Three time Oscar-nominated scribe John Logan is adapting National Book Award-winning author Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West for the big screen for New Regency.
John Hillcoat, who previously adapted McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, will direct and produce along with Keith Redmon for New Regency.
The sprawling novel is widely considered one of the greatest works of American literature. Published in 1985, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is an epic tale of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion which brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of a 14-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
John Hillcoat, who previously adapted McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, will direct and produce along with Keith Redmon for New Regency.
The sprawling novel is widely considered one of the greatest works of American literature. Published in 1985, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is an epic tale of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion which brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of a 14-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
- 4/24/2024
- by Anthony D'Alessandro
- Deadline Film + TV
The fourth episode of the fourth season of "Star Trek: Lower Decks," called "Something Borrowed, Something Green," sees Lieutenant Boimler (Jack Quaid) and Lieutenant Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) sharing a dorm. In previous seasons, when the characters were merely ensigns, they slept in bunks in a hallway. They now have an enclosed private room for the first time, a wrinkle that soon has the two at each other's throats. Notably, they have come to blows over which of them gets to mist the room's adorable bonsai tree. Low-stakes animosity immediately forms. To make matters worse, Boimler's and Rutherford's respective holodeck hours have been double-booked, and they will have to share the day's recreation time together as well.
Curiously, both Boimler and Rutherford enter the holodeck dressed as Mark Twain, eager to spend a few quiet hours on an old-timey Mississippi riverboat. Affecting Twainian accents, the two begin by hurling insults, but...
Curiously, both Boimler and Rutherford enter the holodeck dressed as Mark Twain, eager to spend a few quiet hours on an old-timey Mississippi riverboat. Affecting Twainian accents, the two begin by hurling insults, but...
- 9/21/2023
- by Witney Seibold
- Slash Film
For a writer who spent most of his career outside the limelight, the outpouring of public admiration in the wake of Cormac McCarthy’s death on June 13 at 89 testified to the power of his work. An obscure figure with a cultish following for much of his writing life, McCarthy had long been esteemed by members of the literati. The late literary scholar Harold Bloom placed him on his very short list of American authors in the 20th century who had in their writing achieved the sublime, naming him alone as...
- 7/3/2023
- by Caine O'Rear
- Rollingstone.com
Cormac McCarthy, generally considered one of America’s greatest living authors, has died. His death was confirmed by his son, John McCarthy. He was 89.
McCarthy is best known for books such as Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West; The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and No Country For Old Men, which was adapted into the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning film.
His other published works include The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of Dark, Suttree, All the Pretty Horses – which won the National Book Award – The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country were adapted for film by Billy Bob Thornton, John Hillcoat and Joel and Ethan Coen, respectively.
McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal that No Country for Old Men was originally a screenplay, but failed to gain traction in that form. “In fact, they said, ‘That will never work.
McCarthy is best known for books such as Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West; The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and No Country For Old Men, which was adapted into the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning film.
His other published works include The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of Dark, Suttree, All the Pretty Horses – which won the National Book Award – The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country were adapted for film by Billy Bob Thornton, John Hillcoat and Joel and Ethan Coen, respectively.
McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal that No Country for Old Men was originally a screenplay, but failed to gain traction in that form. “In fact, they said, ‘That will never work.
- 6/13/2023
- by Tom Tapp
- Deadline Film + TV
When Tom Six's horror freakout "The Human Centipede (First Sequence)" was released in 2009, it was met with much disgust and ballyhoo. The poster boasted that the film was "100 medically accurate," something that no movie poster should ever boast.
The premise was wild and gross and repelled prudes while attracting seekers of the extreme. A mad scientist named Dr. Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser) -- clearly inspired by Josef Mengele -- kidnaps three hapless tourists and announces his dark plan while they are strapped to gurneys in his basement. Dr. Heiter intends to surgically connect the three people via their alimentary canals. He will connect one person's face to the previous person's anus, and remove tendons in their knees, forcing them to crawl. In so doing, he will create a human centipede. There is no stated reason for his experiment.
