Film Journey – Page 64 – world cinema in Los Angeles and beyond

Maria Full of Grace

August 4, 2004 Doug Cummings Film review

Maria Full of Grace is a remarkable film for several reasons. It tells a harrowing story of a teenaged Columbian woman who finds herself at a crossroads in an unhappy romantic relationship. Her financially struggling and hard-working family, three generations under one roof, insists that Maria labor in a factory dethorning crates of roses, and her only chance to rise above a deepening hole of deterministic lack of opportunity seems to be the lucrative drug smuggling trade devised in the back rooms of Bogota. But the film displays an unusual intelligence in its treatment of this story–its embrace of ambiguity …

‘Les Dames’ write-up

August 2, 2004 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

The British Film Institute will release Robert Bresson’s second feature, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) on DVD at the end of the month, and MovieMail, a UK seller that specializes in world cinema and commentary asked me to contribute a few words on the film for their latest catalogue. You can read the piece, here.

The film has already been releassed on DVD in region 1 by the Criterion Collection, but the elements are not very good…here’s hoping the BFI can improve.…

Latest Film Comment

July 30, 2004 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

I’ve been complaining about Film Comment for the past few years, its silly sarcastic newsbriefs and short fiction, its efforts to sacrifice meaningful coverage for “hip” mainstream criticism, etc. But I chanced across the latest issue, and it’s actually got me sitting down and reading:

ï Joan Rivers’ Guilty Pleasures (just kidding!)

ïAn article on early Iranian cinema (pre-Kiarostami, who the author, Sohrab Shahid Saless, suggests is “Bazin-compatible” and therefore more popular in the
West; incidentally, Kent Jones makes a similar argument in defense of Olivier Assayas’ “non-Bazinian” work in the latest Cinema Scope)

ï An analysis by Godfrey …

The Story of the Weeping Camel

July 27, 2004 Doug Cummings Film review

While Fahrenheit 9/11 has been passing the $100 million mark this week, reinforcing the resurgence of documentary filmmaking as a popular art form, it has also been deflecting criticisms that suggest documentaries should be free of opinion. Unlike the “actualities” by early filmmakers (trains arriving in stations, people sneezing or kissing)–or even newsreels or industrial films–documentaries have long been identified precisely by their creative spins on reality, their underlying human summary; the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson defined the documentary as the “creative treatment of actualities” and first applied the term to the 1926 film, Moana, by Robert Flaherty, a …

New Senses…

July 26, 2004 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

The new issue of the redesigned Senses of Cinema is online, and noteworthy contributions by Filmjourney discussion participants include Acquarello’s article on “A Divine Tragedy: Kim Ki-duk Searches for Redemption in The Samaritan Girl,” Darren Hughes’ piece on “The New American Old West: Bruno Dumontís Twentynine Palms,” and Michael Kerpan on Ozu’s Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro). Enjoy……

Region-free player

July 20, 2004 Doug Cummings Uncategorized

Multi-region DVD players (allowing you to watch DVDs purchased from around the world) are becoming cheaper all the time. One of the latest units is the Cyber Home CH-DVD 300, a player that can be purchased from Best Buy in the US for $32.99. Ted Mills writes his review at DVDBeaver.com.

I’ve also recently had good results on my OS X Mac computer with the freeware player, VideoLAN, which can be downloaded from Apple’s site or www.videolan.org.…