Thinking Notes of Today

I'm going public by admitting that I'm no fan of Martin Scorsese but do recognize him as one of the American contemporary master-filmmakers.  But as everything in life  -absolutes hardly exist- there are exceptions and the following letter absolutely is the exception that makes me "admire" Scorsese for being willing to make public what so many think about those countries where films with subtitles are not easily accepted.

The letter dated November 25, 1993 was published as a comment to an article in the New York Times on November 19, 1993. The letter date is important as was one week after Federico Fellini's dead.

Here is a copy and paste of the letter; if you wish to read it at the source I used please go here.

To the Editor:

“Excuse Me; I Must Have Missed Part of the Movie” (The Week in Review, 7 November) cites Federico Fellini as an example of a filmmaker whose style gets in the way of his storytelling and whose films, as a result, are not easily accessible to audiences. Broadening that argument, it includes other artists: Ingmar Bergman, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Cage, Alain Resnais and Andy Warhol.

It’s not the opinion I find distressing, but the underlying attitude toward artistic expression that is different, difficult or demanding. Was it necessary to publish this article only a few days after Fellini’s death? I feel it’s a dangerous attitude, limiting, intolerant. If this is the attitude toward Fellini, one of the old masters, and the most accessible at that, imagine what chance new foreign films and filmmakers have in this country.

It reminds me of a beer commercial that ran a while back. The commercial opened with a black and white parody of a foreign film—obviously a combination of Fellini and Bergman. Two young men are watching it, puzzled, in a video store, while a female companion seems more interested. A title comes up: “Why do foreign films have to be so foreign?” The solution is to ignore the foreign film and rent an action-adventure tape, filled with explosions, much to the chagrin of the woman.

It seems the commercial equates “negative” associations between women and foreign films: weakness, complexity, tedium. I like action-adventure films too. I also like movies that tell a story, but is the American way the only way of telling stories?

The issue here is not “film theory,” but cultural diversity and openness. Diversity guarantees our cultural survival. When the world is fragmenting into groups of intolerance, ignorance and hatred, film is a powerful tool to knowledge and understanding. To our shame, your article was cited at length by the European press.

The attitude that I’ve been describing celebrates ignorance. It also unfortunately confirms the worst fears of European filmmakers. Is this closedmindedness something we want to pass along to future generations?

If you accept the answer in the commercial, why not take it to its natural progression:
Why don’t they make movies like ours?
Why don’t they tell stories as we do?
Why don’t they dress as we do?
Why don’t they eat as we do?
Why don’t they talk as we do?
Why don’t they think as we do?
Why don’t they worship as we do?
Why don’t they look like us?
Ultimately, who will decide who “we” are?

—Martin Scorsese
[New York, 19 Nov 1993]

Also suggest to read the recent NYTimes article from April 29, 2011 "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables" that you will find here.

More than 15 years after the letter was written is impressive how the largest movie market in the world -when you count only money- has not opened to world movies. Won't elaborate but have to comment that one of the consequences I dislike the most is the doing of "remakes" that never are as good as the original ones. Sigh.

By the way the conversation about "Cultural Vegetables" has been going on since April 2011 and I'm just joining today.

Today Second Thinking Piece

This is the second article that made gasp for one single statement that reads: "Thinking is boring"... Oh!!! What follows is copy/paste of the article.

June 3, 2011
In Defense of the Slow and the Boring
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT

WHAT is boring? This question was inspired by a piece in the May 1 edition of The New York Times Magazine by Dan Kois that offered a cheerful conformist’s take on what in certain circles is sometimes termed slow cinema and that he simply finds boring, the equivalent of eating his “cultural vegetables.” Mr. Kois writes that he knows he’s supposed to embrace celebrated films that he variously describes as “slow-moving, meditative” and “stately, austere” and “deliberately paced.” But he can’t, won’t, doesn’t like or understand them. In this he empathizes with his 6-year-old daughter, Lyra, who, at a friend’s urging, tuned into “Phineas and Ferb,” a TV show that she doesn’t fully get but watches “aspirationally, as a sort of challenge to herself.”

