Uncategorized – Film Journey

Connections and Globalisms: Days and Nights and the 2020 Palm Springs Film Festival

April 6, 2020 Robert Koehler Uncategorized

NOTE: This essay was written before the covid-19 pandemic, when film festivals around the world closed or cancelled, with no date in sight for relaunch. In a sense, this piece was written in another era, which just ended. But because of that, the strangeness of reading something written at one moment before that moment radically changed can have its own value.

Everything in film culture—like every cultural project—will be permanently changed by this crisis and how governments and society will respond to it. We are in effect living in a global, collective mystery whose outcome is completely unknown. The …

What the Palm Springs Film Festival Tells Us About the State of Cinema

January 22, 2019 Robert Koehler Uncategorized

Like every other North American festival this time of year, the Palm Springs film festival, which closed this past Monday, is pulled into the apparently inescapable vortex of the Academy Awards. Despite all the sturm und drang of the Academy’s internal organizational drama, cost overruns on the new Academy museum at Wilshire and Fairfax and strain to diversify its (still) white-dominant membership, the Oscars rule, and not in a good way. The Oscars have utterly colonized English-language movies aspiring to that thing known as “art.”

This is a recent development that the so-called “art film” world hasn’t figured out or …

Sita Sings the Blues . . . online!

February 27, 2009 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

My favorite animated feature last year, the undistributed Sita Sings the Blues, created almost entirely in Flash by Nina Paley, has become Thirteen.org‘s first feature to be streamed in its entirety on their website. The film has been idling in legal limbo for many months because of its use of 80-year-old pop songs Paley hasn’t had the resources to purchase, but PBS stations have special rules governing their broadcasts that allow the work to be shown.

However, note Paley’s new post at her blog:

“Many more formats will be online by March 7th, the day Sita Sings the

Bernardo Rondeau at LACMA

November 20, 2008 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

I’m still trying to post some reviews from AFI FEST, but my baby has been in the hospital for “minor” surgery this week and everything else has been put to the side.

In the meantime, I was able to attend a few Festival screenings with the LACMA film program coordinator Bernardo Rondeau, which became a highlights of my Festival experience, and he has just posted a “Best of AFI” write-up at the LACMA blog, Unframed.

Los Angeles is famous for its diversity and dispersal, and while its film culture doesn’t benefit from the kind of concentrated public transit and …

AFI FEST repeats

November 9, 2008 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

The Class

In case you missed some of the higher profile films at AFI FEST this week, here’s a list of some of the films that will have upcoming screenings or distribution in Los Angeles:

• Slumdog Millionaire (LACMA preview on 11/11; Landmark release on 11/12; Laemmle release on 12/21)
• Gomorrah (American Cinematheque screening on 11/11; Laemmle release on 12/19)
• A Christmas Tale (Landmark release on 11/14; Laemmle release on 11/14)
• Lion’s Den (American Cinematheque screening on 11/22)
• Hunger (Nuart release on 12/5)
• Wendy and Lucy (Laemmle release on 12/12)
• The Wrestler (LACMA preview…

Halloween viewing

October 20, 2008 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999)

I’m wondering if anyone has any superior horror films or recent discoveries they’d recommend?

I still think Romero’s last zombie movie, Diary of the Dead, is a fantastic genre piece with impressive stylistic qualities (first person camerawork, documentary footage of Katrina) and incisive social commentary, as is typical for the series.

Last year, I watched a lot of the Hammer titles I had never seen, and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) was probably the most complex and emotionally resonating, with a very evocative sense of the Gothic.

Two years ago, I was blown away …