Uncategorized – Page 2

Unknown Forces

April 19, 2007 Doug Cummings Film review, Uncategorized

Last night at the REDCAT, Thai filmmaker (and graduate of Chicago’s School of the Art Institute) Apichatpong Weerasethakul opened his first solo exhibition in the US, entitled Unknown Forces (2007). A filmmaker who often blends narrative and experimental techniques (particularly structural innovation) in his feature films, I learned he also produces and distributes avant garde works through his company Kick the Machine, and has created several video installations for gallery spaces over the years.

Unknown Forces is set up in a bare, roughly 40-foot-square, darkened room, with four large, looping video images projected on three walls, and a …

La Commune (Paris, 1871)

October 26, 2006 Doug Cummings DVD review, Uncategorized

British filmmaker Peter Watkins’ nearly six-hour film, La Commune (Paris, 1871), made in the year 2000, is without a doubt one of the best and most important films of the decade, and it was just released this week on DVD by First Run Features. Count yourselves lucky–the film, which commemorates the short-lived working class attempt to turn France into a socialist republic following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, has rarely been screened in France or elsewhere, although I’ve had the French DVD on hand ever since I first saw the film at a special screening in Los Angeles …

TIFF 2005 line-up

August 23, 2005 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

So the Toronto International Film Festival announced its line-up of films today, and those of us who will be attending can hardly contain our excitement. Of course, Girish and I have already started complaining that the new films by, say, Denis, Bujalski, Aoyama, Tian, Allen, and Hong weren’t included. (Time to order that Korean Tale of Cinema DVD!) But for every “missing film,” there are innumerable titles with great potential, from the obvious (L’Enfant, CachÈ, Three Times) to the perhaps not-so-obvious (My Dad is 100 Years Old, Les Amants RÈguliers, Instructions for a …

Updates

July 17, 2005 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

I’ve taken a longer blogging break than I anticipated, partly because I was out of town and partly because I was immersed in finishing my liner notes for two upcoming Masters of Cinema DVDs in the UK, Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). (Strictly Film School’s Acquarello contributed the essay for our first Shindo release, The Naked Island.) Now that I’m wrapping this up, expect regular updates to resume.

In addition, Cinemarati (“a professional guild for film writers whose work appears primarily online”) relaunched with a new design and structure last week, and it includes a group blog …

Lewton and Ulmer

June 15, 2005 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

I Walked with a Zombie

Great DVD news has arrived this week for fans of elegant horror: Universal have announced a Bela Lugosi collection for September that will finally offer Edgar G. Ulmer’s expressionist/art deco masterpiece, The Black Cat (1934), and Warner have solidified an October street date for their long-awaited Val Lewton collection. The Lewton set will contain five discs and nine films, including the three classics Jacques Tourneur directed (1942’s Cat People and 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man) as well as Mark Robson’s masterpiece, The Seventh Victim (1943), which critic Jonathan Rosenbaum …

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…