Author: Doug Cummings

A Chat with the Academy’s Bernardo Rondeau

Interview

Despite its reputation as home for the entertainment industry, Los Angeles has a thriving alt/repertory film scene, one of the realities I hoped to reflect when I started this blog eleven years ago.  One of the city’s best programmers, Bernardo Rondeau, has maintained the beleaguered LACMA weekend film screenings in the five years since they were initially threatened, and has brought such rare gems to Los Angeles as Aleksei German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer, and several series built around the museum’s excellent Stanley Kubrick and Gabriel Figueroa exhibits.

Happily, Rondeau has recently …

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Vidor and Ulmer at TCM Fest

Film festival, Film review

The TCM Classic Film Festival wrapped Sunday, and as always, it was a whirlwind of celebrity appearances, new prints, flocks of out-of-town tourists, and general TCM geekdom.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling this year’s program emphasized the tried-and-true and was less exploratory than previous editions. One might have hoped TCM’s recent Peabody Award for its elaborate presentation of Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film would have inspired it to cast a wider net.  But even the “Discoveries” section included films such as Eraserhead, Godzilla, Freaks, The Muppet Movie, and other standards of repertory or the DVD …

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Standout Melodramas at IFFLA

Film festival, Film review

One of the great things about living in Los Angeles is the many smaller festivals throughout the year that focus on regional cinema, giving us a broader sense of the movies being made in any given country than the typical artistic skimming that occurs at the larger fests. Now in its twelfth year, the well organized Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles is about midway through its run, showcasing about 16 features (plus shorts) that generally fall within the thoughtful mainstream of Indian cinema.

Two films screening tomorrow – debut features, both – are intriguing melodramas about adolescents: Phoring and …

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TCM Classic Film Festival

Film festival


Try and Get Me (The Sound of Fury) (1951)

It has been about a year since Film Journey has been updated, but I’ve been hard at work publishing a variety of print pieces, particularly for the LA Weekly.  The site is freshly rebooted now, and you can check out some of my writing from the past year on the More Publications page at top.

This past weekend was the fourth annual TCM Classic Film Festival in Los Angeles. I often remark that I have a love/hate relationship with the Festival.  On the one hand, it’s a pass-driven …

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Reemergence

Film review, Site news

After a lengthy hiatus, Film Journey is gearing up for new activity, so make sure your RSS feeds are well-oiled and in good working order. As Paul Brunick wrote in Film Comment some 18 months ago, the site has always been “updated on a schedule that’s leisurely but sustained,” and that will continue.

Last year, I became the web editor at UCLA Film & Television Archive (where I continue to work), and in my spare time published articles in the LA Weekly, hosted a monthly screening/discussion group at Echo Park Film Center, and helped with AFI Fest programming, …

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AFI FEST 2010

Site news, Special event

AFI FEST starts up today in Hollywood, and this year, I’m the Editor of the Festival blog, AFI FEST NOW, as well as an Associate Programmer. I’ll be introducing the screenings of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, A Screaming Man, Free Radicals, Kubrick’s Lolita, and the double feature of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 classic The Housemaid (which can be viewed for free in its entirety at MUBI, here) and Im Sang-soo’s new remake. I’ll also introduce the Hong Sang-soo double feature, HaHaHa and Oki’s Movie, and I’ll facilitate the Q/A …

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