The 2024 Venice Film Festival is set to begin on August 28th and running through September 7th which will offer the first look at the upcoming films we will see throughout the fall season. "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", the sequel to Tim Burton's classic 1988 horror-comedy, has been selected to open the 81st edition of the fest out-of-competition with original cast members, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara on board along with new additions, Jenna Ortega, Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe making appearances.
French acting icon, Isabelle Huppert has been named as Jury President for this year's fest. The rest of the jurors who will help select the winners of awards are American director, James Gray; British filmmaker, Andrew Haigh; Polish filmmaker, Agnieszka Holland; Brazilian filmmaker, Kleber Mendonça Filho; Malian film director, Abderrahmane Sissako; Italian filmmaker, Giuseppe Tornatore; German director, Julia von Heinz and Chinese actress, Zhang Ziyi.
The impressive lineup of films from some of the world's greatest filmmakers that will make their premieres and selected to compete for prizes at Venice include Pedro Almodóvar ("The Room Next Door"), Luca Guadagnino ("Queer"), Pablo Larrain ("Maria"), Justin Kurzel ("The Order"), Walter Salles ("I'm Still Here") Halina Reijn ("Babygirl"), Brady Corbet ("The Brutalist"), Wang Bing ("Youth: Homecoming") and Todd Phillips’ "Joker: Folie à Deux", the sequel to the first film that unexpectedly won the top prize of the Golden Lion here in 2019 with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga co-starring.
Some highlights of films being screened out-of-competition will include the latest from indie American filmmaker, Harmony Korine ("Baby Invasion"); legendary French film director, Claude Lelouch ("Finalement") and the George Clooney and Brad Pitt Apple+ thriller, "Wolfs" from Jon Watts.
Peter Weir, the Australian director behind "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Gallipoli", "Dead Poets Society", "Witness" and "The Truman Show", and Sigourney Weaver, the American actress who appeared in "Alien", "Ghostbusters", "Working Girl", "Gorillas in the Mist" and "The Year of Living Dangerously" (with Weir), will both receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement awards during the festival.
Alain Delon, the French actor who was considered by many to be one of the most handsome men to appear in cinema, died on August 18th at the age of eighty-eight. On screen, he could be remote and vacant yet smoldering and magnetic. His considerable looks certainly brought him plenty of attention but Delon was also a talented performer, helping him become popular and recognized as an international film sensation. No cause of death has been revealed to date but the actor had been in poor health recently, suffering a stroke in 2019 and treated for lymphoma three years later.
He was born to a lower-middle class family but his parents separated when he was four. His mother and father both remarried and had other children, leaving Delon with a foster family for a number of years. But he was eventually returned to his parents, who shared custody, and was shuttled back and forth between his second families. This lead him to become rebellious, misbehaving and disrespectful to his teachers which caused him to be expelled from his schools more than once. At seventeen, he joined the Navy and sent off to fight during the French-Indochina War. Near the end of his service, he was arrested for stealing a jeep and going on a joyride which caused damage the vehicle. This put him in prison for a short time before being expelled from the Navy.
Returning to France, Delon had to fend for himself, doing several odd-jobs and began to get more involved in the darker and seedier side of life. He became romantically involved with Brigitte Auber, an actress who recently had appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief". This brief relationship introduced Delon to other possibilities for his future. They attended the 1957 Cannes Film Festival together which lead him to met his future agent and get discovered by a talent scout.
The inexperienced Delon got a small part in the film, "Quand la femme s'en mêle (Send a Woman When the Devil Fails)" in 1957 where he learned on the job how to act with the help of the director, Yves Allégret. His next major break came when he was cast opposite the German actress, Romy Schneider (who had selected him herself) in the 1958 period drama, "Christine". They began a romance, with neither able to speak the other's language initially nor not particularly liking each other while onset, and became a celebrated couple for six years. After their relationship ended, Delon and Schneider remained friendly, even working together on screen again a couple of times, most notably in "La Piscine (The Swimming Pool)" in 1968.
Delon followed "Christine" up the following year with the comedy, "Faibles femmes (Women are Weak)" which became a big hit in France and was the actor's first movie to be released in the US. But what made audiences really take notice of Delon was his appearances in two films released in 1960; "Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers)", Luchino Visocnti's drama about a poor family from Southern Italy and their struggles to achieve a better life up north in Milan. "Rocco" won a Special Jury Prize during the 21st Venice International Film Festival. And a leading role in the first screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" called "Plein soleil (Purple Noon)" from René Clément. Together, these films helped make Delon a movie star.
He would go on to star in Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Eclisse (The Eclipse)" with Monica Vitti; teamed with Visconti again for "Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)", a historical drama with Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale; and worked again with Clément for "Les félins (Joy House)" with Jane Fonda, shooting French and English language versions. Hollywood certainly became intrigued with the actor and after working on his English, Delon made a few movies stateside for about three years beginning in 1964. But his accent limited what roles he could play and the movies he did make never made much headway with American audiences.