Mr. Kois watches aspirationally too. He sees Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff,” the subject of his longest lament, but his eyes roll back in his head. This makes him feel guilty, but not really. He and his daughter “both yearn,” he writes: she wants to be older than she is, while he aches to “experience culture at an ever more elevated level.” To that end he has watched films by Andrei Tarkovsky, including “Solaris,” but this too bored him as did, apparently, the very different Hou Hsaio-hsien. “As I get older,” Mr. Kois concludes, “I find I’m suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables, no matter how good they may be for me.” Happily for him, movie theaters offer a cornucopia of junk food.

For instance: “The Hangover Part II,” which I find boring, raked in $137.4 million over the five-day Memorial Day weekend. It’s the kind of boring that makes money, partly because it’s the boring that many people like, want to like, insist on liking or are just used to, and partly because it’s the sort of aggressively packaged boring you can’t escape, having opened on an estimated 17 percent of American screens. Filled with gags and characters recycled from the first “Hangover,” the sequel is grindingly repetitive and features scene after similar scene of characters staring at one another stupidly, flailing about wildly and asking what happened. This is the boring that Andy Warhol, who liked boring, found, well, boring.

“Of course, what I think is boring,” Warhol wrote in his memoir “Popism,” “must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.”

Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like “Empire,” eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one). Long movies — among my favorites is Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” — take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing, that most movies try to obscure through continuity editing. Faced with duration not distraction, your mind may wander, but there’s no need for panic: it will come back. In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.

Thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you. If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. And so the images keep zipping, the sounds keep clanging and the actors keep shouting as if to reassure you that, yes, the money you spent for your ticket was well worth all this clamor, a din that started months, years, earlier when the entertainment companies first fired up the public-relations machine and the entertainment media chimed in to sell the buzz until it rang in your ears.

So, is boring bad? Is thinking? In Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” there is a scene in which the title character, a housewife who turns tricks in her fastidiously neat home, makes a meatloaf in real time. It’s a tedious task that as neither a fan of meatloaf or cooking, I find difficult to watch. Which is the point: During the film’s 201 minutes Ms. Akerman puts you in that tomb of a home with Jeanne, makes you hear the wet squish-squish of the meat between her fingers, makes you feel the tedium of a colorless existence that you can’t literally share but become intimate with (you endure, like Jeanne) until the film’s punctuating shock of violence. It makes you think. MANOHLA DARGIS

MOVIES may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment.

Some of this anti-art bias reflects the glorious fact that film has always been a popular art form, a great democratic amusement accessible to everyone and proud of its lack of aristocratic pedigree. But lately, I think, protests against the deep-dish and the highbrow — to use old-fashioned populist epithets of a kind you used to hear a lot in movies themselves — mask another agenda, which is a defense of the corporate status quo. For some reason it needs to be asserted, over and over again, that the primary purpose of movies is to provide entertainment, that the reason everyone goes to the movies is to have fun. Any suggestion to the contrary, and any film that dares, however modestly, to depart from the orthodoxies of escapist ideology, is met with dismissal and ridicule.

Even though, in the bottom-line, real-world scheme of things, the commercial prospects of a movie like “Meek’s Cutoff” are marginal — and even though the distributors of foreign-language films can only dream of such marginality — it is still somehow necessary, every so often, to drag “art movies” into the dock as examples of snobbery, pretense or a suspect form of aesthetic nutritionalism. Vegetables! Yuck! And the supposedly more sophisticated arenas of cultural discourse are hardly immune.

Last year there was a big kerfuffle at Cannes when the jury dared to give the top prize to “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s dreamy and oblique spiritual head-trip through the jungles of his native Thailand. This year a different jury gave the Palme d’Or to “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s dreamy and oblique spiritual head trip through the bungalows of his native Texas. And while much love has been showered on that movie — including by me, once it opened here — it was also met with scattered boos at the press screening and corresponding sourness among some critics. Writing in TruthDig, the venerable Time critic Richard Schickel strikes out against Mr. Malick’s “twaddling pretenses,” seeing them as the latest example of what he calls “The ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ scam,” after Alain Resnais’s quintessential art film of 1959.