Audiences who saw "The Human Centipede" were appropriately grossed out. The...
The premise was wild and gross and repelled prudes while attracting seekers of the extreme. A mad scientist named Dr. Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser) -- clearly inspired by Josef Mengele -- kidnaps three hapless tourists and announces his dark plan while they are strapped to gurneys in his basement. Dr. Heiter intends to surgically connect the three people via their alimentary canals. He will connect one person's face to the previous person's anus, and remove tendons in their knees, forcing them to crawl. In so doing, he will create a human centipede. There is no stated reason for his experiment.
Audiences who saw "The Human Centipede" were appropriately grossed out. The...
- 9/18/2022
- by Witney Seibold
- Slash Film
Director Sacha Jenkins does the most important thing he could do in “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues”: He lets Louis Armstrong be messy.
Armstrong is one of those legends about whom people have had strong, polarized opinions. He’s either the greatest artist of the 20th century, in the esteem of Robert Christgau or Wynton Marsalis. Or he’s an Uncle Tom, someone who sold out and pandered to white audiences, as Sammy Davis Jr. once thought. And of course there’s the third path of corporate America, to sand the edges of someone like Armstrong down until he’s a cuddly teddy bear whose “What a Wonderful World” stands ready to accompany any commercial.
Jenkins’ new documentary for Apple TV+ avoids those absolutes. He’s interested in the man who was Armstrong, and that means a more complete, nuanced picture — a portrait of a human not so easy to categorize.
Armstrong is one of those legends about whom people have had strong, polarized opinions. He’s either the greatest artist of the 20th century, in the esteem of Robert Christgau or Wynton Marsalis. Or he’s an Uncle Tom, someone who sold out and pandered to white audiences, as Sammy Davis Jr. once thought. And of course there’s the third path of corporate America, to sand the edges of someone like Armstrong down until he’s a cuddly teddy bear whose “What a Wonderful World” stands ready to accompany any commercial.
Jenkins’ new documentary for Apple TV+ avoids those absolutes. He’s interested in the man who was Armstrong, and that means a more complete, nuanced picture — a portrait of a human not so easy to categorize.
- 9/9/2022
- by Christian Blauvelt
- Indiewire
David Duchovny, the star of series like “The X-Files” and “Californication,” becomes a recurring figure in Netflix’s “The Chair,” a satirical send-up of modern academia starring Sandra Oh as the beleaguered new chair of the English department at struggling (and fictional) Pembroke University.
When the wife of Pembroke’s dean (David Morse) insists that a prestigious lecture series go not to a seasoned academic like junior professor Yasmin McKay (Nana Mensah) but instead to Duchovny, Oh’s Ji-Yoon Kim reacts with incredulity — even when the dean assures her that Duchovny is a “New York Times bestseller.” He adds, “Look it up.”
And we did. Turns out Dean Larson is right (even if hiring guest lecturers based on who his wife bumps into at the farmer’s market remains questionable). Duchovny’s 2015 debut novel, “Holy Cow,” entered the Times’ hardcover fiction list at No. 16. The actor has since published three more novels,...
When the wife of Pembroke’s dean (David Morse) insists that a prestigious lecture series go not to a seasoned academic like junior professor Yasmin McKay (Nana Mensah) but instead to Duchovny, Oh’s Ji-Yoon Kim reacts with incredulity — even when the dean assures her that Duchovny is a “New York Times bestseller.” He adds, “Look it up.”
And we did. Turns out Dean Larson is right (even if hiring guest lecturers based on who his wife bumps into at the farmer’s market remains questionable). Duchovny’s 2015 debut novel, “Holy Cow,” entered the Times’ hardcover fiction list at No. 16. The actor has since published three more novels,...
