Author: Doug Cummings

Film strips

New URL: Film-Journey.org

Site news

Welcome to the newly hyphenated Film Journey domain—previously filmjourney.org now film-journey.org.

This blog began in 2003 and continued fairly regularly until 2008, when my daughter was born. I sporadically updated it after that, mainly with Robert Koehler’s excellent contributions. It essentially ceased in 2015 when I entered grad school. It’s now an archive of more than 500 articles on moviegoing in the aughts. Despite surviving the digital turn, post-9/11 austerity, the demise of the alternative weeklies, and The Great Recession, film criticism in 2015 seemed more like a hobby—or idealistic exercise in precarious labor—than a viable career. Today I …

Read more

The Death of Cinefamily

Commentary

News has finally arrived that the biggest Los Angeles repertory success story of the last ten years, Cinefamily, is permanently shutting its doors due to accusations of sexual impropriety and harassment among its employees. I write “success story” (even though the owners now say they have “crippling debt”) because Cinefamily, especially in its early years (say, 2007-2012), was regularly touted by local culture commentators as “some of the most vibrant and unusual repertory and independent-film programming in the country.” This included art house, music videos, cable video, repertory, and many other genres programmed on a nightly basis. And Cinefamily had …

Read more

AFI Fest 2017: Loveless

Film festival, Film review

Zvyagintsev’s films are often described as critiques of modern Russia, but I’m beginning to accept his constant denials of that interpretation, his assertions that he is apolitical and only interested in the human condition. Yes, his films are set in contemporary Russia and track the moral compromises and lack of justice in the lives of his characters, but surely Russia is not the only country in the world with such imbalances? It’s partly why Leviathan (2014) is my favorite of his films—simultaneously his most political (in its examination of small town corruption) and his most allegorical (alluding as he does …

Read more

The Underworld Story (1950)

Film festival, Film review

The latest issue of Cineaste features an extended excerpt on 1950’s powerful The Sound of Fury (I wrote about the recent restoration here), part of a forthcoming biography on director Cy Endfield, whom author Brian Neve claims is the “least well known of the American filmmakers who came to Europe in the early Fifties to circumvent the Hollywood blacklist.” It’s mostly a historical overview of the production, but hopefully it will help convince some enterprising DVD/Blu-ray distributor to take notice.

Tomorrow, Angelenos can see Endfield’s other film from 1950, The Underworld Story, as part of the annual Noir …

Read more

Chris Marker’s LEVEL FIVE (1997)

Film review

Chris Marker’s brilliant and passionate but rarely seen (and never before US-distributed) multimedia docudrama reflects on the epic and decisive WWII Battle of Okinawa and its often suppressed historical relevance.  Catherine Belkholdja plays a French computer programmer researching the battle – including its 82-day siege and the loss of a third (roughly 100,000 people) of its island population – and documentary footage is mixed with her monologues as she simultaneously sorts through her feelings regarding a deceased lover.  Less a plot point than a metaphor, Belkholdia’s interactions with the computer (suggested by creative graphics courtesy of Marker’s beloved Macintosh) offer …

Read more

Welles in L.A.

Commentary

I’ve got a piece in today’s LA Weekly previewing Academy @ LACMA’s new Orson Welles series, the most comprehensive in this city in at least a decade. The series includes more readily available titles, but there are a few more films Welles directed that are available online; I thought I’d list some here:

The Fountain of Youth (1956) (YouTube) This very witty television show, based on a story by mid-century fantasist John Collier, was only broadcast once in 1958, but it still managed to win a Peabody Award. It was intended to be the pilot for an …

Read more