For Mr. Schickel the problem with “The Tree of Life” is not just that it isn’t a good movie (“inept” is his succinct appraisal of Mr. Malick’s skill), but also, more seriously, that it gets the medium wrong. Movies, Mr. Schickel writes, “are an essentially worldly medium, playful and romantic, particularly in America, where, on the whole our best directors have stated whatever serious intentions they may harbor as ignorable asides. There are other ways of making movies, naturally, and there’s always a small audience available for these noble strivings — and good for them, I guess.”

Yes, good for them. I will stipulate that Mr. Schickel has forgotten more film history than I will ever know, but in this instance his summary of that history strikes me as strangely narrow. A whole lot of cinema, past and present, falls into that “other ways of making movies” category, and dismissing it outright in the name of fun risks throwing out quite a few masterpieces with the bathwater.

In Mr. Schickel’s argument, “pretentious” functions, like “boring” elsewhere, as an accusation that it is almost impossible to refute, since it is a subjective hunch masquerading as a description. Manohla, you had some reservations about “The Tree of Life,” but your dispatch on it from Cannes emphasized its self-evident and disarming sincerity. Sincerity is the opposite of pretentiousness, and while it is certainly possible to be puzzled or annoyed by Mr. Malick’s philosophical tendencies or unmoved by the images he composes or the story he tells, I don’t think there is any pretending involved. (And while we’re at it, if “The Hangover Part II” is a quintessentially boring movie in its refusal to do anything new or daring beyond a few instances of easy, sophomoric shock-humor, is there a recent movie more deserving of being called pretentious than “Thor”?)

Why is it, though, that “serious” is a bad word in cultural conversations, or at least in discussions of film? Why is thinking about a movie an activity to be avoided, and a movie that seems to require thinking a source of suspicion? It seems unlikely, to say the least, that films like “Uncle Boonmee,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “The Tree of Life” or Jean-Luc Godard’s recently and belatedly opened “Film Socialisme” will threaten the hegemony of the blockbusters, so why is so much energy expended in defending the prerogatives of entertainment from the supposed threat of seriousness? I certainly don’t think fun should be banished from the screen, or that popular entertainment is essentially antithetical to art. And while I derive great pleasure from some movies that might be described as slow or tedious, I also find food for thought in fast, slick, whimsical entertainments. I would like to think there is room in the cinematic diet for various flavors, including some that may seem, on first encounter, unfamiliar or even unpleasant. A. O. SCOTT

To read article at the New York Times please go here.

So what do you THINK about the two articles??? (hope you don't got bored by the two articles...)

Today First Thinking Piece

Not often I get interested in reading articles by well-known critics as most look and feel like "cinema classes" ... but there are always exceptions and today I found two articles that I want to share with you all. This is a copy/paste of the first one.

June 17, 2011
Sometimes a Vegetable Is Just a Vegetable
By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS

ON May 1 The New York Times Magazine published an article, “Reaching for Culture That Remains Stubbornly Above My Grasp,” in which Dan Kois wrote about watching certain critically regarded movies, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” that he likened to eating his “cultural vegetables.” In the June 5 Arts & Leisure section the chief film critics of The Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, defended such films, adding to a vigorous, sometimes fractious discussion about so-called boring and slow films that is still continuing, lighting up the blogosphere and beyond, and inspiring hundreds of readers’ comments. They invited Mr. Kois to join them in the still-simmering conversation.

DAN KOIS So often the things we write sort of flicker and die, and it’s been gratifying to watch this discussion spreading across the film-loving parts of the Internet.

I’m not surprised that the response from critics in particular has been mostly hostile; I made jokes, after all, about a lot of critics’ favorite movies, and critics are critics because they take taste personally. In part it defines them.

But these issues — of public and private taste and the ways they intersect — are becoming more germane for civilians as well, as Facebook and Goodreads and Yelp and Netflix urge us every day to share our Likes and four-star ratings with the world. And I think it’s a source of anxiety for many, as it is for me: this sense of wanting to stay engaged with the culture, both high and low, but feeling, rightfully, that we no longer have the energy to take it all in.

Most full-time critics naturally consume, as Tony Scott puts it, a varied cinematic diet. But for noncritics the expense (in cash and, often as crucially, in time) forces a set of ruthless calculations whenever a new film is praised by reviewers or friends. In that context aspirational viewing is risky — whether those unfamiliar flavors are the populist blockbusters you often dislike but feel you oughtn’t miss, or the slow-moving art films you’re worried you’ll appreciate without actually enjoying.

