Odds & Ends
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Worth Your Attention
Just a quick morning post for two things that have caught my interest - totally unrelated to each other, but both worth a look. The first is this post by Benjamin Wright over at his blog Aspect Ratio, which talks about the role of Imax in popular cinema, and the importance of The Dark Knight in particular. I touched on this in my review but Wright goes into a lot more detail, including screenshots that give a sense of the difference in composition between the Imax and general release versions. Twenty years from now, once the - justified - hype over Ledger has subsided, the film's pioneering use of Imax might be what it is best remembered for. Also, I just wanted to point readers to an Australian film blog of which I have only just become aware: Glenn Dunks' Stale Popcorn. Dunks is offering a very entertaining mix of proper film connoisseurship and more lighthearted posts, and its well worth a look. So I'll add Stale Popcorn to my list of really good online local reads, which includes InFilm, Hoopla, Melbourne Film Blog, Last Night With Riviera, Cinephilia, and Urban CineFile (which I must admit lost me when it went subscription and never got me back). Are there any others out there that, like Stale Popcorn, have thus far escaped my attention (or which I've forgotten here)? Labels: australia, batman, commentary, criticism Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 27.7.08 - 0 comments  
Friday, July 25, 2008
My MIFF
I'm aware that my previous coverage of MIFF hasn't been very helpful, since I frequently don't end up writing about films until after they've had all their screenings - last year the whole festival was over before I wrote up a lot of the films I saw. Once again, I'd recommend Paul Martin's blog for information that's actually useful, like his list of films that are likely to get a commercial release anyway, and his monitoring of what is about to get sold out. By contrast, and as always, my own coverage of the festival will simply be postmortems of my own haphazard, time-constrained and obtuse sampling of the festival. So with no further apologies, this is what I've put on the mini-pass for this year. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Marina Zenovich) This looks like it should be an interesting portrayal of the man with - on the face of it - the shonkiest reason ever for not accepting an Academy Award in person. Apparently it's quite sympathetic to Polanski - it will be interesting to see the filmmaker's take on the events. Of Time and the City (Terrence Davies) This tribute to Liverpool by Terence Davies caught my interest given my urban planning background. Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley) I have run with the "Ozsploitation" focus of the festival this year, and this will be a great scene-setter. Early word is this documentary is very good. Razorback (Russell Mulcahy) Dead End Drive-In (Brain Trenchard-Smith) Roadgames (Richard Franklin) See above about Ozsploitation. Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar Wei) I love Wong Kar Wei, but still have many gaps in my knowledge of his work, so I couldn't miss the chance to see this revised cut of Ashes of Time. Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat) This is a punt: it caught my interest purely because it looks at rebuilding in Thailand after the Tsunami, which interests me as a planner and also because I just came back from my own Thai sojourn. Persepolis (Marjana Satrapi) An early look at Satrapi's acclaimed animated feature. Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog) I love Herzog's stuff - while this doesn't sound as interesting as Grizzly Man, it's always a treat to see a new Herzog doco. Labels: miff Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 25.7.08 - 0 comments
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Touch of Evil! Touch of Evil! Touch of Evil!
Hot on the heels (at least in the order I found out about them) of the restored Metropolis comes the news that Touch of Evil will get a new DVD release carrying three versions of the film. The current DVD features only a highly speculative "restoration," which even the people who made it felt should not have replaced the earlier versions, as noted by Jonathan Rosenbaum: I was a consultant on the third version--a re-edit by Walter Murch based on a memo written by Welles to Universal in the 50s--and it was never the intention of Murch, me, or our producer Rick Schmidlin to replace the film's original release version or the longer preview version that supplanted it in the 70s. We were hoping that all three could be released in a DVD box set.Well, now we have that set, correcting one of the worst bits of DVD butchery we've seen for a while. That's sensational news. Click the image below to order it.  Labels: welles Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 10.7.08 - 0 comments
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Coolest Movie News Since.... Ever?
You've probably seen this already, since it's one of those rare pieces of news about film restoration that was so earth-shattering it made the mainstream media: a near-complete version of Metropolis has turned up. Ain't It Cool have images here.  I love Metropolis: I'm a fan of city movies, and silent movies, and big epic special effects movies, and science fiction movies, so it really does have everything for me. Everything except, of course, about a quarter of its footage: the previous best-available version used intertitles to give a sense of what was missing. That DVD was released by Kino overseas, and seems to be the basis of the version released by Madman in Australia. Kino were already planning a re-release (with a Blu-Ray version) in 2009; that has been hastily revised to include the rediscovered footage. Obviously the new footage is likely to be in poor shape, visually, but its historical importance is extraordinary. What could possibly be next: the ten hour version of Greed? Labels: commentary, rumours, silent film Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 5.7.08 - 0 comments
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