However, Delon remained very popular in France and eventually he returned to his home country where he could feel more comfortable and had plenty of more options for film roles. Some notable films he made include "Histoires extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead)", a 1968 all-star horror anthology, from directors, Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini, based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. And his work with Jean-Pierre Melville in three crime dramas: "Le Samouraï", "Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle)" and "Un flic (A Cop)" all became classics and cemented Delon as an actor who could convey so much emotion and intensity without uttering a word.
Delon made over ninety films throughout his career and later going on to receive many honors and accolades. He won the César Award for Best Actor for his performance in "Notre histoire" in 1985, became a member of France's Legion of Honour in 1991, received an Honorary Golden Bear from the Berlin Film Festival in 1995 and the Honorary Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
Gena Rowlands, an actress best known for her brilliant and unique screen performances, many of her most notable are in collaboration with her actor/director husband, John Cassavetes, has passed away on August 14th at the age of ninety-four. No specific cause of death has been given but she had been struggling with Alzheimer's disease for the last five years.
She was born Virginia Rowlands in Cambria, Wisconsin, one of two children to Wisconsin State Senator, Edwin Myrwyn Rowlands and Mary Allen Neal who later became an actress known as Lady Rowlands. After college, Rowlands went to New York to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She began her professional career performing in repertory theatre companies before making her Broadway debut in "The Seven Year Itch" as a replacement cast member and later toured in a national production of the play. She went on to do several live television programs and made guest-starring roles in many drama and western series. Rowlands made her film debut in 1958 with "The High Cost of Loving", co-starring with Jose Ferrer who also directed the film. But it would be her work with Cassavetes, whom she married in 1954, that would give her a greater opportunity to display all she could do as an actor.
While she had a supporting role in the 1963 Hollywood feature that he directed, "A Child Is Waiting" with Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster, it was six years later with "Faces", a cinéma vérité-styled drama that was entirely self-financed by the couple, when she and Cassavetes began to receive widespread critical acclaim for their work. The film about the final stages of the marriage between a middle-aged couple went on to receive three Academy Award nominations including Best Original Screenplay for Cassavetes. She would make ten films together with her husband who helped guide his wife to some of her most memorable roles. Her two Oscar nominations came from films directed by Cassavetes; "A Woman Under The Influence" in 1974 about a woman's strange behavior creating conflict with her spouse (Peter Falk) and "Gloria" from 1980 where she plays a gangster's former girlfriend who tries to protect a young boy (John Adames) being hunted by the mob for information. Rowlands went on to receive an Honorary Academy Award in 2015.
Some highlights of her later screen performances includes "An Early Frost", a 1985 made-for-TV movie that was one of the first to deal with the subject of AIDS. She played the former First Lady, Betty Ford in the 1987 television film, "The Betty Ford Story" where she won her first Emmy Award. Rowlands made appearances in the movies, "The Brink's Job", "Another Woman", "Something to Talk About", "Hope Floats", the drama, "Unhook The Stars" from 1996 and the 2004 romantic drama based on the best-selling novel, "The Notebook" both directed by her son Nick Cassavetes.
Rowlands is survived by her three children with Cassavetes (who passed away in 1989); Nick, Alexandra and Zoe who all have followed their parents to have careers in the performing arts and filmmaking.
I can't believe this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the live television, comedy sketch program, "Saturday Night Live". I am old enough to remember when this show premiered and although I didn't see the first episode at the time, I did begin to watch it regularly not long after. And ever since that very first televised show, when the sketches work, they are uproariously, laugh-out loud funny. However when a skit fails to coalesce, it can be agonizingly painful to sit through. But that is exactly what's makes "SNL" so great; it's a completely wild and unpredictable comedy show.
Jason Reitman has made a new film, "Saturday Night" which highlights all the unbelievably crazy and chaotic events that led to that first broadcast on October 11, 1975, originally called "NBC's Saturday Night". Gabriel LaBelle ("The Fabelmans") plays Lorne Michaels, the Canadian-born comedy writer who creates the idea of the late show performed live in front of a studio audience with producer, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) that they bring to the network. We witness all of the problems of getting the show ready to air that include deciding on the tone of show with his writers, wrangling his inexperienced yet talented cast of comedians dubbed "the not-ready-for-prime-time players" and convincing a skeptical NBC programing chief, David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) that the program should even make it to broadcast .
"Saturday Night" is due in US theaters on October 11, 2024
Where & When: Nuart Theater, West Los Angeles, CA. July 27, 2024 7:30 PM
The filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are responsible for some of the most exquisite, breathtaking works of world cinema, which includes "A Matter of Life and Death", "Black Narcissus" and "The Red Shoes", that have gone on to become important classics in motion picture history. Introduced by producer, Alexander Korda in 1939, the British Powell had worked in various roles in the early days of the film industry beginning in France before returning home to get an opportunity to write and direct while Pressburger, Hungarian-born of Jewish heritage, had begun his career as a journalist before turning towards screen writing, forced to migrate a couple of times before landing in Britain due to the rise of the Nazis. Pressburger was asked to doctor the script for the World War I spy thriller, "The Spy in Black" that Powell was directing which began the cinematic partnership between these men, eventually making over twenty films over the course of their career together.
