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Mira Nair and Satyajit Ray

Special event

One of the more interesting programs the American Film Institute puts on in Los Angeles is the Cinema Legacy series, which invites filmmakers to present a movie by a filmmaker who inspires them. I’ve had the good fortune to catch Agnieska Holland presenting AgnËs Varda’s Le Bonheur, Paul Schrader presenting Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, and just last week, Mira Nair presenting Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito (1957), his second film in the acclaimed Apu Trilogy.

Nair was born in India, in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, but eventually began studied sociology and cinÈma vÈritÈ documentary filmmaking at Harvard University before coming to international prominence …

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Save the Beaver

Uncategorized

I’ve been meaning to post an alert for a few days now, but following my previous blog on public radio donations, it’s only appropriate that I go ahead and mention the DVDBeaver donations drive that’s currently underway.

If you refer to DVDBeaver‘s screengrabbed visual reviews and region comparisons even half as often as I do, you should be aware of the fact that it’s a labor of love for Gary Tooze in Toronto, whose site’s increasing popularity and bandwidth continually demands more of his finances. DVDBeaver provides the best practical information for those of us wading through the multi-region …

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THX 1138

Uncategorized

I saw several screenings the past few days, so expect assorted updates this week…

Last week, I discovered a wonderful opportunity. Since I don’t own a television, I get a lot of my news from US public radio (and its incorporation of CBC and BBC programs) and, of course, the Internet. And for a while now, my local Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles has offered a Film Club to subscribers, which I finally took advantage of and can highly recommend. For a $150 annual membership, KPFK in Los Angeles offers tickets to over 80 movies a year, predominantly those …

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Winsor McCay

DVD review

Image Entertainment and Milestone Films recently released the complete extant works of Winsor McCay on DVD, Winsor McCay: The Master Edition, totaling ten short films from 1911-1922. It’s a direct transfer of the region 2 DVD, so some PAL-to-NTSC ghosting occurs, but should only upset the purists. McCay, who was a respected New York Herald cartoonist, is considered to have been the first real master of animation, creating extended motion films with great detail and a surprisingly offbeat sense of humor. From large animals who devour everything in sight (a dragon, Gertie the dinosaur, a growing monster) to a …

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Freaks

DVD review

Tod Browning is probably best remembered for directing BÈla Lugosi in Dracula (1931), but of the handful of his films I’ve seen, his most extraordinary are The Unknown (1927) and Freaks (1932), two movies that use the auspices of the horror convention to reveal complex notions about physical and social “normalcy.” Both films have been released as excellent DVDs in the US, Freaks just this week by Warner Home Video.

Browning was a Hollywood eccentric to be sure, a filmmaker who delved artfully into themes no other mainstream filmmaker seemed to touch, issues that were rooted in his past: at …

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The Big Animal

Film review

Unlike Heaven (2002), which tapped into the double lives and blind chances of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s earlier work, the newly-released film The Big Animal (2000), based on another of his unproduced screenplays, taps into his dry wit and sense of the absurd. It’s directed by the great Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr, who appeared in such Kieslowski films as Camera Buff (1979), Decalogue: Ten (1988), and Three Colors: White (1994), and there are few obvious updates to the screenplay since the time in which it was written in the early ’70s. Stuhr films in academy ratio (4:3×1) in black-and-white, and while there’s …

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