Must have been moonlight

Кино 2009 (3)

2009-12-27T22:20:53Z

Кино 2009 (2)

2009-12-23T19:55:15Z

Jean Rochefort (Cible émouvante)

Peter Ustinov (Hot Millions)

Ian Richardson (House of Cards)

Kenneth More (Sink the Bismarck!)

Michael Redgrave (The Browning Version)

Alastair Sim (Green for Danger)

Charles Laughton (Advise & Consent)

Gabriel Byrne (Miller's Crossing)

Rod Steiger (No Way to Treat a Lady)

Robert Shaw (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three)

Jeremy Brett (The Good Soldier)

Кино 2009 (1)

2009-12-20T22:46:51Z

Не могу устоять перед соблазном и не повторить опыт miss_arbuthnot.
Кое-что даже совпало. :)

Karin Viard (Les ambitieux)

Linda Fiorentino (The Last Seduction)

Ludivine Sagnier (La fille coupée en deux)

Danielle Darrieux (Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme)

Dany Carrel (La petite vertu)

Martina Gedeck (Sommer '04)

Isabelle Huppert (Merci pour le chocolat)

Julie Christie (Darling)

Dita Parlo (Rapt)

Annette Bening (Valmont)

Jean Seberg (Bonjour tristesse)

Diane Fletcher (House of Cards)

Catherine Spaak (La noia)

Daniela Silverio (Identificazione di una donna)

Gunnel Lindblom (Sult)

Lawrence Gordon Clark

2009-11-06T22:07:15Z

Посмотрел в октябре ещё несколько ghost stories из серии снятых Кларком. А именно - Lost Hearts, The Stalls of Barchester и Treasure of Abbot Thomas. К сожалению ни одна из них так и не приблизилась по силе воздействия к The Signalman.

Больше всего из трёх выделяется The Stalls of Barchester, надо полагать в основном за счёт истории, в которой интересно используется церковный антураж, а в финале есть эффектная сцена с кошкой-призраком. Treasure of Abbot Thomas запомнился только очередным использованием приёма периферийного зрения, когда страшная фигура неожиданно возникает на несколько секунд на дальнем плане, чем вызывает чувство тревоги у зрителя. Про Lost Hearts и говорить смешно - призраки здесь больше напоминают детей, раскрашенных к хэллоину.

Smell of books

2009-10-27T12:00:50Z

Русские книги всегда пахнут типографским свинцом. Привезённая из Англии "The Model" Эйкмана - малиной, а "Cold Hand in Mine" почему-то банным мылом. Не удивлюсь, если в одном из рассказов произойдёт смерть в ванной комнате. Хайсмит без запаха, nothing that meets the nose.

***

2009-09-24T19:14:45Z

Советские дубляжи конечно очень занятны.

Оригинал:
Alejandro is my lover. He came this morning, day of sex.

Дубляж:
Алехандро мой лучший друг. Очень сердечный человек.

***

2009-09-21T22:20:10Z

Поставил смотреть Nattlek и выключил на 15-ой минуте. По-моему это что-то совершенно неудобоваримое. Даже неплохая операторская работа не удерживает внимание.

Автора сценария фильма Detour зовут Martin Goldsmith. А продюсера - Martin Mooney.

Cold Comfort Farm

2009-09-18T20:47:13Z

Не понравилось. Вся эта rural eccentricity вроде отца проповедника, бычье мычанье за кадром при каждом появлении мужчины и нелепости вроде "I saw something in a woodshop" is certainly not my cup of tea.

tbd

2009-09-17T14:01:43Z

Чего-то этот Gran Torino прям захвалили. Уже чуть ли ни один из лучших фильмов 00-х.
Интересно мне одному он показался совершенно беспомощным? Старик занимается какой-то натужной самопародией, не смешно. Все эти жалкие и беззубые разборки сопляков китайских... Актёрская игра на уровне драм-кружка. Не говоря уже о том, что всё это морализаторство, на котором весь фильм и тянется собственно говоря, вгоняет в зелёную тоску.