The extraordinary documentary, "Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger" goes into great detail about the influence and craftsmanship of these groundbreaking filmmakers.
We have executive producer, Martin Scorsese as our on-screen narrator, delivering a masterclass on these highly esteemed and inspirational film creators in this captivating doc, directed by David Hinton. The now eighty-one legendary director begins by recalling his own childhood history with him being forced to be indoors most of the time due to being an asthmatic. This lead to him being brought to movie theaters where his love of cinema was developed. By the time Scorsese became a teenager, he had become obsessed with the work of Powell and Pressburger which would greatly impact not only his desire to become a filmmaker but his own cinematic style.
After making two more films together, realizing they work well together with a common viewpoint regarding cinema, Powell and Pressburger formed a partnership which would be known as "The Archers". While Pressburger would work on the initial script outline and Powell would essentially direct the film, together they would shape the complete movie with the screen credit going to both as writer, producer and director. The Archers were early indie filmmakers; experimenting with structure, demanding control over their work and never wanted to be forced to compromise on their productions. The duo assembled a regular group of actors and crew members that they worked well with and wanted to participate in fulfilling their creative vision.
Powell and Pressburger were enlisted to do their part for the war effort by creating films that would inspire and uplift during this harrowing time. However, they chose to do this on their own terms. "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" may have been a pro-British, romantic war drama but it was also a satire on the country's army, delivering soft jabs at the leadership. The original intention of "A Matter of Life and Death" was to help improve the tense relations between the late arriving American soldiers stationed in the UK and the war weary, British public. But what it became was a surreal romantic fantasy in stunning Technicolor set during the World War involving a British airman (David Niven) who survives a plane crash and falls in love with an American radio operator (Kim Hunter) only he begins to have visions of an angel summoning him to the afterlife.
The end of the war allowed the filmmakers to let their imaginations soar even further. "Black Narcissus" revolves around the increasing strain within a small convent of nuns trying to establish a school on top of an isolated mountain in the Himalayas. Filled with unexpected simmering sexual tension and grounded by exceptional realism, this film firmly establishes Powell and Pressburger as true cinematic artists highlighted by the Oscar-winning cinematography of Jack Cardiff.
But what is considered by many viewers and critics as this team's greatest masterpiece would be their follow-up feature, "The Red Shoes" from 1948. Boldly wanting to experiment with how music and visuals could effectively be used in a film, "The Red Shoes" is set in the world of ballet, exploring a dancer's conflict between living for their art and finding space to have a personal life. Determined to have a professional dancer who could act in the lead role, the duo managed to lure a very reluctant Moira Shearer, a ballerina from Scotland, to do the part after pursuing her for a year. The one sequence the film is best known for is the seventeen minute ballet centerpiece inspired by the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale which the film is based. Far from a traditional filmed dance number that was commonly done at the time, the scene utilizes editing, close-ups and impressionistic visual effects, creating an undeniable cinematic experience.
By the mid-1950's, The Archers had decided to pursue some separate creative paths. Pressburger would have two novels published and write a few screenplays for other filmmakers. Powell had begun working on some solo film projects, most notably beginning with the controversial, "Peeping Tom" in 1960. During this period, they came together to make a film, "They're a Weird Mob" in 1966 with Pressburger using a pseudonym, "Richard Imrie". But their final collaboration together would be "The Boy Who Turned Yellow", a 1972 feature made for the UK non-profit, Children's Film Foundation.
Scorsese's longtime film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker would go on to marry Powell in 1984 (after introducing the two to each other). This gave Scorsese an even greater opportunity to connect with Powell, allowing him to pick his brain over the films his cinematic idol had made and receive advice from him on the movies he was making at the time, ultimately forming a closer friendship. This relationship also helped gain access to a trove of archival footage seen in the film with interviews with the filmmakers, personal home movies and behind-the-scenes recordings.
Hinton, a British director of several documentary shorts and episodes of television series, basically gets out of the way, simply allowing the rapid-fire, insightful discussion by Scorsese and the resonant beauty of the images by Powell and Pressburger to do much of the work in "Made In England". While there are moments in his conversations that can feel a bit dry like a college lecture, Scorsese is a passionate cheerleader, reiterating why he loves their films and why you really should too. Long before they even ended their partnership, the work by these filmmakers would fall out of favor and they were never properly appreciated during their career by the critics of their native country. But time allows an opportunity for second look in order to consider a greater appreciation. "Made In England" is an excellent, helpful guide into the cinema of Powell and Pressburger and a wonderful encouragement into seeking out their movies.
