Film Journey – Page 54 – world cinema in Los Angeles and beyond

The Best of Youth

March 22, 2005 Doug Cummings Film review

Classical narrative has dominated Hollywood commercial filmmaking for so long that it’s easy to grow a bit jaded toward it, particularly when best-selling screenwriting gurus promote plot structures by page numbers. (“Plot point one must occur within three pages of the 30-minute mark…”) But films that really know how to spin a good yarn, create memorable characters with complex shadings, utilize talented actors, and render novelistic stories are rare enough that they stand out like hand carved sculptures in a Wal-Mart store.

Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth attains its degree of accomplishment partially by allowing itself the luxury …

The River

March 17, 2005 Doug Cummings DVD review

Jean Renoir (1894-1979), the son of the famous impressionist painter, is commonly referred to as a major filmmaker in history, but his films, strangely enough, rarely figure prominently in retrospectives or the era of Internet film discussions. Part of that may be attributed to the fact that his directorial style is gentle and restrained. He is no volatile Eisenstein or iconoclastic Godard or perplexing Bresson. In one of the better entries of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes: Renoir “liked simple incidents and their fusion with popular theatre and never chose to go beyond elementary narrative forms. …

Bringing Up Baby and To Be or Not to Be

March 13, 2005 Doug Cummings DVD review

Bringing Up Baby

Viewers new to American comedies of the ’30s are often surprised by the period’s sophistication and wit, two words not usually reserved for Hollywood comedies nowadays. Screwball comedy, in particular, was a genre that offered an opportunity for Depression troubled audiences to enjoy stories promoting a complete reshuffling of the social order, where classes and sexes intermingled with equal agency, random events ensured happy endings, and chaos reigned supreme. The genre was given its start in 1934 when three films were released–It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, and The Thin Man–and petered out …

Susan Sontag Selects 2, Naruse

March 3, 2005 Doug Cummings Film review, Special event

Repast

One of the last things Susan Sontag did before she passed away last December was program a sequel to her last touring series of classic Japanese films. Of the nine titles in the new series now playing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I’ll remark on the Mikio Naruse selections here. (And I’ll catch up with The Story of the Last Chrysthanemums at the American Cinematheque’s upcoming Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective in the next couple weeks.)

Repast (1951)

Although he is considered a major filmmaker by any measure (critic Audie Bock includes him with Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu …

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…

The River’s End

February 19, 2005 Doug Cummings Film review

In recent years, Iranian cinema has often been associated with Italian neorealism with its evocative, non-professional actors and direct representations of everyday life. But Behrooz Afkhami’s new film, The River’s End (Gavkhouni), suggests a much more European and formally adventurous mold that merges dreams and reality in a compelling meditation on the grieving process. That it’s also charming and enlivened with knowing humor makes it especially rewarding viewing. I managed to see it as part of UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ongoing festival of contemporary Iranian cinema last night, and immediately began hoping for a chance to see …