This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor discuss Eclipse Series 29: Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys.
About the films:
In the late eighties, Aki Kaurismäki, a master of the deadpan, fashioned a waggish fish-out-of-water tale about a U.S. tour by “the worst rock-and-roll band in the world.” Leningrad Cowboys Go America’s posse of fur-coated, outrageously pompadoured hipsters struck such a chord with international audiences that the fictional band became a genuine attraction, touring the world. Later, Kaurismäki created a sequel, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses,and filmed a gigantic outdoor concert that the band put on in Helsinki, for the rollicking documentary Total Balalaika Show. With this Eclipse series, we present all three crackpot musical and comic odysseys,...
About the films:
In the late eighties, Aki Kaurismäki, a master of the deadpan, fashioned a waggish fish-out-of-water tale about a U.S. tour by “the worst rock-and-roll band in the world.” Leningrad Cowboys Go America’s posse of fur-coated, outrageously pompadoured hipsters struck such a chord with international audiences that the fictional band became a genuine attraction, touring the world. Later, Kaurismäki created a sequel, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses,and filmed a gigantic outdoor concert that the band put on in Helsinki, for the rollicking documentary Total Balalaika Show. With this Eclipse series, we present all three crackpot musical and comic odysseys,...
- 10/22/2015
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
This week's theatrical release of Bernie, after a long and winding run through the festival circuit, beginning at the Los Angeles Film Festival last summer, has prompted more than a few appreciations of Richard Linklater's career overall, regardless of how each individual critic ultimately comes down on his new film. Noel Murray and Scott Tobias have written up a primer at the Av Club and, at Slate, Seth Stevenson's attached a sidebar of rankings to his assessment of the oeuvre.
And then there's Kent Jones, writing for Film Comment: "My belief that Richard Linklater remains America's most underestimated filmmaker has been reinforced by the reception thus far to his new film Bernie, treated as either a failed Jack Black comedy or a movie that has not made up its mind about whether it wants to be fiction or documentary, funny or serious. Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion...
And then there's Kent Jones, writing for Film Comment: "My belief that Richard Linklater remains America's most underestimated filmmaker has been reinforced by the reception thus far to his new film Bernie, treated as either a failed Jack Black comedy or a movie that has not made up its mind about whether it wants to be fiction or documentary, funny or serious. Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion...
- 4/27/2012
- MUBI
It's been a newsy day. We lost Tonino Guerra and Ulu Grosbard, the Hong Kong and New Directors/New Films festivals have opened, Takashi Miike has yet another film on the way and Casablanca, celebrating its 70th, is playing coast to coast. It's also been a fine day for posters, so I'm pepping up today's Briefing with a few for festivals and events happening soon or already ongoing. Kevin Tong designed the one above for the three films that Edgar Wright will be on hand to present at the opening of the Alamo Drafthouse on Slaughter Lane in Austin this weekend.
The lineup and schedule for Ebertfest 2012, running April 25 through 29, has been set and Roger Ebert discusses each of the titles in his Journal. Among the highlights: David Bordwell will lead a discussion of Citizen Kane, Patton Oswalt will host a session on Kind Hearts and Coronets and it looks...
The lineup and schedule for Ebertfest 2012, running April 25 through 29, has been set and Roger Ebert discusses each of the titles in his Journal. Among the highlights: David Bordwell will lead a discussion of Citizen Kane, Patton Oswalt will host a session on Kind Hearts and Coronets and it looks...
- 3/21/2012
- MUBI
"With The Deep Blue Sea," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice, "the great British director Terence Davies returns to the postwar period — though in a sense, he has never left. Born in 1945, Davies's cinema is defined by a mixed pity and fondness for the world of yesterday, a past he seemingly finds impossible to put behind him or to do without. The era's hypocritical propriety and quivering repression has most frequently been held up for 'enlightened,' Pleasantville-style condescension, but Davies is a great historical filmmaker because he feels the period too intimately to mock its rituals and mores, knows that no progress occurs without loss."
A retrospective of Davies's work is running at New York's BAMcinématek through March 27, while Sing, Memory: The Postwar England of Terence Davies opens today at the Harvard Film Archive and runs through March 26. On March 28, The Long Day Closes (1992) opens for a week-long run at New York's Film Forum.
