Author: Doug Cummings

Update on LACMA Film

Commentary


“Where’s the significant fine art?” Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Lakeside Landscape (1889) and Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1936), courtesy of the excellent Landscape Suicide.

After several months in which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was presumably doing good on its promise to re-prioritize and promote its threatened film program, my Save Film at LACMA partner, Debra Levine, and I have posted a new update on the museum’s progress: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, or “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”…

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LA Weekly Preview of COLCOA

Film festival


Pierrot le fou‘s digital restoration will receive its post-Cannes international debut on Friday.

The LA Weekly has published my preview of the City of Lights, City of Angeles (COLCOA) French film festival, which begins in full force today and plays through Sunday, April 25th. Of the handful of screeners I watched, I was particularly moved by Alain Cavalier’s Irène, and this may be your only chance of seeing it.

For COLCOA’s full line-up and many events, be sure to check out its website. In addition to the restored Pierrot le fou, I’m also excited about the …

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Earth (1930)

DVD review

Mr. Bongo Films in the UK is releasing a DVD of Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) “fully restored and in its full-length version” next month, and it’s a beauty to behold. Appreciating a silent film sometimes requires that we adjust our modern reflexes to engage it on its own terms, but this monumental and passionate work is one of the exceptions, the last and most poetic entry of Dovzhenko’s loose silent trilogy about the violent social forces sweeping through peasant Ukrainian lives in the first decade of the Soviet Union. Rhapsodic and intensely lyrical, the film dramatizes the deep tensions that …

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Ross Lipman article in the LA Weekly

Film review, Special event


10-17-88 (1989)

I’ve got an article in this week’s LA Weekly about the films of Ross Lipman, whom many readers will recognize as the UCLA restorationist behind classic films by independent luminaries such as Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Charles Burnett. However, his upcoming show at REDCAT on March 30 (a Tuesday event rather than the Theater’s typical Monday night film schedule) should expose more people to his own film, video, and performance work, and shouldn’t be missed.…

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Videotheque in South Pasadena

Interview


Some of the cinephile loot at Videotheque, and its owner, Mark Wright.

I’ve long wanted do an interview with Mark Wright, who established a remarkable DVD store named Videotheque in South Pasadena a few years ago. Los Angeles has a few stores renowned for their ambitious classic Hollywood and world cinema selections (Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee, Cinefile, Vidiots) but none in the San Gabriel Valley. I first heard about the newly-opened Videotheque on a film discussion board in 2003, and soon became a loyal customer attracted to its great selection (including many imports) organized by country or director, genuinely friendly …

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A Conversation with Bong Joon-ho

Interview


Bong Joon-ho, courtesy of the author

By Hye Jean Chung

The synopsis of Mother, the latest film from award-winning Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, whose filmography includes the critically acclaimed and widely popular films, The Host (2006) and Memories of Murder (2003), is deceptively simple: The titular character is a devoted single parent (Kim Hye-ja) who lives with her twenty-seven-year-old, mentally-challenged son, Do-joon (Won Bin), and takes care of him with a passion that tinges on obsession. When he is arrested by the local police and charged with murdering a teenage girl, her maternal instincts attain a primal intensity as …

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