FILM
Tastes Good Still? Oscars 2010
Benjamin Strong
03.08.10
We are so bitchy we'll never get any star interviews...oh well. As Ben Strong elucidates: "The Oscars exist for the sole purpose of Hollywood’s identity maintenance." But the Academy didn't need Avatar to win to prove anything to itself. 'Cause The Hurt Locker "more closely resembles Hollywood’s image of itself than do blue people." Alas, it ended with historic precedents. And George Clooney had a hockey haircut, ha....and Ben Strong gives Fanzine's annual second take opinion on the event. (What we are hoping for in the future? I'm not sure…but I wouldn't mind seeing Rob Lowe take another stab at some song and dance, cracked out Disney style. -CM)
From Party Animals to Gilt Queens to a New Hollywood Dame: Oscars 2010
Kevin Killian
03.08.10
Some changes in the Oscars over the years, and especially this year - 2010 sees 10 best picture noms as opposed to 5, a woman winning best director, and no gilded Miramax flick in the bunch, right? Except that “damned Helen Mirren” still got unwanted attention from co-host Steve Martin. Kevin Killian notes what has changed and looks back on a man who maybe got the Oscar show rolling in a new direction long ago, Allan Carr, who once ruled the Hollywood party scene and blew it all on a weird Snow White night. There’s a new book out about him by Robert Hofler called Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.
Kim Ji-woon's Tale of Two Sisters
Emily Carter
03.03.10
Alfred Hitchcock either popularized or created the term "MacGuffin" to describe any highly valued object that sets the plot in motion: the ticking bomb, top secret microfilm or the stolen necklace. Is it a stretch to say that in a romantic comedy, the completion of the romantic union is a type of MacGuffin? U.S. films often trot out romantic or sexual union as kind of plot device, while several Korean films I've seen seem to use the re-completion of the family unit as one of the central concerns. Director Bong Joon-ho's excellent 2006 swamp monster film, The Host revolves around a family getting their daughter back after she's been eaten by a giant mutant squid and dragged into the sewers. (Fittingly, Bong's latest film which opens next month is titled Mother.) Kim Ji-woon's particularly unpleasant depiction of "blended" family life, oddly helped Emily Carter, author of Glory Goes and Gets Some, to heal the wounds in her own.
Rob Nilsson and Cine Manifest at Anthology Film Archives
Nancy Keefe Rhodes
01.22.10
This week (Jan 21. through the 28th) at New York City's Anthology Film Archive come the films of award winning director Rob Nilsson and Cine Manifest, San Francisco’s 1970s Marxist film collective. Nancy Keefe Rhodes gives an exhaustive yet breathless preview of the films screened at AFA. But even if you aren't in New York, you can get many on Netflix, from your favorite indie movie store, or buy them from the source; so read up, watch, and learn how Nilsson, the octogenarian everyman, demurs his stance over time, favoring art over politics.
The Last Station - Love, Copyright and Anarcho-Christianity
Amy Meyerson
01.14.10
It seems that L. Ron Hubbard wasn't the only writer to create a bizarre and zealous spiritual organization. In the later part of his life, Leo Tolstoy began a radical ascetic pacifist Christian movement. He swapped letters with Gandhi, advocated for anarchist zoologist Peter Kropotkin and extolled the values of Esperanto. Director Michael Hoffman's The Last Station offers a view on the last days of Tolstoy's life and the dispute over the ownership of the literary estate between his wife and his followers. While the film maintains a tight focus on its pair of lovers, Amy Meyerson offers insight into the historical events that loom just outside the frame. Starring Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren and Paul Giamatti, the film is based on a novel by literary critic Jay Parini, who having contemplated the influence of an author after their eventual departure in his writing, has perhaps appropriately been appointed literary executor to Gore Vidal.