WAR AND PEACE at LACMA
"You are never, ever, going to see anything to equal it … as spectacular as a movie can possibly be." That’s Roger Ebert, referring to Sergei Bondarchuk’s mammoth 7-hour epic Voyna i mir / War and Peace (1967), which won numerous accolades, including the best foreign-language film Oscar in 1968. (A six-hour, dubbed version was released in the United States at about that time.)
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will be presenting several screenings of War and Peace in two parts, in two consecutive evenings beginning tomorrow, June 6. The final screening will take place on June 21. (See below.)
Bondarchuk’s adaptation (with Vasili Solovyov) of Leo Tolstoy’s sprawling (and more than a tad inconsistent) novel — about [...]
by Andre Soares | June 5, 2008
| Subscribe / Syndicate
Tags: Classic Movies, Russian Cinema
Oscar 2007: THE GOLDEN DOOR, THE 9TH COMPANY Submitted
Italy’s choice for this year’s Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award is Emanuele Crialese’s Nuovomondo / The Golden Door, winner of several prizes at this year’s Venice Film Festival, including a Silver Lion Revelation Award. Nuovomondo, or "New World," follows a number of Sicilians who want to emigrate to the United States.
The film, which stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Vincenzo Amato, has been picked for obvious reasons. (And here’s wondering how many Italian films have been made about the millions of Italians who emigrated to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.)
Russia has picked Fyodor Bondarchuk’s 9-ya rota / The 9th Company, the story of an army unit sent to Afghanistan to fight mujahadeen guerrillas. Made with a budget of US$9 million, 9-ya rota [...]
by Andre Soares | October 10, 2006
| Subscribe / Syndicate
Tags: Film Awards, Russian Cinema
Vera Kholodnaya Back on the Big Screen
The Moscow Times reports that a silent film festival will bring back to the fore 1910s Russian star Vera Kholodnaya. Four of Kholodnaya’s films will be shown at Moscow’s Illyuzion Theater in the upcoming weeks: Be Silent, Sorrow, Be Silent, a 1918 production about a circus artist who, while married to an alcoholic acrobat, is wooed by a wealthy admirer; Mirages, with a new score by the St. Petersburg electronic duo Yolochniye Igrushki; Children of the Century, in which the actress once again plays a married woman – this time, a clerk’s wife – pursued by a wealthy suitor; and Yevgeni Bauer’s 1916 romantic drama Zhizn za zhizn / A Life for a Life. In 1919, at the age of [...]
by Andre Soares | November 17, 2005
| Subscribe / Syndicate
Tags: DVDs, Film Festivals, Russian Cinema, Silent Films
4 d: Ilya Khrzhanovsky
4 / Chetyre (2005)
Direction: Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Screenplay: Vladimir Sorokin and Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Cast: Yuri Laguta, Sergei Shnurov, Marina Vovchenko
BAD MATH
Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s relentlessly bleak feature film debut, 4, starts with a bang and ends with a painfully longwinded whimper. Here, I’m using the word "bang" literally, for the film begins with four dogs lying about on a cold, empty street at night. The loud noise of an approaching vehicle disturbs the dogs’ peace, as they become increasingly edgy. Something is going to happen. Suddenly, four mechanical legs start a deafening pounding on the pavement, forcing the dogs to scurry away. This reviewer wishes he’d fled along with them, for the film’s next two hours are filled with endless, self-indulgent, [...]
by Andre Soares | June 28, 2005
| Subscribe / Syndicate
Tags: Film Reviews, Russian Cinema
Berlin Film Festival 2005: BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
The 55th Berlin International Film Festival will present a reconstructed version of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin, considered by many film scholars one of — if not the — greatest motion picture ever made.
Battleship Potemkin was originally commissioned by the Russian Communist leaders to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Odessa uprising, during which mutinous sailors rioted at that Ukrainian port. The massacre of the protesters at the Odessa Steps is still shown in film schools all over the world as a classic example of montage — the art of editing used for greater dramatic effect.
The more rabid ideologues within the the Soviet government may not have thought so, but the film’s message is so effective that [...]