A retrospective of Davies's work is running at New York's BAMcinématek through March 27, while Sing, Memory: The Postwar England of Terence Davies opens today at the Harvard Film Archive and runs through March 26. On March 28, The Long Day Closes (1992) opens for a week-long run at New York's Film Forum.
- 3/19/2012
- MUBI
"The miracle of Lionel Rogosin's apartheid drama Come Back, Africa isn't that it's a solid, affecting artifact of a cruel society, but that it exists at all," begins Bill Weber in Slant. "In the wake of his debut film, the New York skid-row chronicle On the Bowery, Rogosin set out in 1957 for Johannesburg, and for months laid the groundwork for surreptitiously shooting a follow-up that would lay bare the pain and humiliations of black South Africans subjugated by the white majority, enlisting native writers Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane to collaborate on the scenario. Mixing documentary-like footage with scripted scenes as he had in his first feature, the filmmaker heavily features music and dance by throngs of street performers, a diegetically captured salve for the wounds of extreme poverty and social oppression — and an ideal camouflage of his critical agenda from the South African authorities, who were persuaded that...
- 1/26/2012
- MUBI
At the Parallax View, Sean Axmaker sends out a DVR alert to TCM viewers in the Us — this happens tonight:
The evening of Max Ophüls in Hollywood is followed by two of his greatest French films, La Ronde (1950) and The Earrings of Madame de… (1954), but while they are well represented in superb DVD editions stateside, the four American films showing Monday night — Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), The Reckless Moment (1949), Caught (1949) and the rarity The Exile (1947), his Hollywood debut — have still not been released on DVD in the Us.
The films of Ophüls haunt the space between the idealism of unconditional love and the reality of social barriers and fickle lovers. Yet his greatest films are anything but cynical; ironic certainly, but also melancholy, sad and wistful, and always respectful of the dignity of those who love well if not too wisely. His fluid, elegantly choreographed camerawork and intimate yet...
The evening of Max Ophüls in Hollywood is followed by two of his greatest French films, La Ronde (1950) and The Earrings of Madame de… (1954), but while they are well represented in superb DVD editions stateside, the four American films showing Monday night — Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), The Reckless Moment (1949), Caught (1949) and the rarity The Exile (1947), his Hollywood debut — have still not been released on DVD in the Us.
The films of Ophüls haunt the space between the idealism of unconditional love and the reality of social barriers and fickle lovers. Yet his greatest films are anything but cynical; ironic certainly, but also melancholy, sad and wistful, and always respectful of the dignity of those who love well if not too wisely. His fluid, elegantly choreographed camerawork and intimate yet...
- 1/23/2012
- MUBI
"It's no fun wearing my Tintin shirt now that the masses know who he is." The drawing over that caption is superfluous. Still, the cartoon in this week's New Yorker nicely sums up the shift in Tintin's status in the Us since the release of Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin — his face has migrated from imported T-shirts to dog food ads.
As with another 3D spectacle currently in theaters, Pina, we've already had two roundups on Spielberg's Tintin, the first in October, an entry that kicked off with initial reactions to the film's premiere and eventually segued into more considered reviews in the British and European press, and the second in November, an entry gathering takes from the Tintinologists and reviews from AFI Fest. So I'll try to keep it brief in this third go-round, focusing more on Hergé than Spielberg, beginning with Charles McGrath's introduction in the video embedded above.
As with another 3D spectacle currently in theaters, Pina, we've already had two roundups on Spielberg's Tintin, the first in October, an entry that kicked off with initial reactions to the film's premiere and eventually segued into more considered reviews in the British and European press, and the second in November, an entry gathering takes from the Tintinologists and reviews from AFI Fest. So I'll try to keep it brief in this third go-round, focusing more on Hergé than Spielberg, beginning with Charles McGrath's introduction in the video embedded above.
- 12/29/2011
- MUBI
Louise Bourgeois in Sleepless Night Stories
"Jonas Mekas," begins Nick Pinkerton in the Voice, "88-year-old Lithuanian-American poet, filmmaker, co-founder of Anthology Film Archives, and all-around proselytizer for the avant-garde, has spent the last half century or so with a motion picture recording device of some sort running at his side — who could better relate to Christopher Isherwood's I Am a Camera? What Mekas sees (and narrates) is periodically fashioned into a movie, Sleepless Night Stories being the latest."
