Author: Doug Cummings

Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning

The Ottawa International Animation Festival, a very large and impressive event, concluded on Sunday and included several retrospectives (Hayao Miyazaki, Robert Breer, and others) and scores of new works. Two of those works involved Canadian friends of mine, John Torvi’s animation in Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning (2004) and director Kevin Nikkel’s Dial ‘M’ for Monster (2004).

Kevin also attended a seminar entitled “Your Criticism Sucks!” Here is its description:

Is critical commentary of the animated film dead? Useless? There was a time when there was a vibrant, if small, voice for popular criticism

One of the pleasures of doing websites devoted to specific filmmakers is meeting people who come out of the woodwork (or cyberwork or something). Not long after starting Robert-Bresson.com, Trond Trondsen and I were contacted by the UK writer-director Jonathan Hourigan, who had assisted on L’Argent (1983). Jonathan has been a great encouragement to us ever since, and we are proud to announce a new interview with him conducted by Colin Burnett that we have just co-published with the film journal Offscreen. It details Jonathan’s friendship with Bresson and his experience on the set of what was to …

This weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Los Angeles Korean International Film Festival at the American Cinematheque. (Why the word “international” was included, since it only featured Korean films, is beyond me.) LAKIFF screened recent films by two of Korea’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Hong Sang-soo’s Woman is the Future of Man (part of the upcoming NYFF line-up in October) and Kim Ki-duk’s Samaritan Girl–both films are already available as Korean region 3 DVDs. Hong was actually supposed to attend his screening and offer a Q&A that I was very much looking forward to, but he was held …

While I’m finishing my TIFF notes, I thought I’d mention a few unrelated, but exciting tidbits.

ï The films ofCarl Dreyer are currently airing this month on TCM, and it’s always fun to make new converts; on Monday, a coworker came into my office and asked if I’d ever heard of a silent film called The Passion of Joan of Arc, a movie she glimpsed on TCM and is now planning to buy her first DVD player simply so she can own the Criterion disc. And Image Entertainment has just released Dreyer’s The Parson’s Widow on DVD this …