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5 items from 2012

27 May 2012 8:05 AM, PDT | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

Doubtless there was no more fitting one-two-three punch at Cannes than Holy Motors – Cosmopolis – 11/26 The Day Mishima Chose His Fate, films from an austere netherworld of profound disturbance, loneliness, searching, questing. Kôji Wakamatsu's piercingly precise digital feature on the path Yukio Mishima took that ended in 1970 with him (and his most loyal followers) taking hostage the commandant of Japan's Self Defense Force, listing his demands and pleas to a jeering gathering of troops, and finally committing ritual suicide produces a shock when shown among these three speculative and fantastic films, as well as next to the generally uncommitted politics of the festival this year.

The Day Mishima Chose His Fate comes as contradistinction to Wakamatsu's 2008 masterpiece on the failed radical left movement in Japan, United Red Army, here treating with a respect bordering on the severe the passion of Mishima and followers in their dissatisfaction with and anger at the »

17 May 2012 4:50 AM, PDT | The Film Stage | See recent The Film Stage news »

While Paul Schrader currently attempts to get financing for his next directorial effort, the Bret Easton Ellis-scripted drama The Canyons, he will also be penning another project. Coming from Cannes, The Wrap reports that the man behind Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Mosquito Coast, American Gigolo, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and more is set to pen a new project.

Schrader has been commissioned by the Kremlin, to script a biopic focusing on Mathilde Kschessinska, the famous Russian ballerina, who also played mistress to the country’s last tsar, Nicholas II. To attain a larger audience, the project will include an American cast and be shot in English. Check out Schrader’s comments below.

“Kschessinska’s life is a powerful metaphor for Russian culture and evokes the best of Russian arts. She was a first native prima ballerina in the country that saw the highest achievement in that art form. »

- jpraup@gmail.com (thefilmstage.com)

1 February 2012 9:16 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

Besides the two dozen operas, the symphonies, concertos and solo works, Philip Glass, who turns 75 today, has composed literally scores of scores for films, beginning most famously with Koyaanisqatsi (1982), an essay film as dependent on its music as any other. Glass and Godfrey Reggio would complete the trilogy with Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). Another crucial cinematic collaboration has been with Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line (1988), The Fog of War (2003)), and other notable scores would be, for example, those for Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985; sample it here) and Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997). And whatever you think of Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002) — and chances are, if you're reading this, you may not think much of it at all — that soundtrack, aimed straight at the mainstream and nominated for an Oscar, holds up better than you might remember.

"Glass is the only living classical composer with anything »

29 January 2012 9:22 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Art director who created striking designs for Francis Ford Coppola, Björk and the Beijing Olympics

Performance in Japan has always depended on graphic design: the climaxes of kabuki and noh theatre are inseparable from the woodblock prints that advertise and commemorate them, while the appeal of a great geisha is assessed on her formal entrance in an ensemble of many layers and complex visual allusions – the costume is the performance.

The art director Eiko Ishioka, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 73, came from that Japanese graphic tradition and took it around the world in every medium – advertising, cinema, theatre, circus, fashion and the conjunction of them all that was the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, for which she designed the costumes.

Her father, a graphic designer, encouraged her childhood art work, but discouraged her ambition at Tokyo University to follow him into the business: Japanese graphic art was a male world, »

- Veronica Horwell

25 January 2012 6:45 PM, PST | SoundOnSight | See recent SoundOnSight news »

It’s a phrase out of the music industry:  one-hit wonders.  Those bands that come out of nowhere, hit the top of the charts with a catchy – maybe even impressive – single, or have one chart-topping album, and then never seem to be able to hit that sweet spot again.  Anybody remember Boston’s second album?  Another hit single after “96 Tears” from Jay and the Mysterians?

But they’re not alone.  There’s not an area of entertainment where the phenomenon doesn’t exist.  Rod Serling never topped The Twilight Zone, and Chris Carter never came up with another series as good as The X Files.  Fitzgerald wrote a lot of impressive stuff, but never matched The Great Gatsby, and drank himself to death over it (well, Zelda being crazy didn’t help).  Michael Cimino copped an Oscar for The Deer Hunter (1978), and then began a long, spectacular flameout.

It happens. »

- Bill Mesce

5 items from 2012