Author: Doug Cummings

TIFF ’06 Diary #1

Film festival

TIFF has been a fine, blustery week, with temperatures hovering in the 60s with occasional showers. After the heat records in Los Angeles this summer, this feels like paradise, and standing in line at midnight for The Host in a torrential downpour with lighting crashing around us was an atmospheric high point of the festival. The films and company have been terrific–I’ve only seen one movie I ultimately disliked, and so far I’ve seen about 20 of them (not including the Wavelengths program of shorts).

Here are my impressions of the films, which I hope to add in six- or …

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TIFF ’06

Film festival

For the past couple years, I’ve planned on blogging from the Toronto International Film Festival, with mixed results. Inevitably, I always remember one of my favorite aspects of film festivals is the social component, particularly in this age of virtual interaction; getting to meet online friends and cinÈphiles in person I only get to see once or twice a year is too great a thrill to cloister myself in a hotel room. Having said that, I’m hoping to blog some this year, but if Girish or somebody invites me out for coffee, I’m tossing the laptop in my room and …

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Unshown Cinema

Special event

The Los Angeles Film Festival–officially in its fourth year–is still finding its groove, but it’s improving. A few years ago, Chicago critic Roger Ebert called the Sundance Film Festival the “de facto Los Angeles film festival,” and said that as the world’s film center, Los Angeles needs a festival less than almost any other place in the world: “There’s no need for one in a town where every commercial release plays usually before it plays anywhere else.” Well sure, if all festivals do is premiere industry films; fortunately, festivals are where hundreds of international films that won’t ever play …

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The Road to Guantanamo

Film review

Given the kneejerk partisan response to An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s informative documentary about the realities of global warming, I have little expectation that Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ new visceral docudrama about human rights abuses in US prison camps will provide a wake-up call to the dwindling numbers of internment policy loyalists–but one can always dream.

The Road to Guantanamo (winner of the best directing award at the Berlin Film Festival) comes to US screens at a time when the mainstream media has rediscovered the prisons in Cuba used for people captured in the war on terror: imprisoned …

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Mr. Arkadin

DVD review

Like many cinephiles, I’ve been slowly making my way through Criterion’s DVD set of Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin the last couple weeks. Welles was never allowed to finish editing his 1955 picture and it has appeared in various forms throughout the years, so Criterion includes the producer-finished Confidential Report version, the so-called “Corinth” version that corresponds most closely to Welles’ vision, and a newly reconstructed “comprehensive” version created by the Munich Film Archive that combines five different versions; plus various essays, interviews, radio shows, and a novel attributed to Welles but likely adapted from the screenplay by somebody else. For …

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Arthur Lipsett, 21-87

Film review

Several weeks ago, I managed to see Arthur Lipsett’s astonishing collage film, 21-87 (1964), in Toronto at the NFB Mediatheque, but I postponed writing more in-depth about it until I could obtain a copy on video. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that it isn’t available for individual purchase, even though the NFB offers DVDs of A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965) and Very Nice, Very Nice (1961), the film that earned Lipsett an Academy Award nomination and an invitation by Stanley Kubrick to create the title sequence for Dr. Strangelove. (He declined.)

21-87 is a particularly hard film to write about …

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