Alternative Film Guide

At a awards ceremony yesterday, Sept. 30, the 54th Donostia-San Sebastián Film Festival’s Golden Shell was given to two films: Niwemang / Half Moon (Iran-Iraq-Austria-France), which also took the International Film Critics’ FIPRESCI Award, and Mon fils à moi / My Son (France).
Directed by Bahman Ghobadi, Half Moon follows an old Kurdish-Iranian musician on his [...]

54th San Sebastian International Film Festival Awards - 2006
The 54th San Sebastian International Film Festival was held between Sept. 21-30, 2006.
The winners at the 54th San Sebastian International Film Festival were announced on Sept. 30, 2006.
San Sebastian Film Festival 2006 Awards - Article
Films in competition at the 2006 San Sebastian Film Festival
Photos: Iñaki Pardo
 

OFFICIAL [...]

Surprisingly, Jens Lien’s Den Brysomme mannen / The Bothersome Man, one of the best-received Norwegian films in recent years and the winner of the Best Director and Best Screenplay Amandas — Norway’s top film awards — was passed over as that country’s submission for the 2006 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award. Instead, Joachim Trier’s [...]

Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, winner of the Best Screenplay Award and of an ensemble Best Actress Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has been chosen as Spain’s submission for the 2006 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award.
The family drama stars Penélope Cruz and Lola Dueñas as sisters whose mother’s ghost (played by Almodóvar veteran Carmen Maura) [...]

Driving Lessons (2006)
Direction and screenplay: Jeremy Brock. Cast: Julie Walters, Rupert Grint, Laura Linney, Nicholas Farrell
 
THE WAY OUT OF THE CROSS
Jeremy Brock’s comedy-drama Driving Lessons, the story of how a Christian teenager finds inner freedom after becoming friends with a retired actress, is a moderately enjoyable coming-of-age story whose shortcomings in terms of direction [...]

Mexico’s selection for the 2006 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award is the Mexican-Spanish-American co-production El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth, a mix of politics and fantasy in which a young girl escapes from the brutal reality of the right-wing regime of Spain’s General Francisco Franco by creating an imaginary world of mystery and horror. [...]

Press Release:
Beverly Hills, CA — Monday, October 2, is the deadline to submit Oscar entries in the Live Action Short Film and Animated Short Film categories as well as in the Foreign Language Film category. To be considered for the 79th Academy Awards®, entry forms and supporting materials must arrive at the Academy of Motion [...]

Edward Albert, Goldie Hawn’s leading man in the 1972 romantic comedy Butterflies Are Free, died of lung cancer at his Malibu home on Sept. 22. He was 55.
Albert was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 20, 1951. (His middle name, Laurence, was an homage to his godfather, Laurence Olivier.) Both his parents were performers: two-time [...]

Press Release:
Beverly Hills, CA — The Oscar®-winning documentaries of 1965 and 1966 will screen on Monday, October 2, at 7:30 p.m., in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Linwood Dunn Theater as the next installment of “Oscar’s Docs, Part Two: Academy Award®-Winning Documentaries 1961 – 1976.” The 11-week series showcases the short and [...]

One of the highlights of this year’s San Sebastián International Film Festival is a mouth-wateringly thorough Ernst Lubitsch Retrospective.
Besides the obligatory titles, such as the witty 1939 comedy of bright lights and Communism, Ninotchka, and the delightful 1934 version of The Merry Widow, the retrospective is also showcasing a large number of Lubitsch rarities [...]

Rang De Basanti, the tale of seven college students who go up in arms against the system, is India’s entry for the Oscars. Directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and starring Indian superstar Aamir Khan (the hero in the Academy Award-nominated Lagaan), the song-and-dance political epic has become one of Bollywood`s biggest blockbusters of the year.
Slawomir [...]

Julie Andrews, whose film career spans four decades, will receive a Life Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild. The honor will be presented at the guild’s next awards ceremony on Jan. 28, 2007.
Andrews won a Best Actress Academy Award for her performance as the quirky (and sometimes flying) nanny in the 1964 Disney megahit [...]