- 9/5/2021
- by Thom Geier
- The Wrap
Hollywood, the Dream Factory, is the apt setting for the latest cinematic update on William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fran Kranz, Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe, and Rachael Leigh Cook are among the cast in the new Midsummer adaptation. HitFix has an exclusive early look at the film. The new vision of one of the Bard’s greatest comedies is set in present-day Hollywood, a place where glamorous stars, commanding moguls, starving artists, and vaulting pretenders all vie to get ahead. The Athenians are Hollywood glitterati, the mechanicals (Bottom and his troupe of wannabe actors) are film students, and the fairies of the forest are hippies in Topanga Canyon, nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains just east of Malibu. Staging or filming a Shakespeare project four centuries after the incomparable playwright lived and after countless artists have already mounted productions of his plays poses several challenges. (Yes, really four centuries,...
- 5/20/2016
- by Emily Rome
- Hitfix
Update: Uncertainty hovers over the all-star package that appeared destined for the Cannes market next week after it became clear on Thursday that a key rights issue remained unresolved.
Im Global was preparing to launch international sales and CAA Us sales to Blood Meridian, which long-time McCarthy champion Scott Rudin has been lining up to produce for years.
However once an announcement about the project appeared in Screen International and the trade press, the project and ongoing talent negotiations quickly unravelled after it emerged that the film-makers had not secured rights to the 1985 Western novel.
According to original reports earlier in the day, James Franco had been lined up to direct and star alongside Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan and Vincent D’Onofrio.
Rudin, who scored a global hit with his McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men, would produce alongside Cassian Elwes and Franco’s partner at Rabbit Bandini, Vince Jolivette.
International buyers...
Im Global was preparing to launch international sales and CAA Us sales to Blood Meridian, which long-time McCarthy champion Scott Rudin has been lining up to produce for years.
However once an announcement about the project appeared in Screen International and the trade press, the project and ongoing talent negotiations quickly unravelled after it emerged that the film-makers had not secured rights to the 1985 Western novel.
According to original reports earlier in the day, James Franco had been lined up to direct and star alongside Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan and Vincent D’Onofrio.
Rudin, who scored a global hit with his McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men, would produce alongside Cassian Elwes and Franco’s partner at Rabbit Bandini, Vince Jolivette.
International buyers...
- 5/5/2016
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Exclusive: A major all-star package has dropped into the market on the eve of Cannes as it emerged on Thursday that Scott Rudin is finally moving ahead on his long-gestating Cormac McCarthy adaptation.
Im Global will launch international sales on the Croisette on Blood Meridian and is co-financing the project, while CAA represents Us rights.
James Franco will direct and star alongside Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan, and Vincent D’Onofrio. Further casting attachments are anticipated.
Like Rudin, who steered the McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men to worldwide success, Franco is a devout McCarthy fan.
Franco wooed Blood Meridian rights-holder Rudin years ago with test footage but there was no deal, so he headed off to shoot McCarthy adaptation Child Of God instead.
Now it would appear the younger man’s tenacity has prevailed and the project will proceed. Rudin will produce alongside Cassian Elwes and Franco’s partner at Rabbit Bandini, Vince Jolivette.
[link...
Im Global will launch international sales on the Croisette on Blood Meridian and is co-financing the project, while CAA represents Us rights.
James Franco will direct and star alongside Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan, and Vincent D’Onofrio. Further casting attachments are anticipated.
Like Rudin, who steered the McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men to worldwide success, Franco is a devout McCarthy fan.
Franco wooed Blood Meridian rights-holder Rudin years ago with test footage but there was no deal, so he headed off to shoot McCarthy adaptation Child Of God instead.
Now it would appear the younger man’s tenacity has prevailed and the project will proceed. Rudin will produce alongside Cassian Elwes and Franco’s partner at Rabbit Bandini, Vince Jolivette.
[link...
- 5/5/2016
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Exclusive: A major all-star package has dropped into the market on the eve of Cannes as it emerged on Thursday that Scott Rudin is finally moving ahead on his long-gestating Cormac McCarthy adaptation.
Im Global will launch international sales on the Croisette on Blood Meridian and is co-financing the project, while CAA represents Us rights.
