Doug Cummings – Page 37

Frederic Back

March 24, 2005 Doug Cummings Film review, Special event

In precise and elegant scribbles, a robust party comes to life filled with folk dancing and social rituals; peasant couples in colorful dress twirl and part, women in rocking chairs sway in time to joyous fiddles, children watch from the top of a stairway. A man takes a drink and sprouts antlers, shadows flicker across the candlelit room. And the image itself can hardly contain the energy as the “camera” constantly shifts to capture as much of the action as possible, finally tilting up to the chandeliers while continuing to rotate in its own private exhilaration.

An avant-garde film? No, …

The Best of Youth

March 22, 2005 Doug Cummings Film review

Classical narrative has dominated Hollywood commercial filmmaking for so long that it’s easy to grow a bit jaded toward it, particularly when best-selling screenwriting gurus promote plot structures by page numbers. (“Plot point one must occur within three pages of the 30-minute mark…”) But films that really know how to spin a good yarn, create memorable characters with complex shadings, utilize talented actors, and render novelistic stories are rare enough that they stand out like hand carved sculptures in a Wal-Mart store.

Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth attains its degree of accomplishment partially by allowing itself the luxury …

The River

March 17, 2005 Doug Cummings DVD review

Jean Renoir (1894-1979), the son of the famous impressionist painter, is commonly referred to as a major filmmaker in history, but his films, strangely enough, rarely figure prominently in retrospectives or the era of Internet film discussions. Part of that may be attributed to the fact that his directorial style is gentle and restrained. He is no volatile Eisenstein or iconoclastic Godard or perplexing Bresson. In one of the better entries of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes: Renoir “liked simple incidents and their fusion with popular theatre and never chose to go beyond elementary narrative forms. …

Bringing Up Baby and To Be or Not to Be

March 13, 2005 Doug Cummings DVD review

Bringing Up Baby

Viewers new to American comedies of the ’30s are often surprised by the period’s sophistication and wit, two words not usually reserved for Hollywood comedies nowadays. Screwball comedy, in particular, was a genre that offered an opportunity for Depression troubled audiences to enjoy stories promoting a complete reshuffling of the social order, where classes and sexes intermingled with equal agency, random events ensured happy endings, and chaos reigned supreme. The genre was given its start in 1934 when three films were released–It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, and The Thin Man–and petered out …

Susan Sontag Selects 2, Naruse

March 3, 2005 Doug Cummings Film review, Special event

Repast

One of the last things Susan Sontag did before she passed away last December was program a sequel to her last touring series of classic Japanese films. Of the nine titles in the new series now playing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I’ll remark on the Mikio Naruse selections here. (And I’ll catch up with The Story of the Last Chrysthanemums at the American Cinematheque’s upcoming Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective in the next couple weeks.)

Repast (1951)

Although he is considered a major filmmaker by any measure (critic Audie Bock includes him with Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu …

Oscar shorts

February 22, 2005 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

For the last few years, Apollo Cinema have theatrically distributed mini-festivals of the Oscar nominees for Best Live Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film, and this weekend the American Cinematheque screened the 2005 touring program. For some reason, this collection doesn’t include the nominated films by Bill Plympton (Guard Dog), Mike Gabriel and Baker Bloodworth (Disney’s Lorenzo), or Gary McKendry (Everything in This Country Must). Even so, and although it has been years since I’ve watched the Oscar broadcast, these two categories do reveal unexpected pleasures.

Best Animated Short Film:

Gopher Broke…