So my question for you two is: Do you ever engage in aspirational viewing? Are there styles of filmmaking or individual directors you simply can’t access, but keep sampling in hopes of finally breaking through? I don’t mean things that are just terrible, like “The Hangover Part II”; I mean movies you genuinely wish you could get excited about and feel guilty (yes, Manohla, really guilty!) that you can’t. What’s your cultural vegetable?

A. O. SCOTT A lot depends on what is being aspired to, and in the name of what. A place at some imaginary cultural grown-ups’ table where people speak in hushed tones about exquisite masterpieces? A domain of art where experiences are more difficult and perhaps more intense than in the easygoing, thrill-a-minute realm of pop culture?

I guess my own aspirations are always to see something interesting, and ideally something that will challenge my expectations and prejudices and show me something new about life, love, art, whatever. I don’t believe that certain kinds of work have a monopoly on offering this kind of experience, and the history of movies as a popular art form proves as much. So I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a snob or an elitist, or as someone who believes that one kind of movie is a priori better than another. Thinking in categories — high and low, trash and art, entertaining and “serious” — is a shortcut and an obstacle, and it leads inevitably to name calling and accusations of bad faith. “You’re a snob!” “Well, you’re a philistine!”

The suspicion that only certain kinds of people like certain kinds of movies slides into contempt for the movies themselves, which flourishes on both sides of the supposed high-low divide, and other divisions as well. Action movies are for guys; romantic comedies are for girls; animation is for kids; subtitled movies are for skinny people dressed in black. And so on.

Our job as critics— our mission as freethinking, curious, pleasure-seeking human beings — should be to smash these categories, which are at bottom self-reinforcing artifacts of the tyranny of marketing. Duke Ellington said there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. William Blake said: “To generalize is to be an idiot. Particularization is the alone distinction of merit.” Figuring out how to respect the particulars is difficult enough without falling into the traps of groupthink and pop sociology.

But what was your question? I don’t feel guilty about not caring for “Last Year at Marienbad“ or persisting in my skepticism that the films of Pedro Costa are as transcendent as some of my colleagues believe. But until I can argue my case, the benefit of the doubt goes to Mr. Costa and the burden of proof rests on me.

MANOHLA DARGIS Having an open mind is my only form of aspirational viewing, which is partly why I also think it’s good to resist categories (like cultural vegetables). The critic who insists that every movie in an art house is art and that every major Hollywood release is trash just reaffirms prejudices (aesthetic, ideological, political) instead of looking at the movie with a Zen-like beginner’s mind. Each of us has preferences, of course, that are shaped by our life histories, and we nurture those likes and sometimes abandon them for different reasons, including education and habit. But it’s a problem when critics try to rationalize their preferences — their so-called taste — into a proscribed idea of cinema. And, Dan, I have to think that it’s this proscriptive urge by critics that partly inspired your original article.

KOIS Well, the at times overheated response to my piece has certainly increased my awareness of critical factionalism and the flair some critics have for being proscriptive bullies. (I’m sure there are people who think of me the same way.) Like most thoughtful readers, though, I usually read writers whose insights give me pleasure, not guilt: writers who are catholic in their tastes and honest in their enthusiasms. The guilt, really, comes from inside, specifically the part of me that’s an uncertain college student, terrified I’m not keeping up.

That’s why it’s hard to take offense when critics, spurred by genuine love for individual films, push back against my piece. Just because I appreciated “Blue” and “Tulpan” more than I enjoyed them doesn’t mean I don’t adore reading smart critics passionately make a case for those films.

Which brings me to the most succinct and potent response I’ve read, posted as a comment on The Times’s Web site by Johnny from El Paso. In just a few sentences he demolished my central metaphor, articulated your concerns about the dangers of categories and penned a pitch-perfect review of a film that I feel certain my philistinism won’t stop curious viewers from seeking out. “ ‘Meek’s Cutoff’ is not ‘cultural vegetables,” Johnny wrote. “It’s a steak. Bring your A-1 and chew on it.”

SCOTT “The one thing I most emphatically do not ask of a critic is that he tell me what I ought to approve or condemn.”