Claude Chabrol on La Cérémonie

2009-09-15T12:39:54Z

An Interview with Claude Chabrol on La Cérémonie
by Pierre Berthomieu, Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Claire Vassé and Positif in 1995

Your starting point was a novel by Ruth Rendell.

Yes. Her fifth or sixth. The first, I think, to depart from the normal process of police inquiry, with its recurrent detective figure — interesting though that process is. In this instance, the novel is a thriller only to the extent that she has chosen to maintain the formal appearance of a thriller. She might easily have chosen to make it a straight novel. I loved the book when it came out, fifteen or twenty years ago, but I hadn’t thought of adapting it as it was written, with only two characters, the maid and the postwoman. The maid was called Eunice in the book. She was a wobbly, fat thing, unpleasant really. The postwoman was very different too. They were fairly typically British. So time passed. I read other novels of hers. I saw that she was developing, her work was changing. She was the one to suggest I modified the structure. The process of reading her more recent work told me how I should adapt this one.

What was Caroline Eliacheff’s contribution?

She helped me in that, in one shake of a puppy dog’s tail, she uncovered the underlying psychological and psychoanalytical structure. That enabled us to restructure it without altering Ruth Rendell’s vision. She hasn’t seen the film yet. I’d like to know what she thinks. I’ve tried to remain faithful to her way of thinking.

I asked Caroline to clean up the story for me, and she did a much more thorough job than I had expected. When I started working on the book, I had whole chunks of dialogue ready that would consolidate the psychiatric underpinning, so that the characters’ reactions might remain consistent. Otherwise, we would have spun off into insanity. Very often, when films depict psychopaths, they allow one to forget, for the duration of one or two scenes, that the psychopaths are just that. And then the insanity returns. But in reality, insanity is a continuous phenomenon. Here, Sophie’s illiteracy is always present, and Jeanne’s craziness is always there too.

There’s a sense in which the film marks a return in politics for you.

Yes. My last political film was Poulet au vinaigre. What I was interested in then was to show the provincial bourgeoisie as starkly as possible, not in too heavy a way, but so that that critique was definitely a feature of the film. Subsequently, I found no particularly stimulating social phenomena to observe. And it is only now, in the past two years, that I am beginning to reconsider. I had a conversation with a young hooligan which left me with a feeling that society was about to explode, or implode rather, because it’s not just a marginal phenomenon. So I decided to make something of this feeling, but not in too precise a documentary way. Just as well, because Mathieu Kassowitz’s La Haine (1995) makes the point much better than I could have done. Our films are related, in that they reflect the beginnings of this explosion. He sees it as an explosion. I see it as an implosion. The young hooligan I mentioned thought things couldn’t go on like this for long, no more than three or four years. Only two more years left!

The film is a stylized account of class war.

Yes. I remember an article, I can’t recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing. Ask the lower orders if class war can ever end! La Cérémonie was an opportunity to deal with this area. Once a screenplay is ready to go, I always try and find a way of including a few personal preoccupations. In this case, it works. The film really does depict a schematic view of class war.

The film constantly draws on panes of glass and mirrors.

Especially the oval mirror in the hall, which is the entrance to another world, the world of the kitchen. I love mirrors. They let one pass through the surface of things. I have to be careful not to overdo it. I often tell the production designer not to put too many in. I love bells too and have to keep telling the editor, ‘Not too many bells!’ I know I can’t turn them down once they are there. But that mirror was essential. A simple, straightforward indication of the separation between two worlds.

And the glass wall at the café, at the beginning?

The first shot? Yes, that’s an interesting one. I hope you noticed Jacqueline Bisset’s head, as the truck passes. I wanted the film to be perfectly constructed, in such a way that the construction didn’t show. I decided that in the first shot the trickery must not show, so people didn’t think, ‘Lord, this is complicated.’ The truck had to go past at just the right moment. Jacqueline could not be shot at the turn, when Sandrine passes by on the pavement outside. And how was I going to get the right balance between indoor and outdoor lighting? The usual thing is to use translucent sheets, but that wasn’t going to work in this case. There would have been too much of it, and it would have altered the light balance, as well as making it difficult to show Jacqueline’s face. We decided that the outside should be slightly over-exposed. The result is disappointing. Because it gets even more over-exposed by a changing of the aperture as Sandrine enters. It was much too obvious. So we tried a new trick. We very slightly over-exposed the whole shot, which doesn’t show.