"Mr Mekas has said the idea for the movie came from his reading of One Thousand and One Nights," notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The connections between that collection of Arabic-language stories and folk tales and Mr Mekas’s movie — which consists of some two dozen intimate vignettes — are not immediately apparent, despite a sporadic 'praise Allah' in the movie’s handwritten intertitles…. The camerawork and the editing in this introductory scene,...
"Jonas Mekas," begins Nick Pinkerton in the Voice, "88-year-old Lithuanian-American poet, filmmaker, co-founder of Anthology Film Archives, and all-around proselytizer for the avant-garde, has spent the last half century or so with a motion picture recording device of some sort running at his side — who could better relate to Christopher Isherwood's I Am a Camera? What Mekas sees (and narrates) is periodically fashioned into a movie, Sleepless Night Stories being the latest."
"Mr Mekas has said the idea for the movie came from his reading of One Thousand and One Nights," notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The connections between that collection of Arabic-language stories and folk tales and Mr Mekas’s movie — which consists of some two dozen intimate vignettes — are not immediately apparent, despite a sporadic 'praise Allah' in the movie’s handwritten intertitles…. The camerawork and the editing in this introductory scene,...
- 12/16/2011
- MUBI
Slant's is, of course, the big list to appear since the last Briefing. From Nick Schager's introduction to the countdown of their collective top 25: "The auteurs had it in 2011, which delivered such a feast of fantastic domestic and international cinema that it's difficult to remember a year in which it was harder to compile a consensus Top 25. Nonetheless, best-of-year rankings wait for no critic, and our list is practically overflowing with films by young and old masters at the apex of their games, be it Terrence Malick's sumptuous spiritual odyssey The Tree of Life, Edward Yang's long-unreleased 1991 classic A Brighter Summer Day, or Abbas Kiarostami's formalist masterwork Certified Copy." Which lands at #1. At the House Next Door, you can scan the titles that came in between #26 and #50 as well as the individual ballots by Schager, Ed Gonzalez, Andrew Schenker, Jaime N Christley, Bill Weber, Jesse Cataldo,...
- 12/16/2011
- MUBI
"Can something be considered fan fiction if it's also an official, canonical studio product?" asks Alison Willmore at Movieline. "I'm going to argue yes, absolutely, because with The Muppets, Jason Segel has crafted what can only be described as the most extravagant work of fan fiction ever, Mary Sue-ing himself into the Muppet universe as a character who helps reunite the gang in order to save their old theater and the day. Segel, who co-wrote the film with Nicholas Stoller, even leaves his own tentative mark on Jim Henson's beloved ensemble by inserting a personal addition in the form of alter ego Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), his character's Muppet brother and the group's most devoted fan even when the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about them." 7.5 out of 10.
Bill Weber in Slant: "Made with palpable affection and childhood nostalgia by its comedy young-blood participants...
Bill Weber in Slant: "Made with palpable affection and childhood nostalgia by its comedy young-blood participants...
- 11/25/2011
- MUBI
"Roland Emmerich's Anonymous is a well-polished cowpat that will confuse and bore those who know nothing about Shakespeare and incense those who know almost anything," declares David Edelstein in New York. The film begins with Derek Jacobi announcing on a contemporary Broadway stage that the plays we attribute to Shakespeare are, in fact, the work of "Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who could not, by virtue of his rank, have anything to do with the theater and so handed over his masterworks — many of which were not performed until well after his death — to a boobish actor named Will Shakespeare, who incidentally was the one who stabbed Christopher Marlowe in the eye. Less improbably, De Vere screwed Queen Elizabeth, as well as (accidentally) his own mum…. Apart from its ineptitude, Anonymous is peculiarly beside the point. Shakespeare's succession of masterpieces, near masterpieces, and thrilling misses is a...
- 10/27/2011
- MUBI
"Alexander Korda's production of The Four Feathers, the most popular film version of a 1902 British adventure novel set during the Sudanese Mahdist revolt in the late 19th century, retains on its surface pro-Empire bravado and a streak of colonialist supremacy," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "But as vintage 1939 English-regiment actioners go, it has the edge on Hollywood's Gunga Din in authentic, epically framed locations, a lush Technicolor palette, and a lesser racist taint." Criterion's release is a "landmark physical production is handsomely remastered and preserved, even if the bloom has gone off the rose of its imperial England." Speaking of which. As you've likely heard, perhaps on Start the Week (see Mon, Oct 11), Richard Gott's Britain's Empire: Resistance, Rebellion and Repression has kicked up a bit of dust recently. Verso has a quick primer.