James Franco will direct and star alongside Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan, Ryan Reynolds and Vincent D’Onofrio. Further casting attachments are anticipated.
Like Rudin, who steered the McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men to worldwide success, Franco is a devout McCarthy fan.
Franco wooed Blood Meridian rights-holder Rudin years ago with test footage but there was no deal, so he headed off to shoot McCarthy adaptation Child Of God instead.
Now it would appear the younger man’s tenacity has prevailed and the project will proceed. Rudin will produce alongside Cassian Elwes and Franco’s partner at Rabbit Bandini, Vince Jolivette.
[link...
Im Global will launch international sales on the Croisette on Blood Meridian and is co-financing the project, while CAA represents Us rights.
James Franco will direct and star alongside Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan, Ryan Reynolds and Vincent D’Onofrio. Further casting attachments are anticipated.
Like Rudin, who steered the McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men to worldwide success, Franco is a devout McCarthy fan.
Franco wooed Blood Meridian rights-holder Rudin years ago with test footage but there was no deal, so he headed off to shoot McCarthy adaptation Child Of God instead.
Now it would appear the younger man’s tenacity has prevailed and the project will proceed. Rudin will produce alongside Cassian Elwes and Franco’s partner at Rabbit Bandini, Vince Jolivette.
[link...
- 5/5/2016
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard as the Macbeths: It seemed to be perfect casting. Which is what makes this adaptation of William Shakespeare’s bloody tale of ambition spun out of control all the more disappointing. The latest film adaptation of the Scottish play, which premiered at Cannes this year and opened in U.S. theaters last weekend, boasts plenty of smart choices. It’s gorgeously shot, with the mud-soaked battles and the moody fog of the Highlands setting just the right foreboding tone. Director Justin Kurzel delivers a striking new take on Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane that thankfully avoids the inevitably silly image of soldiers approaching a castle whilst hiding behind tree branches. But (you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you?) the approach to the lead performances, especially Fassbender’s, is misguided. This is a very quiet “Macbeth,” one without the sound and fury the text demands.
- 12/9/2015
- by Emily Rome
- Hitfix
Orange is the New Black mainstay cast member Todd Susman, who plays Harold Bloom, father of series lead Larry Biggs in the Netflix hit, helms the casting of this new drama along with Tony Award nominee Jonathan C. Kaplan, Falsettos, The Diary of Anne Frank, Opera icon Lawrence Craig Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme at Abrons Art Center, 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002, on Monday, June 15 at 530pm.
- 6/12/2015
- by BWW News Desk
- BroadwayWorld.com
Harold Bloom is 84 and a little under the weather. He is one of Yale’s more famous professors (where he’s been teaching for 60 years) and the author of dozens of books (including an anthology for “Extremely Intelligent Children”), many of them best sellers, many of them fascinating and enlightening, some of them infuriating or confusing (if you are not up on your Gnostic texts or the Kabbalah), and all of them written in his unmistakable voice — imperious, sympathetic, melancholy, intimate, playful, and brilliant in both depth and breadth. Long before we were friends, and in an academic pool in which I don’t so much as dip a toe, he was also a major pot-stirrer. I gather that the admiration he expresses for many women poets, for many gay poets (“Three out of four poets in America are gay or bisexual,” he says. “More than half of all the...
- 5/6/2015
- by Amy Bloom
- Vulture
Most politics in film end up coded, oblique, and vague, and not without reason. The direct, didactic political message can be bracing, but more often than not it doesn’t seem to hold up for posterity very well; the specifics of time get forgotten. The major stories of politics each day end up as nothing more than footnotes the vast majority of the time. When you want your message to be appealing, powerful, and understandable for future generations, it often serves you poorly to be specific. Even as someone who is moderately well versed in American history, I found myself often lost watching Secret Honor, Robert Altman’s one actor movie of Richard Nixon’s private breakdown. The broad strokes made sense, and I was able to glean plenty from it (and Philip Baker Hall giving the performance of a lifetime helped things greatly), but the specifics are lost to the time it was made,...