It does at the start of the shot, which is very daring.

Yes. The shot is unsettling. We diminished the impact in the print. There was a margin for us to lighten or darken the shot. When the rushes came back, there was a phone call to say, ‘It’s over-exposed!’ ‘Yes, yes,’ we said. ‘We know.’ I try, as far as possible, to shoot in chronological order. It helps the actors. In this case, I was determined to start with the first shot, so Sandrine would really feel she was arriving.

Is the camera hand-held?

No. It’s a short track, about 50 cm in diameter. I’m not wild about hand-held shots. Laying tracks gives you freedom without being too obvious. I use some other tricks. When the two men are in the car and the child starts being insufferable, saying he hopes the maid won’t be too disgusting, a tension develops. It was a tracking shot, pulling back on the car, and I used a very slight forward zoom. It’s like a sauce beginning to thicken. At least, that’s how it feels to me.

How did you cast the actresses?

Initially, I was looking to make another film with Isabelle [Huppert]. I thought, she’s got plenty of choice. I wanted to cast her as Jeanne, but I wanted her to choose. She could have easily played the other part. I was thinking of Sandrine for the other character. But she could have played the postwoman. It would have been different, of course. I was delighted that Isabelle didn’t hesitate. She said, ‘I’ve played the other part already, twenty years ago.’ But there is a real sense in which they are complimentary.

They are different shapes. Sandrine is all lines and angles, Isabelle all curves, much more than in reality.

Ah, Isabelle’s curves! For Madame Bovary, I told her she was too thin. The costume designer told me not to worry. She was right. Isabelle can go either way. It’s the clothes which make the difference. Her shoulders are not round. Sandrine is thinner than usual in this film, after giving birth. She’s perfect.

What about Jacqueline Bisset?

I wanted someone beautiful. I hadn’t thought to make her English. With hindsight, I like the idea. It’s interesting and fun. I had thought of casting Caroline Cellier, but she didn’t feel up to it. Dominique Sanda was unavailable. My agent, who is also Jacqueline Bisset’s agent, suggested her. We met and there it was. She’s superb. The fact that she has a slight accent, that French is her second language, that the intonation is sometimes slightly off, makes her seem more fragile, more uncertain, which is good. It’s one of the nice surprises I have had on finishing the film. The opaqueness is essential. Openness wouldn’t have worked. They each have their little secrets, two of them keep those secrets — Jacqueline and her son. The other two give more away, they are less mysterious. They are at home. There’s no mystery about being at home. She’s an immigrant, albeit perfectly integrated.

In your films, it’s character which immediately grasps one. Do you start with plot situations, or with characters?

My starting-point is the relationship between the story and a character. On this film, the audience is not aware of the fact that there is no story. The characters gradually reveal themselves, their relationships evolve, but there is no real plot. Like Simenon, I’m a great believer in structures that arise out of the confrontation between different characters. I take an important characteristic that determines the character (e.g. sex, for Betty), and try to monitor its development in relation to others. It’s chemistry, really. A chemistry of affinity. Although I make plenty of thrillers, I am not really interested in plot. What I am interested in is the mystery, the intrinsic mystery of the characters. The best Agatha Christie is Pension Vanilos. Poirot is investigating a student hostel. He discovers the killer, a young man who is on his tenth murder. No one had noticed the monster in him. The idea is magnificent. The last fifteen pages are a true accumulation of horror.

Are there any actresses you find particularly inspiring?

I am not like Ingmar Bergman. I don’t need to sleep with my actresses. But I do need to feel there is some communication, some mutual respect. I also have to like what I’ve seen. Then I think, ‘Hey, maybe we’d get on.’ Sometimes someone I’ve worked with says, ‘Look, you really should meet so-and-so.’ Or my daughter, who sees practically everything that gets released. She was the one who recommended Virginie Ledoyan. She said she’d be right. And she was. I get on with both Isabelle and Sandrine, though they are very different.