Identification of a Woman is Michelangelo Antonioni's "foolishly underrated 1982 film about men and women,...
Identification of a Woman is Michelangelo Antonioni's "foolishly underrated 1982 film about men and women,...
- 10/25/2011
- MUBI
"When I mentioned the writer Paul Goodman to an older friend," recalls Dan Callahan at the L, "he cried, 'My God, I haven't heard his name in years. In the 60s, you couldn't avoid him!' The tone of his second sentence was slightly exasperated, and based on Jonathan Lee's new documentary, Paul Goodman Changed My Life, Goodman was very adept at exasperating people. Novelist, poet, public intellectual, playwright, urban planner, Gestalt therapist, bisexual family man and inveterate cruiser of sailors, Goodman tried to be so many things at once that he didn't get the attention he felt he deserved until his book on male delinquency, Growing Up Absurd, made him famous in 1960. After that, Goodman spent a heady decade as a kind of rumpled professor Pied Piper of the 60s youth movement, but his engagement with that movement led to disillusionment before his death in 1972."
"'Anarchism is an attitude,...
"'Anarchism is an attitude,...
- 10/20/2011
- MUBI
Roundups on some of the more interesting titles opening this weekend have been updated through today: The Last Picture Show, 50/50, Margaret, Take Shelter and My Joy — see, too, Daniel Kasman's review — as well as another on the documentaries.
"Hillbilly horror is nothing new," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Some might mark its heyday as the 1970s, a decade containing Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and I Spit On Your Grave (1978). Others might point to Herschell Gordon Lewis's immortal Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), probably cinema's most persuasive example of why Yankees road-tripping below the Mason-Dixon Line should never, for any reason, detour off the main highway…. But what if, asks Eli Craig's Tucker and Dale vs Evil, you were totally misjudging those sinister-seeming whiskey-tango yokels? What if, despite being a little unwashed and fond of sharp objects and power tools, they...
"Hillbilly horror is nothing new," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Some might mark its heyday as the 1970s, a decade containing Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and I Spit On Your Grave (1978). Others might point to Herschell Gordon Lewis's immortal Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), probably cinema's most persuasive example of why Yankees road-tripping below the Mason-Dixon Line should never, for any reason, detour off the main highway…. But what if, asks Eli Craig's Tucker and Dale vs Evil, you were totally misjudging those sinister-seeming whiskey-tango yokels? What if, despite being a little unwashed and fond of sharp objects and power tools, they...
- 9/30/2011
- MUBI
"Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis Laforche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter," begins Melissa Anderson in the Voice. "The clouds open, raining down oily piss-colored droplets. It's end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to witness, and the first of many private, impressively CGI'd apocalyptic visions to come. Like Carol White, the central, unglued character of Todd Haynes's Safe (1995) who is 'allergic to the 20th century,' blue-collar worker Curtis is haunted by one of the looming terrors of the 21st: financial ruin. This unarticulated fear triggers Curtis's mental illness, and despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder — a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as 'something that's not right.'"
"Convinced the end is coming," writes James Rocchi at the Playlist,...
"Convinced the end is coming," writes James Rocchi at the Playlist,...
- 9/30/2011
- MUBI
Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, that showcase of contemporary British acting, has opened in the UK this weekend, and that roundup has been updated through today. The entry on Gus Van Sant's Restless has been updated with pointers to pieces related to the Museum of the Moving Image's retrospective, running through September 30. And of course, we've got roundups running on Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive and Rod Lurie's remake of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Meantime, two weeks after the release of Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, we've entered the think piece stage, so that roundup's been kept up-to-date through today as well.
"Imagine that a semi-pagan society quietly survives in the heartland of Russia, amid the leftover Soviet-era factories, the old shops and stores strung along the roadsides, the new concrete towns with their shopping malls." Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "Imagine that the people of...
"Imagine that a semi-pagan society quietly survives in the heartland of Russia, amid the leftover Soviet-era factories, the old shops and stores strung along the roadsides, the new concrete towns with their shopping malls." Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "Imagine that the people of...
- 9/17/2011
- MUBI
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.