- 4/7/2015
- by Michelle
- SoundOnSight
With James Franco’s recent test footage for his not-to-be Blood Meridian film adaptation now online, it’s time to think about what we want from a movie version of the landmark novel. Franco shot that test footage a few years ago and showed it to Scott Rudin, who owns the rights to the novel, but Rudin seems to have turned him down—and should continue to do so.
So Franco, instead, directed another movie adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel: Child of God. The movie comes out this week, and Franco wrote a piece for The Daily Beast explaining...
So Franco, instead, directed another movie adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel: Child of God. The movie comes out this week, and Franco wrote a piece for The Daily Beast explaining...
- 7/30/2014
- by Jacob Shamsian
- EW - Inside Movies
Stuart Hall, the so-called 'godfather of multiculturalism' changed Britain for the better even while he showed us the ugly truth about our racist society
"The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire," Stuart Hall once wrote. "Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth."
For the Jamaican-born intellectual, who was one of the Windrush generation, – the first large-scale immigration of West Indians to the capital after world war two – that rottenness was unmissable. Hall came to that rotten land with its in-part slave-generated wealth from Kingston in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar to study at Oxford. "Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home," he told the Guardian in 2012. "I'm not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to...
"The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire," Stuart Hall once wrote. "Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth."
For the Jamaican-born intellectual, who was one of the Windrush generation, – the first large-scale immigration of West Indians to the capital after world war two – that rottenness was unmissable. Hall came to that rotten land with its in-part slave-generated wealth from Kingston in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar to study at Oxford. "Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home," he told the Guardian in 2012. "I'm not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to...
- 2/11/2014
- by Stuart Jeffries
- The Guardian - Film News
Initial drafts of Murphy, up for auction next month, include extensive revisions as well as drawings of himself and James Joyce
In pictures: The Murphy manuscript
The "extraordinarily rich" manuscript of Samuel Beckett's first major novel Murphy, which has been glimpsed by only a very few individuals over the last half-century, is expected to fetch more than £1m when it goes up for auction next month.
Filling six notebooks, the Murphy manuscript – originally entitled Sasha Murphy – is packed with doodles and extensive corrections, including Beckett's lively sketches of his friend and mentor James Joyce, of himself, and of Charlie Chaplin, who went on to be an influence on the tramps in Waiting for Godot. The first 11 pages of text are entirely crossed out, and an insight into the workings of the Nobel prize-winning author's mind is provided by the eight cancelled versions of the novel's famous opening sentence. Beckett tried out "The sun shone,...
In pictures: The Murphy manuscript
The "extraordinarily rich" manuscript of Samuel Beckett's first major novel Murphy, which has been glimpsed by only a very few individuals over the last half-century, is expected to fetch more than £1m when it goes up for auction next month.
Filling six notebooks, the Murphy manuscript – originally entitled Sasha Murphy – is packed with doodles and extensive corrections, including Beckett's lively sketches of his friend and mentor James Joyce, of himself, and of Charlie Chaplin, who went on to be an influence on the tramps in Waiting for Godot. The first 11 pages of text are entirely crossed out, and an insight into the workings of the Nobel prize-winning author's mind is provided by the eight cancelled versions of the novel's famous opening sentence. Beckett tried out "The sun shone,...
- 6/4/2013
- by Alison Flood
- The Guardian - Film News
Writers often worry about the dangers of outside influence, but what about the non-literary inspirations they are far more comfortable admitting to? Andrew O'Hagan talks to six novelists about their passion for a second artform
The divine counsels decided, once upon a time, that influence is bad and that too much agency is the enemy of invention. Harold Bloom can't be blamed for that: he certainly pointed to the danse macabre of influence and anxiety, but to him the association was perfectly creative. Elsewhere, writers have always been blamed for being too much like other writers, or too much like themselves, and even now, in the crisis of late postmodernism, we find it hard to believe that writers might live happily in a state of influence and cross-reference. Yet anybody who knows anything about writers knows that they love their sweet influences.