Can one shoot with an actress one does not get on with?

I have done. I don’t make a meal of it, I hate tense situations. [Maurice] Pialat only works in a crisis. There have been some people I’ve found tricky. Dear Romy [Schneider], for example. She cheated me. She said, ‘I warn you, I don’t have an ounce of humor.’ Amazing! A girl who can say such a thing. The trouble was, it was true. It went well. But she spent as much time acting in between takes as in front of the camera. We had a fight at the dub.

Do you write for specific actresses?

No. It’s often wrong to write for specific actors because one ends up using what is least interesting about them, their mannerisms and habits. I prefer not to write for specific people.

There seems to be three distinct periods in your work: one during which your main characters are men; one during which Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran share the main parts equally; and now, when you are really a women’s director.

Yes, probably. I’ve always enjoyed women’s company. A woman is subject matter enough. We speak of Hercules’ labors, not Hercula’s labors. A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible. I am fascinated by homosexuals too. A very interesting subject. I even wrote a film about two men who wanted to have a baby. I must have been drunk one night and let the cat out of the bag. The real subject matter was the emptiness of things, compared with human beings. Someone made the film, starring Souchon. They messed it up completely.

Without going into the story of how L’Enfer was written, what exactly were your relations with [Henri-Georges] Clouzot?

Clouzot and [Jacques] Becker were the two people who were genuinely kind to me when I was starting out. We played bridge together while Clouzot was in pre-production on L’Enfer, and so I saw him again, and his then wife Vera, with whom I was great friends. Making L’Enfer was fun, it was pleasant. I tried to make something personal out of a screenplay which was not originally for me and which I had not originally chosen to do.

Which gives the writing its idiosyncratic style, deliberately stylized.

It would have been hard to do otherwise. There was one thing which I thought was tremendous fun, namely finding as many angles as possible within the confines of a single room. Almost half the film is in that one room. I was delighted with François Cluzet, who is great. I didn’t want the actors to hate each other too soon. They got on very well. Emmanuelle Béart has lots of energy, she’s very strong. Which meant François could let himself slide a little. Finally, we made it into that damn room, after doing the exteriors. They were in there for three weeks, tearing into each other. In the end, they couldn’t stand each other. Which is logical! Neither would give in to the other. I expect they’ve patched it up since.

What about future projects?

A comedy called Trompe l’oeil, about appearances. I’d like to shoot it in a hotel, during a seaside health cure. People looking after their bodies is always fun. I’ve also got a long-standing project which I’d like to bring off. When I announce future projects, I always end up doing another film first. I am also thinking about a very free adaptation of an old book by Philip McDonald, Murder Gone Mad, which I think is translated as Le Vampire. It’s a story about anarchic crime, people killed for no reason, illogically. A very difficult subject. Having said which, anything could happen. Perhaps I’ll treat myself to a TV movie and show what can be done for television. There is a conspiracy in the TV magazines. I get worried when I see Navarro [a French TV thriller series] has three stars and Night of the Hunter only two. I am not being paranoid. It can’t be by accident. There must be a deliberate policy of boosting TV movies quite beyond what is reasonable. I don’t care how many stars I get, two, three or four, so long as I get as many as Navarro.

Sketchbook

2009-09-05T18:39:53Z

The Clouded Yellow

The Clouded Yellow gave me a pleasant viewing but turned out to be quite a disappointment after all. It seems that the main character took the role of a rather worn out agent from the start and always looked absolutely lifeless. He is an english cold type and because of this lack of emotions his romantic affair with Simmons becomes ridiculous and unlikely as her usual Bambi looks meet the wall.
Sometimes I had a feeling that he engaged with this little lost girl only out of a boredom, to produce himself a little entertainment and to meet some chinamen and old contacts around the block. Moreover, the rhythm of the movie is strangely abrupt and doesn't help to build much tension until some final acceleration.
One could see the potential of the cast if only it was another combination, something more fascinating, like a chess match between the minds of two agents, Howard and More, playing hide-and-seek. But More gets nothing more than two minutes of a screen time. Alas.
The film has some highlights of course, not much original though, like a Hitchcockian trademark final scene. It could had some more thrills, especially in the scenes with a maniac uncle if he had a bigger part from the beginning. But the movie is not about uncle's obsessions and his deranged mind, it's about something else. Not quite sure about what...