That’s W. H. Auden, from “The Dyer’s Hand,” the first dozen pages of which — a series of epigrammatic musings on “Reading” — may be all the theory any critic needs. Old Wystan did not much care about movies, but about criticism he was never wrong.

To wit: “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.”

And somewhat astonishingly, given our interest in vegetables: “You do not educate a person’s palate by telling him that what he has been in the habit of eating — watery, overboiled cabbage, let us say — is disgusting, but by persuading him to try a dish of vegetables which have been properly cooked. With some people, it is true, you seem to get quicker results by telling them — ‘Only vulgar people like overcooked cabbage; the best people like cabbage as the Chinese cook it’ — but the results are less likely to be lasting.”

DARGIS Dan, I didn’t “enjoy” watching “Shoah,” but I do appreciate it: it’s a long and slow film, and its protracted length is essential to its meaning. Duration is a crucial issue here, and some of the recent discussion about slow (if not boring, at least to some of us) films revisits arguments over what has previously been termed Slow Cinema. In the February 2010 issue of Sight and Sound, the British critic Jonathan Romney characterized Slow Cinema as films that are “poetic, contemplative — cinema that downplays event in favor of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.” He added, “Such films highlight the viewing process itself as a real-time experience in which, ideally, you become acutely aware of every minute, every second spent watching.”

As with other critical coinages, Slow Cinema can easily become misleading shorthand for work that is very different. The truth is that questions of time have preoccupied filmmakers long before Kelly Reichardt, the director of “Meek’s Cutoff.” Filmmakers isolate time (as in the empty hallway shots in films by Yasujiro Ozu, images in which nothing appears to be happening); embody time (the “tirednesses and waitings” of Antonioni, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it); make time stutter (the jump cuts in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless”); slow it down (the long takes of Bela Tarr); and deconstruct it (as the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs does). Without going too deeply down an academic rabbit hole let’s acknowledge that when we talk about ostensibly slow and boring films, the terms of debate extend beyond issues of entertainment.

Deleuze, for instance, distinguishes between pre-World War II cinema, in which time was subordinate to movement (the passage of time obscured through classical techniques like those of continuity editing), and postwar cinema, in which a direct vision of time emerges. In this new cinema — with its discontinuities, sense of interiority and seer-subjects — time appears “for itself,” becomes something movies confront even if their characters (and maybe we too) don’t know what it means. And so characters in “L’Avventura“ wander around and forget that a woman has disappeared, and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, stuck in her horror of a life turning tricks out of her dismal middle-class home, makes a meat loaf in real time we share. They are, as Deleuze puts it, “struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought.” Sometimes a slow movie is just a slow movie, but sometimes it’s also a window onto the world.

To read article at the New York Times please go here.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Have to comment about the enormous and who knows if successful (we will find out when movie is released) marketing effort for Paltrow's latest film Country Song. I don't know if you have catch some of the glitz and buzz, but started with the CMA's (Country Music Awards) and next week continues with her appearance in TV series, Glee.

Don't know about you but I know since a long time ago (remember her father Bruce Paltrow's 2000 film Duets?) that she can sing and have seen that she haven't pursued singing as a career even if she could. So now she's singing all over the net, American TV and who knows where else too. That's marketing as obviously (at least for me) she's promoting her film and not "starting" a singing career. But truth is that you never know... or we will know after her film is released.

Anyway, I tried to watch her at the CMA's but fall asleep (Country music is not my thing) but saw the clip the day after and she was okay. But today I saw the Glee clip and surely because the type of song/music I was taken aback as she can really sing! LOL! Maybe some of you would like to watch the Glee clip that follows and to keep post movie oriented, the film trailer for her film follows.

Glee clip



Country Song Trailer



Well, just for reference here is her in Duets.

Playing with country submissions to the Foreign Language Film

Finally today the Academy released the official list with 65 films that can be considered as ONE of the best films produced in each country and since a few days ago I been thinking about using the list as a database to play a little for fun.

Here is me dissecting the long list for useful and useless data.

Women Filmmakers

With the absence of Afghanistan announced submission, there are ONLY eight (8) films directed by women, which means that ONLY 12.3% of honored directors are women. That’s TERRIBLE!!! Not much happened around the world after and because last year a woman won (for the first time ever) the Oscar for Best Director and her film won the top award.

