(“Air Doll”, Joe Odagiri and the amazing Korean Actress directed by Hirokazu Koreeda)

(Makanai – Koreeda drected Netflix series)

(Hirokazu Koreeda won Screeplay award, accepting for Yuji Sakamoto, Koji Yakusho for best actor at Cannes 2023 working with Vim Wenders.
previously Koreeda directed Koji Yakusho in “The Third Murder”)

Happy birthday Hirokazu Koreeda

See more photos for Koreeda from previoua poar – Shoplifters wins Palme d”Or at Cannes 2018

(Rainer Werner Fassbinder & Margit Carstensen on the set of “Bremer Freiheit,” 1972)

Margit Carstensen

Margit Carstensen passed away one day after Fassbinder’s birthday (May 31).

Clint Eastwood and Silvana Mangano in “Le streghe” (ENG: “The Witches”), a 1967 Italian anthology film consisting of five comic stories, directed by Luchino Visconti, Franco Rossi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini and Vittorio De Sica. Each story is about witches and features different actors, except for Mangano who stars in all segments.

Film production took place in the period in which Eastwood was often in Italy because he was working with Sergio Leone in his epic ‘dollar trilogy’ Spaghetti Western movies. Perhaps, it is precisely for this reason that the screenwriters chose a particularly ironic role for him: in the last segment of this movie (“An Evening Like the Others”, directed by Vittorio De Sica), he plays the part of a Western movie lover who does not know how to change the flat relationship with his wife, even going as far as to disguise himself as a gunslinger to entertain her

Reportedly, Clint Eastwood was given the choice of taking $25,000 in cash or $20,000 plus a new Ferrari sports car by producer Dino De Laurentiis to play in this movie. He chose the money and the Ferrari (a spectacular 275 GTB), so that his agent wouldn’t be able to get ten percent of the car.

LACMA Art + Film Gala Honoring Clint Eastwood And John Baldessari Presented By Gucci

Focus on outdated lingo and Michel Legrand-scored beach montages and risk missing the inexorable peeling of the values from bourgeoisie and counterculture alike, Eastwood’s Sirkian attention to vivid reds within hollow interiors, the pointed way the protagonist is exposed in all his male dread by a Mephistophelian sauna comrade, and Holden’s abrupt realization, while paying for his girlfriend’s new duds, that he is now playing the Norma Desmond part. (via MUBI)

“Jerry & Marge Go Large” is a charmer. It’s a low-key, fact-based caper movie that overcomes some broad comedy leanings to settle into the sweet stuff in the soft center. It’s bolstered by a funny script and dependably sharp performances by Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening.

Conversation Piece directed by Luchino Visconti

RIP Helmut Berger passed away.

Helmut Berger was an Austrian actor, known for his portrayal of narcissistic and sexually-ambiguous characters. He was one of the stars of the European cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s, and is regarded as a sex symbol and pop icon of that period.^[1]

He is most famous for his work with Luchino Visconti, particularly in his performance as King Ludwig II of Bavaria in Ludwig, for which he received a special David di Donatello award, and his performance in The Damned for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. (via wiki)

(Luchino Visconti, Helmut Berger and Romy Schneider on the set of Ludvig, 1972)

Documentary Portrait of Visconti’s Greatest Muse, Helmut Berger

“I am trying to discover who I am through making movies. I see myself as being confined in a cage of Japanese culture and the cage of being a man. I have to look at myself from an outsider’s point of view when I make my films.” Itami Juzo.

Nobuko Miyamoto and Juzo Itami, NYC, 4/12/88

Itami and Nobuko Miyamoto, Creative Marriage

Itami was the brother-in-law of Kenzaburō Ōe and an uncle of Hikari Ōe.

A Quiet Life – Criterion based on a novel by Kenzaburo Oe, directed by Itami Juzo.

Itami Juzo was cast in “Lord Jim” acted with Peter O’Toole. When Peter O’Toole visited Japan, Itami took him to meet Akira Kurosawa when he was
filming, “Red Beard”.

Spotlight on Juzo Itami

Movies & TV Spotlight: Juzo Itami — The Revered Tampopo Director Who Died in Mysterious Circumstances

Itami Juzo Museum

Juzo Itami vs The Yakuza

Holy Spider

An amazing film about Iran, great performances from two leading actress and an actor.

Interview with Abbas and
Zahra Amir Ebrahimi.

(Spider Duo, on why Iran Protests have made the film more resonant)

(Via MUBI Live and Become )

“Live and Become (French: Va, vis et deviens) is a 2005 French drama film about an Ethiopian Christian boy who disguises himself as an Ethiopian Jew to escape famine and emigrates to Israel. It was directed by Romanian-born Radu Mihăileanu. It won awards at the Berlin and Vancouver film festivals among others.  (Wiki)

(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)