What I've noticed, though, is that the influences...
The divine counsels decided, once upon a time, that influence is bad and that too much agency is the enemy of invention. Harold Bloom can't be blamed for that: he certainly pointed to the danse macabre of influence and anxiety, but to him the association was perfectly creative. Elsewhere, writers have always been blamed for being too much like other writers, or too much like themselves, and even now, in the crisis of late postmodernism, we find it hard to believe that writers might live happily in a state of influence and cross-reference. Yet anybody who knows anything about writers knows that they love their sweet influences.
What I've noticed, though, is that the influences...
- 4/27/2013
- by Andrew O'Hagan, Lavinia Greenlaw, John Lanchester, Alan Warner, Sarah Hall, Colm Tóibín
- The Guardian - Film News
When James Franco first came up with the idea to make a movie about the life of American poet Hart Crane, he had no idea he would wind up writing, directing, producing and starring in it, as he eventually did in "The Broken Tower," which is getting a theatrical release Friday. He thought he'd just want to act. He was fascinated by Crane's legendarily difficult, brilliant poetry, as well as his personal demons, which led him to alcohol and eventually suicide at age 32.
"At that point, I was only an actor; I'd never directed a movie before," Franco told The Huffington Post. "So I thought, 'I sorta look like him and he has such an interesting, dramatic story.' So I'd go around and say, 'I want to play Hart Crane,' hoping that someone would be willing to work with me and do a Crane project. But nobody was interested.
"At that point, I was only an actor; I'd never directed a movie before," Franco told The Huffington Post. "So I thought, 'I sorta look like him and he has such an interesting, dramatic story.' So I'd go around and say, 'I want to play Hart Crane,' hoping that someone would be willing to work with me and do a Crane project. But nobody was interested.
- 4/27/2012
- by Joe Satran
- Huffington Post
Mohammad Reza Moini and Mohammad Rasoulof
at La Cinémathèque française last September
"To be quite honest, I don't know what the current status of my sentence is," Mohammad Rasoulof tells Scott Lucas in an interview for EAWorldView. "For example, in the end, my friend Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced to six years in prison last year, only spent two months in jail. My own sentence has been reduced to one year, but for the time being I am still being issued with visas so I can attend festivals like Cannes and the Iffr. I have no idea what will happen next…. Iran is like an alcoholic father. You can't change your father, but I can see him hurting himself, myself and others. But I still love him."
More reading. David Lynch is "a religious or spiritual artist in the same loosely categoric sense that one might apply the term to William Blake or Tarkovsky,...
at La Cinémathèque française last September
"To be quite honest, I don't know what the current status of my sentence is," Mohammad Rasoulof tells Scott Lucas in an interview for EAWorldView. "For example, in the end, my friend Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced to six years in prison last year, only spent two months in jail. My own sentence has been reduced to one year, but for the time being I am still being issued with visas so I can attend festivals like Cannes and the Iffr. I have no idea what will happen next…. Iran is like an alcoholic father. You can't change your father, but I can see him hurting himself, myself and others. But I still love him."
More reading. David Lynch is "a religious or spiritual artist in the same loosely categoric sense that one might apply the term to William Blake or Tarkovsky,...
- 2/11/2012
- MUBI
Geoff Dyer's irreverent commentary on one of cinema's most 'difficult' offerings is a free-wheeling delight
The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and in particular his 1979 classic Stalker, have a reputation for being among the most difficult in cinema. Difficult, not just in the sense of intellectually demanding, but difficult as in hard to sit through, long and slow-moving and potentially very boring. Perhaps only the work of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr is viewed (or not, in most cases) with greater trepidation. Cinema buffs wear their familiarity with films such as Stalker and Tarr's seven-hour Sátántangó like a badge of honour and speak of them in reverential tones. Most other people regard them like non-mountaineers regard Everest: "I'm sure it's a great mountain, but damned if I'm climbing it."
