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MADE IN U.S.A / 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER d: Jean-Luc Godard

Made in U.S.A. (1966)
Direction: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard; from Donald E. Westlake’s novel
Cast: Anna Karina, László Szabó, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marianne Faithfull, Yves Afonso
 
2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle / 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)
Direction and screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Marina Vlady, Joseph Gehrard, Anny Duperey, Roger Montsoret, Raoul Lévy, Jean Narboni
 

 

When the young cinephiles who would later spawn the French New Wave attended screenings of Hollywood films at the Cinémathèque Française, they often found themselves watching prints lacking French subtitles.  Not all of these men understood English, but they stuck it out anyway.  After all, you can still learn from a film even if you can’t quite follow the dialogue; [...]

UNDERWORLD Screening

Evelyn Brent, Clive Brook in Underworld

Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 crime classic Underworld will be screened on Friday, June 19, at 8 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. The Alloy Orchestra will perform their score for the film, starring Clive Brook, Evelyn Brent, and George Bancroft. This will be the Boston-based orchestra’s only Los Angeles performance of Underworld this year.
Underworld, called the precursor — or at least the most notable precursor — of the gangster genre of the 1930s, features a ruthless mobster (Bancroft), his mistress (Brent), and his lawyer (Brook). Inevitably, romance and bullets ensue.
In 1929, at the first Academy Awards ceremony, Underworld won an [...]

TAKEN – Liam Neeson

Taken (2008)
Direction: Pierre Morel
Screenplay: Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
Cast: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Xander Berkeley, Katie Cassidy, Olivier Rabourdin
 

 

Taken, directed by Pierre Morel and written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, is a remarkably effective action thriller. Liam Neeson stars as Bryan Mills, an ex-CIA agent who quit his job so as to salvage his relationship with his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). Bryan had already sacrificed his marriage to his (by now) ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and doesn’t want to repeat the same mistake.
After Bryan saves a flippant singer from a would-be attacker, he encounters a situation infinitely more dangerous than his CIA assignments. Though hesitant, Bryan allows Kim to go to Paris with her friend [...]

THE HONEYMOON KILLERS d: Leonard Kastle

The Honeymoon Killers (1970)
Direction and Screenplay: Leonard Kastle. Cast: Shirley Stoler, Tony Lo Bianco, Mary Jane Higby, Doris Roberts
 
From the moment we hear Gustave Mahler’s highly dramatic music in the opening scene of The Honeymoon Killers, Leonard Kastle’s imaginative thriller and its cast of little-known players take off.
Shirley Stoler plays a corpulent hospital nurse who finds love — of a sort — by joining a lonely-hearts correspondence club. Her ad is answered by a Spanish gigolo (Tony Lo Bianco) in the business of marrying lonely women, taking their money, and abandoning them. However, the two miscreant creatures fall in love. Stoler instantly sticks her senile mother in a nursing home so she can accompany her new lover in his [...]

THE BAD SLEEP WELL d: Akira Kurosawa

Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Direction: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Masayuki Mori, Kyôko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Kô Nishimura, Takeshi Katô, Kamatari Fujiwara, Chishu Ryu, Ken Mitsuda
 

 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 black-and-white Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well, is often compared to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but that’s an inapt comparison. While Shakespeare’s play has a higher sense of poetry, Kurosawa’s film — though a high-class melodrama — has far more relevance, realism, and complexity.
Written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni, The Bad Sleep Well’s Shakespearean pedigree and the fact that [...]

GASLIGHT To Be Lit Again

Warner Bros. has begun developing a remake of Gaslight, the 1944 thriller directed by George Cukor, and starring Charles Boyer as a suave murderer and Ingrid Bergman as his naive — and quite wealthy — wife, who almost goes bananas before the final fadeout. The film received a total of seven Academy Award nominations: best picture, best director, best actor, best supporting actress (Angela Lansbury, in her film debut), and best screenplay (John L. Balderston, Walter Reisch, and John Van Druten), winning in the best actress and best art direction categories. Additionally, Bergman won a Golden Globe for what is one of the weakest performances of her career.
Also in the Gaslight cast were Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, [...]

MATCH POINT d: Woody Allen

Match Point (2005)
Direction and screenplay: Woody Allen
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, Penelope Wilton
 

 

If Alfred Hitchcock were to direct a screenplay co-written by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, the result would be something like Woody Allen’s latest opus, Match Point. A dark fable about the vagaries of chance in a godless world, Allen’s aesthetically old-fashioned crime drama belies a haunting postmodern sensibility.
Set in London, the basic plot of Match Point follows certain key elements of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: After experiencing the joys of wealth and high social standing (read: power), an ambitious petit bourgeois resorts to whatever it takes to maintain his newfound status. Between the [...]

TRAINING DAY – Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke

Training Day (2001)
Direction: Antoine Fuqua
Screenplay: David Ayer
Cast: Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Tom Berenger, Harris Yulin, Macy Gray, Eva Mendes, Raymond J. Barry, Dr. Dre
 

 

Every few years, the Los Angeles Police Department gets embroiled in one scandal or other. The public is then told that the problem has been caused by a few bad apples; the system itself remains spotlessly clean. We get to taste quite a few of those bad apples in Training Day, a 2001 thriller that depicts a police culture embedded in corruption and violence. As such, the film could have become an early 21st-century Chinatown — a reflection of a city and a society so corrupt that nothing and no one are what they [...]

ROAD TO PERDITION – Tom Hanks, Paul Newman

Road to Perdition (2002)
Director: Sam Mendes
Screenplay: David Self; from Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner’s graphic novel
Cast: Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law, Tyler Hoechlin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stanley Tucci, Daniel Craig, Dylan Baker, Ciarán Hinds, Liam Aiken

 

 
British director Sam Mendes won an Academy Award for his first film, American Beauty, released in 1999. Three years later, for his second film, Road to Perdition, Mendes once again relied on the assistance of cinematographer Conrad L. Hall and composer Thomas Newman to create another stylized look at dysfunctional American families. But instead of 1990s suburbia, Road to Perdition throws us into the warped universe of a Depression-era Midwestern town, a place where family values include loyalty, faith, extortion, [...]

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