Kiss me Deadly

Because of the wide acknowledgement and sort of a cult status of this movie among cinema-goers I was certainly hoping for something more, expected the movie to be on the same string with the hallmark of film-noirs, something as big as Double Indemnity, for instance. And the result almost met my expectations, although I had to make some alteration in my point of view to enjoy it. Perhaps the most unpleasant thing about this movie is in it's screaming sensationalism, and if you was waiting, like I was, for a Wilder kind of noir, with a misty talk and sight, with more leisureliness to it, then this running barefoot lady would certainly send you to a ditch. One have to consider the movie in his mind not as a routine straight forward noir genre picture with it's strict well-known rules but as a whirlpool of fear and despair, as a step by step descent into the nightmare (it reminded me of Dementia). This way, we can easily forgive the director his little overdoings like unbrushed, sometimes even hysterical, hard-boiling a la Fuller, with tough guy slapping everybody left and right in almost a farce manner and women sweating out in despair. And some exceptional cinematography, joined with the most bizarre MacGuffin in the movie history, certainly helps us to see the movie that way.

Near Dark

As somebody already mentioned somewhere, despite the fact that this is obviously a b-movie, with rather modest production values, it certainly has some charm to it, something that makes it quite unforgettable. Maybe it is because of it's unpretentiousness. Or maybe it is because everything in it is taken for granted, without a pile of explanations and introductions, like in the Spielberg's movies where all the gimmicks are explained carefully during the half of the movie.
And it seems that along with my old sympathy for Jenny Wright I also developed a soft spot for Tangerine Dream soundtracks.

BBC Radio - The Film Programme

2009-07-28T15:39:41Z

24/07/2009: Sylvia Syms: from Ice Cold In Alex to The Queen. Mark Gatiss's guide to British cinema.

(Sylvia Syms discusses her adventures in motion pictures. League Of Gentlemen member, writer and actor Mark Gatiss presents his alternative guide to British cinema (part 1))
___________________

Другие выпуски здесь - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r5jt/episodes/player

Factory Girls Sing

2009-07-16T15:35:45Z

P&P

2009-07-06T11:03:42Z

Death and the Maiden

2009-07-03T09:41:50Z

Жаль, что сообщество filmvote_ru умерло. Интересные бывали дискуссии. Предлагаю оценить три фильма Поланского, снятые в 90-е.

View Poll: #1424560

To whom it may

2009-06-29T11:32:38Z

Выложил на ТР фильм Кшиштофа Занусси "Обладание" (Stan posiadania). Сам не смотрел, поэтому ничего про фильм сказать не могу. Качество среднее, но смотрибельное. Раритет.

http://torrents.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1972258

Videodrome

2009-05-25T09:40:04Z

Глянул ещё раннего Кроненберга. Если это, как говорят, его лучший фильм, то видимо знакомство с этим периодом можно и не продолжать. Очень насмешил комментарий у Томсона - ...it (Videodrome) contains the superbly witty invention of an outlet in the human body where images may be plugged in. Это он издевается или серьёзно? Действительно superbly witty, я бы до такого никогда не додумался. Судя по всему это основной приём режиссёра - пугать детей через плоские экстравертивные метафоры.

Follow the white rabbit

2009-05-24T10:22:43Z

В связи с вчерашним просмотром Dark City (1998), возникла идея оценить два в чём-то схожих фильма.

View Poll: Виртуальная реальность

Ответы на квиз

2009-05-23T10:09:37Z

Спасибо за игру.

Ответы на квиз.