In his new book, Geoff Dyer sets out to address this problem by articulating what he loves so much about Stalker...
The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and in particular his 1979 classic Stalker, have a reputation for being among the most difficult in cinema. Difficult, not just in the sense of intellectually demanding, but difficult as in hard to sit through, long and slow-moving and potentially very boring. Perhaps only the work of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr is viewed (or not, in most cases) with greater trepidation. Cinema buffs wear their familiarity with films such as Stalker and Tarr's seven-hour Sátántangó like a badge of honour and speak of them in reverential tones. Most other people regard them like non-mountaineers regard Everest: "I'm sure it's a great mountain, but damned if I'm climbing it."
In his new book, Geoff Dyer sets out to address this problem by articulating what he loves so much about Stalker...
- 2/5/2012
- by Killian Fox
- The Guardian - Film News
"Legendary cult author Russell Hoban, whose apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker was described by Anthony Burgess as 'what literature is meant to be,'" has died at the age of 86, reports Alison Flood in the Guardian. "Hoban, born in Pennsylvania but a resident of London for more than 30 years, first made a name for himself with his children's books; his series about Frances the badger and his novel The Mouse and His Child are acclaimed as modern classics. Riddley Walker, set in Kent 2000 years after a nuclear holocaust and told in a distinctive version of English, was begun in 1974 and published in 1980 to huge praise. It has since been included in Harold Bloom's survey of literature, The Western Canon."
The Telegraph calls Hoban "a maverick writer of extraordinary imaginative gifts and highly original turn of phrase; although he was sometimes compared to Tolkien and to Cs Lewis, he conformed to...
The Telegraph calls Hoban "a maverick writer of extraordinary imaginative gifts and highly original turn of phrase; although he was sometimes compared to Tolkien and to Cs Lewis, he conformed to...
- 12/15/2011
- MUBI
Getty Author Stephen King in New York City in 2010.
Stephen King’s new 842-page epic, “11/22/63,” defies neat categorization. It’s at once a high concept thriller, a science fiction saga and an intricately researched work of historical fiction that retraces Lee Harvey Oswald’s steps in the months and weeks leading up to the Kennedy assassination.
“11/22/63” opens in contemporary Maine, as high school English teacher Jake Epping is sent on a bizarre errand for his dying friend Al, who owns...
Stephen King’s new 842-page epic, “11/22/63,” defies neat categorization. It’s at once a high concept thriller, a science fiction saga and an intricately researched work of historical fiction that retraces Lee Harvey Oswald’s steps in the months and weeks leading up to the Kennedy assassination.
“11/22/63” opens in contemporary Maine, as high school English teacher Jake Epping is sent on a bizarre errand for his dying friend Al, who owns...
- 11/9/2011
- by Alexandra Alter
- Speakeasy/Wall Street Journal
His Jerusalem is a Broadway hit – now director Ian Rickson is back with a star-studded Betrayal. He talks to Andrew Dickson about his debt to Pinter, coaching Pj Harvey – and why he's finally ready for Shakespeare
Never let it be said that Ian Rickson lacks range. This week, the director opens a new production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, starring Kristin Scott Thomas; it turns out that he has also found time to direct Pj Harvey's current tour. "We talked about staging and lighting, should she talk between songs, things like that," he explains, before adding, not wanting to take too much credit: "Director in inverted commas."
I'm not sure he needs the rider. In the four years since Rickson stepped down as artistic director of the Royal Court, there seems to be little he hasn't turned his hand to. His farewell production there, The Seagull, was the first...
Never let it be said that Ian Rickson lacks range. This week, the director opens a new production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, starring Kristin Scott Thomas; it turns out that he has also found time to direct Pj Harvey's current tour. "We talked about staging and lighting, should she talk between songs, things like that," he explains, before adding, not wanting to take too much credit: "Director in inverted commas."
I'm not sure he needs the rider. In the four years since Rickson stepped down as artistic director of the Royal Court, there seems to be little he hasn't turned his hand to. His farewell production there, The Seagull, was the first...