Jewel Robbery (1932)
Direction: William Dieterle. Screenplay: Erwin C. Gelsey, from Ladislas Fodor’s 1931 play Ekszerrablás a Váci-uccában and Bertram Bloch’s English-language adaptation, Jewel Robbery. Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright, Alan Mowbray
 
TO SNATCH A THIEF
Film scholars consider the 1932 comedy Trouble in Paradise to be the best work of actress Kay [...]

Aurora Borealis (2006)
Director: James C. E. Burke. Screenplay: Brent Boyd. Cast: Joshua Jackson, Donald Sutherland, Juliette Lewis, Louise Fletcher
 
THE GUIDING LIGHT
Duncan Shorter (Joshua Jackson), the likable, unassuming protagonist of Aurora Borealis, is probably the most non-average Average Joe in the United States. At first glance, this Minneapolis resident may look, sound, and act like [...]

"The surest way to get people to resist the idea that they’re about to see a great movie is to announce they’re about to see a great movie. It raises expectations through the roof and can even instill a ’show me’ attitude in the viewer. Yet without someone saying, ‘This is great, this is special, [...]

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica
I should no longer be surprised when critics miss the most obvious things in works of art, because they are human beings, and the vast majority of human beings are lazy by nature. That said, the simplistic notion that Ingmar Bergman’s great 1968 drama Skammen / Shame is merely anti-war does [...]

Playwright and novelist Joseph Hayes, best known for his stage and film adaptations of his 1954 suspense novel The Desperate Hours, died this past Sept. 11 at a nursing home in St. Augustine, Fla. Hayes, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, was 88.
The Indianapolis-born Hayes briefly considered becoming a priest, though after graduating from [...]

Montreal’s 19th mage + Nation, the city’s International LGBT Film Festival, will be held between Nov. 16-26.
Among the selected films are Ramón Salazar’s Almodovaresque musical 20 Centimetros / 20 Centimeters; starring Mónica Cervera; the romantic drama Loving Annabelle, about the relationship between two women — one a teacher, the other a student; and Reinas / [...]

Via The [Beirut] Daily Star: "Somewhere in the sea wall separating Beirut from the Mediterranean, sewerage pipes protrude. They disgorge the city’s waste into the sea as the wintertime tide washes around them, smashing the invisible filth against the base of the city before disseminating it elsewhere. Passionate, disembodied notes sound from a piano.
"It’s with [...]

Malcolm Arnold, reportedly the first British composer to win an Academy Award, died Saturday, Sept. 23, at a hospital in Norfolk county, eastern England, after suffering from a chest infection. Arnold was 84.
He won his only Academy Award for scoring the mammoth 1957 Anglo-American David Lean production The Bridge on the River Kwai, which won [...]

"About that time [1960] I also made The Naked Edge with [Gary Cooper] at Elstree, as I had always wanted to work with him. I had no idea he was terminally ill with cancer although he often seemed tired, felt the cold badly and was sometimes in pain."
That’s six-time Academy Award nominee Deborah Kerr, as [...]

Deepa Mehta’s Water, starring Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas, and John Abraham, has been chosen as Canada’s entry for the 2006 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award.
Set in the Indian holy city of Varanasi, the Hindi-language Water is now eligible as a Canadian entry for the foreign-language Oscar because of recent regulation changes enacted by [...]

Among the nineteen films in the main section of the San Sebastián International Film Festival are John Boorman’s The Tiger’s Tail, about twins whose radically different paths become intertwined later in life; Lars von Trier’s big-business charade Direktøren for det Hele / The Boss of It All; and Forever, director Heddy Honigmann’s look at the [...]

Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, starring Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura, has won this year’s International Film Critics’ FIPRESCI prize, voted on by about 350 critics from around the world.
The announcement was made at a press conference at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Volver, the family tale of two young women who are assisted by [...]

A rare curiosity:
On Youtube, silent-film star Betty Compson advertises her upcoming (we’re talking 1935 or whereabouts) tell-all autobiography. (I’d never heard of it, even though I’ve done extensive research on the period.)
The pert, squeaky-voiced Compson began her career in the 1910s. She was a bathing beauty who later became a dramatic actress — her first [...]