1. Hanno cambiato faccia
2. Kremlin Letter
3. Identificazione di una donna
4. La petite vertu
5. La prisonnière
6. I'll Never Forget What's'isname
7. De noorderlingen
8. Afraid of the Dark
9. The Parallax View
10. Daisy Miller
11. Iluminacja
12. The Last of Sheila
13. Una gota de sangre para morir amando
14. Ana y los lobos
15. De vierde man
16. Educating Rita
17. L'Ami de Vincent
18. Body Double
19. Frankenstein 90
20. Just Before Dawn
21. The Draughtsman's Contract
22. The Conversation
23. Le hasard et la violence
24. L'alpagueur
25. Un sussurro nel buio
26. Le locataire
27. Summerfield
28. L'uomo, la donna e la bestia
29. Spalovac mrtvol
30. The Looking Glass War
31. Le chat
32. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
33. L'alliance

Simply 5 most memorable love scenes I've ever seen

2009-05-22T15:59:32Z

trivia

2009-05-22T11:58:45Z

Странно, что кто-то до сих пор возмущается. Фестивальное кино закономерно превратилось в то, чем изобразительное искусство является уже лет 50 - рынок, где лучше всего продаются коровы в формалине и фекальки в баночках.

Подсказки к квизу

2009-05-20T12:53:22Z

Сутки уже не было никакой активности, поэтому дам подсказки сейчас.

3. В поисках образа.
4. Он, она, чужое портмоне.
5. Последний фильм французского мэтра. Трагический финал.
6. Рекламный ролик.
8. Нападение на станции. Не первое в этом районе.
12. Убийство на яхте. Часть опасной игры.
13. В кадре парики и будущая жертва.
14. Прибытие в логово.
15. Гульдены от роковой женщины.
17. Очевидный кадр. Обратите внимание на то, что написано, и на чём это написано.
19. Ночной кошмар человека с известной фамилией.
20. If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise.:)
24. - Crazy frenchmen.
- Indeed.
28. Один из героев фильма - художник с радикальными политическими взглядами.
31. Записка из одного слова.

Квиз - здесь.

Квиз - Ручки, ножки и прочая всячина

2009-05-17T21:16:23Z

Небольшой квиз без общей темы, а то чего-то все совсем заскучали. Надеюсь, что получился не очень сложный, но в то же время и не совсем простой. Комменты скрываются, имена угадавших над картинками. Всё как обычно. Старался, чтобы не было повторов со старыми квизами. Enjoy. (Заяц, айда с нами играть.)

Последняя проверка - 19:15 МСК.

1. miss_arbuthnot, ea10, nomen_n

2. ea10, miss_arbuthnot

3

4. nomen_n

5. ea10, nomen_n

6

7. chook_i_gek, ea10, reginafilangie, nomen_n

8. miss_arbuthnot, ea10

9. miss_arbuthnot, ea10, nomen_n

10. ea10

11. chook_i_gek, garibal, ea10

12. miss_arbuthnot, nomen_n, chook_i_gek

13. nomen_n

14. nomen_n

15. reginafilangie

16. reginafilangie

17. jacquouille

18. reginafilangie, bit_pitt, nomen_n

19

20

21. miss_arbuthnot, bit_pitt, chook_i_gek, garibal, totalityoffacts, reginafilangie, ea10, zhenyach, nomen_n

22. chook_i_gek, garibal

23. miss_arbuthnot, chook_i_gek

24. nomen_n

25. miss_arbuthnot, chook_i_gek, ea10, garibal, nomen_n

26. m_macintyre

27. miss_arbuthnot, ea10, chook_i_gek, nomen_n

28

29. ea10

30. miss_arbuthnot, r_p, garibal, ea10, nomen_n

31. reginafilangie, jacquouille

32. miss_arbuthnot, chook_i_gek, ea10, reginafilangie, bit_pitt, zhenyach, nomen_n

33. ea10

To whom it may

2009-05-10T18:57:10Z

Robert Aickman reading a "fair usage" excerpt from his story Larger Than Oneself :

http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2697

Eye candies

2009-05-04T14:56:04Z

Обожаю чешские киноафиши. Вот так должны выглядеть постеры, чтобы сразу захотелось посмотреть фильм.