- 6/15/2011
- by Andrew Dickson
- The Guardian - Film News
I fully expected this penultimate episode of the series to accelerate full-force into the season finale next week. But it seems likely that we'll be left with more questions than answers and the empty promise of a second season pay-off. I'm not entirely sure "Rubicon" will make it past season one. I'm not wishing its demise, but I can't imagine there's a huge following after such a slow build, despite the to-die-for time slot. We make some big-time connections in episode 12, but we're only really getting to the core of the characters (and we've only got 60 more minutes to catch the bad guys and wrap up this circus -- the Atlas storyline can't sustain another season, in my opinion). It'll certainly be a shame if I never again type the name "Truxton" after next week.
Tonight we learn that Spangler, the king of Not Giving a Fuck, smokes out the...
Tonight we learn that Spangler, the king of Not Giving a Fuck, smokes out the...
- 10/11/2010
- by Dustin Rowles
Galaxie 500 and Luna while critically adored, tend to be overlooked and in this music lover's opinion, remain two of the most under appreciated bands of my lifetime. Frontman Dean Wareham moved on from Galaxie and then from Luna with his lovely bandmate, Britta Phillips, married her and the two began recording as Dean & Britta. Sort of a rock and roll Bonnie and Clyde -- I mean that in the most French way possible.
Their latest project, endorsed and by invitation of the Andy Warhol Museum, is a collection of soundtracks made to accompany 13 of Andy Warhol's "Screen Tests." Boring or brilliant, they were originally conceived by Warhol as portraits, portraits on film rather than canvas, and feature some people who are ridiculously famous. It's all in the eye of the beholder of course, if you're fascinated by Bob Dylan or Edie Sedgwick you'll want to ogle their "Screen Test.
Their latest project, endorsed and by invitation of the Andy Warhol Museum, is a collection of soundtracks made to accompany 13 of Andy Warhol's "Screen Tests." Boring or brilliant, they were originally conceived by Warhol as portraits, portraits on film rather than canvas, and feature some people who are ridiculously famous. It's all in the eye of the beholder of course, if you're fascinated by Bob Dylan or Edie Sedgwick you'll want to ogle their "Screen Test.
- 8/3/2010
- by Brandon Kim
- ifc.com
To commemorate what would have been the 100th birthday of one of cinema's greats, Akira Kurosawa was awarded his very own Google Doodle - joining the likes of Mahatma Ghandi, Hg Wells and Vivaldi. Known for not only directing films - but also producing and screen writing too -Kurosawa made 31 films in his 50 year career, including The Seven Samurai which he co-wrote and directed. Telling the story of seven samurai who rescue a village held hostage by a gang of bandits (to reduce the plot, somewhat), the final battle scene is widely regarded as cinematic art in it's highest form, and the film provided the direct inspiration for the Steve McQueen epic-western, The Magnificant Seven. But of course, any film fan worth their weight in popcorn / yoghurt covered cranberries (depending on your taste in cinema) can reel off their top Kurosawa films...and For Your Consideration is no different. Here...
- 3/30/2010
- by For Your Consideration
- t5m.com
To commemorate what would have been the 100th birthday of one of cinema's greats, Akira Kurosawa was awarded his very own Google Doodle - joining the likes of Mahatma Ghandi, Hg Wells and Vivaldi. Known for not only directing films - but also producing and screen writing too -Kurosawa made 31 films in his 50 year career, including The Seven Samurai which he co-wrote and directed. Telling the story of seven samurai who rescue a village held hostage by a gang of bandits (to reduce the plot, somewhat), the final battle scene is widely regarded as cinematic art in it's highest form, and the film provided the direct inspiration for the Steve McQueen epic-western, The Magnificant Seven. But of course, any film fan worth their weight in popcorn / yoghurt covered cranberries (depending on your taste in cinema) can reel off their top Kurosawa films...and For Your Consideration is no different. Here...
- 3/30/2010
- by For Your Consideration
- t5m.com
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