Countries with films directed or co directed by women: Austria, Costa Rica, Denmark, Germany, India, Nicaragua, Norway, and Switzerland.

Festivals

Doing a very “scientific research” I used the huge blog database and did a search for each of the 65 films. To my surprise almost half, exactly 47.7%,of the movies come from festivals that are listed in this blog. In this year list there are 31 films that have been at festivals since 2007 when the film submitted by Egypt was a project at Locarno, continuing with 7 films that were in 2009 festivals and 23 that were in 2010 festivals. We can say that when films travel the festival circuit they have some good chance of becoming a country submission to the Oscars.

Cannes is the festival that showcases more films that countries select to submit to Oscars; this year there are four (4) that got its premiere at 2009 Cannes and eight (8) screened at 2010 Cannes for a grand total of 12 films coming from this prestigious festival, or 18.4% of the 65 films. These are the countries that submitted films from Cannes

2009 Certain Regard: Greece, Portugal
2009 Quinzaine: Austria, Bulgaria
2010 Cannes
Main Selection: Thailand, Algeria, France, Mexico
Certain Regard: South Africa, Argentina
Quinzaine: Kyrgyzstan, Belgium

But if Cannes has a good presence in this year Foreign Language Film submissions also the Berlin Film Festival or Berlinale has a significant presence with 6 films or 9.2% of 65 films. Just these two festivals represent almost a third of the submitted films or 27.6%

The other 13 films come from other festivals like La Biennale, Locarno, Rotterdam, San Sebastian, Moscow, Montreal, Guadalajara and Pula. I don’t doubt that from the other 34 films that are not listed in this blog, some were also screened in festivals but that’s something we will not know for sure this year as I know that I haven’t covered many festivals during my long hiatus from posting at the blog. The following is the list of festivals and countries that submitted films to be considered at the 83rd Academy Awards.

2010 Berlinale (6): Turkey, Romania, Germany, Colombia, Czech Republic, Iraq
2010 Biennale (3): Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Chile
Locarno (2): 2007 Egypt, 2010 Switzerland
2010 Rotterdam (2): Estonia, Georgia
San Sebastian (2): 2009 Peru, 2010 Uruguay
2010 Moscow International Film Festival (1): Venezuela
2010 Montreal World Film Festival (1): Kazakhstan
2009 Guadalajara (1): Nicaragua
2009 Pula Film Festival (1): Croatia

Unfortunately have to stop here today, but maybe another day will continue dissecting the list to find that -for example- films produced and co produced by France production companies have the largest representation in the list (or maybe is another country like Germany).

If you have something that you wish to find from this list of films please let me know and gladly will try to find whatever is possible to find.

Enjoy!

Improving the Blog

Since a long while ago I wanted to publish the blog's posts in facebook and wanted to be active in Twitter. Isn't until this very moment that finally I'm able to do both!

As you can see there is a new Twitter widget showing whatever could be in my mind and most important, showing the latest Movie On posts. Alright, I'm so excited that haven't tuned the settings, but I'll do it in a moment. As a matter of fact after a couple of hours playing with Twitter I already got three (3) followers! (Thank You Very Much fellow tweetee's) That's the power of Twitter, everything goes really fast in there.

Now my facebook friends will also get in their News feed whatever I post in the blog, so only if they're interested in reading they will have to come to the blog. Since my Wall is public anyone with a facebook account can check the wall to find what's going on at the blog and visit only what calls their attention.

So my dear friends, now you can follow me by coming to the blog, checking Twitter and/or facebook as everything is integrated and communicates with each other.

My first experiment will be with La Mostra, will try to have different information in each service, but as mentioned, blog posts will be in all services. Absolutely will continue learning until I hope to know 'everything' and be completely ready for 2011 Cannes.

This is the second important step into becoming again myself. The third is having all my stuff with me, which will happen soon.

2011 is the year of the new re-invented me and my new profession that has lots to do with movies, but also with the Internet, software and other related stuff.

I'm VERY HAPPY!!!

Cheers!!!

