Author: Doug Cummings

Predicting Your Taste

Texts

One of the freelancing hats I wear these days is graphic design for the California Institute of Technology’s award-winning Engineering & Science magazine, and its latest issue contains a really fascinating article on the Netflix Prize contest (2006-’09) that awarded a million dollars to the person/team who best improved the company’s algorithm for predicting its user ratings.

I’m sure most readers here have received their fair share of movie predictions from any number of websites, ranging from the accurate to the absurd. A few months ago, Amazon.com actually sent me this email: “As someone who has purchased or rated The …

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Jafar Panahi is Released

Special event

Jafar Panahi, happy to be home. (Photo courtesy of the Twitter group FreeJafarPanahi.)

“I think Panahi’s refusal to cooperate with [the authorities] prolonged the case,” Jamsheed Akrami says in Godfrey Cheshire’s summary of events. “They just realized they couldn’t intimidate Panahi. I consider that to be a great moral victory for Panahi and people like him. We have a lot of them in Iran. But they are not as well known as Panahi, and are sadly paying much heavier prices.”…

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World on a Wire (1973)

DVD review

One of the most exciting DVD releases of the year occurs Monday in the UK, when World on a Wire arrives as a two-disc edition from Second Sight. The cult science fiction TV movie by Rainer Werner Fassbinder had scarcely been seen since its 1973 broadcast, but a new restoration wowed critics at the Berlin film festival and MoMA earlier this year. The film deserves to enter the pantheon of great SF movies.

It’s a close adaptation of Daniel Galouye’s 1964 Counterfeit World, a virtual reality novel years ahead of its time; although human connections to machines and alternate …

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The Blacks (2009)

Film festival, Film review

The Southeast European Film Festival concludes tonight at UCLA. A highlight has been the US premiere of Goran Devic’s and Zvonimir Juric’s The Blacks, a trancelike, psychological thriller about a group of Croatian special forces during the Bosnian war. It’s being touted as the first Croat feature to address Croatian war crimes, but it’s not a message picture; it merely references Branimir Glavas‘ famed Garage Case as a backdrop for its existential drama.

Five armed men slink through a forest as they follow the tracks of a previous party; a shocking event twenty minutes into the picture triggers …

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TCM Classic Film Festival and Wild River (1960)

Film festival, Film review


45-year-old Jo Van Fleet as octogenarian Ella Garth in Wild River.

The three-and-a-half-day TCM Classic Film Festival wraps up today with the North American premiere of the newly restored Metropolis (1927) tonight. The Festival has been somewhat of an experiment in its first year, screening good prints of well known films in the heart of Hollywood for a high fee ($20 per screening if seats are available, or $500 passes). Most Angelenos think the Festival is prohibitively expensive, but that may be because we can see titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Playtime in 70mm here on a regular …

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The Man Beyond the Bridge (2009)

Film festival, Film review

The 2010 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles debuted last night and will continue through Sunday, April 25th. It’s one of the better produced local festivals and takes place in Hollywood at the posh Arclight Cinema. It aims to strengthen ties between filmmakers of Indian descent, audiences, and industry people, so its line-up emphasizes popular hits and Bollywood films, but it also includes documentaries and the occasional art film.

A standout with elements of the latter category this year is The Man Beyond the Bridge (screening Sunday), Laxmikant Shetgaonkar’s FIPRESCI-award-winning drama, fresh from Berlinale’s Forum section. It’s a fascinating story …

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