ridiculously simple, but it is Athens, as location and inspiration, that makes Crimes a new direction for Cronenberg, even as it is possibly his magnum opus. The movie, which takes its title and thankfully little else from one of the director’s early experimental films, is set in an indeterminate future that often resembles Renaissance paintings. The only people left on Earth are a small group of performance body-modification artists, their followers, and a few functionaries of the surveillance state—still dedicated to law and order while promoting chaos by playing everyone against one another.

AT: The lighting is very different from the lighting I’ve seen before in your films.

DC: It’s shooting in Athens, and in Mediterranean light, which I’ve never done before. I really embraced Athens and Greece for everything, including the streets, the graffiti, the color of the Mediterranean, and that had a lot to do with the way the film looked. When I wrote the script more than twenty years ago, I was thinking of Toronto, of course. But once we decided on Athens, I embraced it completely. And part of it is the color.

Thanks to Kanopy streaming, I finally was able to see this film and read this interview of Cronenberg by Amy Taubin who concluded that many of Cronenberg films were great love stories.

Happy Valentine’s Day – here more on David Cronenberg below..

The Actor: When you record the moment, you record the death of the moment. Children and death are a bad combination.

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Cronenberg Beyond Cinema: his photos were exhibited

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DAVID CRONENBERG (born 1943) has been lauded for his blurring of boundaries between technology and the individual, but this praise has consistently missed the point, for his films have singularly denied the existence of any such boundaries. (Read more here)

Carlos Saura wiki

Carlos Saura Criterion

Directed by Carlos Saura

Reality and fantasy, dreams and memories flow freely into one another in the haunting, layered works of iconoclastic auteur Carlos Saura, arguably the most important Spanish filmmaker to emerge between Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar. Achieving international renown during the repressive years of Francisco Franco’s rule, Saura became a model for how to make dissident political cinema under an authoritarian regime, using potent metaphors and symbolism to dodge censors and examine his nation’s troubled twentieth-century history. In complex and often controversial works like PEPPERMINT FRAPPÉ, COUSIN ANGELICA, and CRÍA CUERVOS . . . —frequently starring his longtime partner Geraldine Chaplin—Saura explored the legacy of fascism and its devastating effects on a generation of Spanish citizens, while in often-overlooked post-Franco films such as DEPRISA, DEPRISA he captured the turbulence of a society experiencing the first shockwaves of liberalization.

Alfred Leslie, a second-generation Abstract Expressionist and filmmaker who turned his back on nonrepresentational art in the early 1960s to lead a revival of figurative painting, died on Friday in Brooklyn. He was 95. His son Anthony said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was complications of a Covid infection. (New York times).

The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God

Alfred Leslie – Artnet

Alfred Leslie wiki

(Delphine Seyrig from Pull My Daisy)

Pull My Daisy Robert Frank, Albert Leslie, USA, 1959, V’08, Tribute to Bob Dylan

Pull My Daisy is a 1959 American short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, and adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration

(With Gerard Philipe in Fanfan La Tulipe)

Gina Lollobrigida

Dame in the Game: The Unexpected Feminism of Gina Lollobrigida

Throughout her acting career, Lollobrigida never abandoned her dreams of returning to the fine arts, and she used her time on set as a master class in photography. By the late 1960s, she was an accomplished photojournalist and over the course of her career, she photographed as diverse figures as Paul Newman, Salvador Dali, and Henry Kissinger. Most notably, Lollobrigida became so skilled in her photojournalism that she managed to secure an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro in 1972. Speaking of this incredible opportunity, Lollobrigida noted that she was shocked to discover Castro was more nervous to meet her than she him. Inspired by this rare access, Lollobrigida produced, directed, and wrote a documentary short entitled Ritratto di Fidel. Years before Cuba would be reopened to America, she secured a personal and in-depth look at one of the world’s most reclusive political figures.

Lollobridiga retired from acting in 1997, but she continued to pursue an avid career as an accomplished photographer, painter, and sculptor. Her work has been displayed all over the world and has won numerous accolades, including the “Legion of Honor” as “artiste de valeur” from France.

Happy birthday Ricardo Darin Jan 16
(Peter Lanzani played Luis Moreno Ocampo.)

Luis Moreno Ocampo on Argentina 1985 and Why Democracy is at Risk Today (Amy Goodman Democracy Now)

(Jody Kantor, Megan Twohey, Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan)

Maria Schrader directed “She Said” – Vanity Fair

The “Sacred Duty” of “She Said”
In their first interviews about the film, the stars—and the journalists they play—talk about the big-screen adaptation of the groundbreaking investigation into Harvey Weinstein.

NHK World on Demand till June 2023

China is tumultuous in 1921 when the famed Japanese author of Rashomon, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, visits Shanghai as a correspondent. Here he encounters revolutionaries, courtesans and much more…

Ryuhei Matsuda who played Ryunosuke Akutagawa was directed by Nagisa Oshima in Gohatto (御法度), also known as Taboo.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke
Kappa
drawing at the bottom by an author.
Akira Kurosawa made “Rashomon” world famous with Toshiro Mifune playing the bandit.

Gong Li
and Gaspard Ulliel, at Premier of Hannibal Rising.

Tragically Gaspard Ulliel an Elegant actor, he was only 37 when he passed away last January 2022.

Gong Li was born on New Year’s Eve. (Like Matisse and Paul Bowles)

Eros -Wong Kar Wai (Gong Li and Chen Chang)

Gong Li lives in France with her composer husband.

Interview with Angelo Badalamenti

Angelo Badalamenti wiki

Yoshishige Yoshida

Graduating from the University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature, Yoshida entered the Shōchiku studio in 1955 and worked as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita,[1] before debuting as a director in 1960 with Rokudenashi.[2] He was a central member of what came to be called the “Shōchiku Nouvelle Vague” along with Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda,[3] and his works have been studied under the larger rubric of the Japanese New Wave,[4] a linkage which Yoshida himself disliked.[1] Like many of his New Wave cohorts, he felt restricted under the studio system. After Shōchiku’s re-editing of his Escape from Japan (1964), he left the studio to start his own production company,[1] for which he directed such films as Eros + Massacre.[2]
Between 1960 and 2004, Yoshida directed more than 20 films, some of which starred his wife, actress Mariko Okada.[1] After a long absence from the screen following the 1973 Coup d’État, he returned with A Promise, which was shown in the Un Certain Regard section the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.[5] Two years later, his film Wuthering Heights would compete for the Golden Palm at the 1988 Festival.[6] In 2002, Women in the Mirror followed after another hiatus of 14 years.[7] In addition to his theatrical films, Yoshida directed a series of documentaries for Japanese TV.
Yoshida named European cinema as a great influence on his work, most notably the directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, and pre-war French films like the works of Jean Renoir.[1] He also published a number of books on the topic of cinema, including one on his own cinematic work and an analysis of the films of Yasujirō Ozu.

Mariko Okada married to Yoshishige Yoshida is an actress who worked with her husband, Yasujiro Ozu, Juzo Itami and her father was a legendary silent film star Okada Tokihiko. (Both father and daughter were directed by Ozu).

Yoshishige Yoshida MUBI

Midnight Eye Interview Yoshishige Yoshida