Fall Preview: The 33 Must See Films

As Peter Knegt (yes, I will always say again-and again- that he's my favorite net writer) says, summer is over! (I'm so glad!) not necessarily by the calendar but certainly when it comes to festivals and movies. For many of us tomorrow the fall festival season starts with La Mostra/La Biennale/Venice Film Festival and the 2011 award season already started.

But Mr. Knegt today delighted readers with his Must See Films for the American fall and even if there are some that will not be must be seen for me (but surely will watch), we agree with many like -for example- Aronofsky's Black Swan (he says, "think of it as a violent, sexual, ballet world update of "All About Eve" -wow! - I know have to control expectations); Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist (the follow-up of extraordinary The Triplets of Belleville"); Schnabel's Miral; Julie Taymor's The Tempest; hmm... he's talking about Heartbreaker, maybe should watch it, with Romain Duris, Vanessa Paradis); Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger; and others that could be interesting.

To check the complete article please go here.

By the way, the other favorite net writer, Anne Thompson is in Venice, so hope she does more than just reviewing movies, which will allow us to enjoy more the fest. Well, well... today she also has an interesting column "Critic vs. Critic: The Changing Landscape of Movie Coverage"... yep, about the many Internet "informal" critics/reviewers ... like me (LOL!). Suggest to read the article here.

It’s no secret: The Academy makes some strange choices

Just love this article about Oscar's Foreign Language Film category, very cleverly written. The first I ever like from Metacritic! As a teaser, a brief excerpt.

"So if the Academy voters aren’t selecting the most critically-acclaimed films, what exactly are they picking? The most accessible films? That doesn’t appear to be the case, either. As you can see above, the Academy’s selections rarely coincide with Metacritic user preferences. And, more surprisingly — given that an Oscar victory presumably provides some sort of box office bump — the Oscar-winning foreign film more often than not performs more poorly in U.S. theaters than at least one other nominee. Apparently, the only people who agree with Academy voters are … Academy voters."

You'll find data and much more. I strongly suggest you take a look at the complete article here.

Moving.... again!

Tomorrow I'll be traveling ... again!!! LOL! I'm really tired of traveling, think I had enough. This time is -again- to another country where I hope I'll stay for a long time!!! All my stuff left yesterday and me will leave tomorrow. Hope to get settle fast so I can go back to do what I really like: watching films and sharing with you all.

Cheers!!!

Hope

For the past year I've not been able to post regularly as I did since I started this blog about five years ago, but I HOPE that soon I'll be back to 'normal' in the blog and most important, in my life.

I thank dearly to all that visited during the last 365+ days to view or review old posts -and a few new ones- that now have become an interesting database and my way of not forgetting which movies I have seen and which have to watch.

As always there is an exception to the rule, I truly loved being able to cover this year Cannes festival the way I did and promise you all that next year will be even better as there were so many things that I couldn't do this year due to life non-pleasant situations.

It may not be fast, but hopefully soon I'll be back to my regular posting.

Again, THANK YOU!

MUBI - Update

One of my true passions until today is Branding. I invested many years of my career learning and developing brands. I know the power of a brand and had the opportunity to help some companies that had high levels of brand or branding fragmentation. With this background, it is with high surprise that today I discover that MUBI is still The Auteurs... and The Auteurs is MUBI.

From product description I gather that The Auteurs is where we will continue to find excellent movies, while in MUBI we will find more films less strictly curated and will be like a social network, a discussion group, the latest news and critcism... Hmmm. Like they say: The Auteurs is about films, MUBI about the audience. Hmm.

I'm really sorry to say that this seems like a bad case of brand fragmentation (against a good case of brand segmentation) and just hope that eventually brand owners realize the power of The Auteur brand as what was a unique World platform to watch, discuss, read, review, learn and simply enjoy excellent cinema. My suggestion if I was their brand consultant is .... wait! I used to charge three figures an hour to give this kind of advise... so I better remain silent, LOL!

Anyway if you're interested in this subject, more from a marketing/branding point-of-view than cinema pov, check the letter that The Auteurs/MUBI Founder & CEO published today, please go here.

---end of Update--

Some of my European friends have to be very interested in today's news from Cannes. Here is an excerpt from the news at indieWire that you can read here just go down to 11:33 AM.

“Never before have filmmakers had the ability to program, now they do,” said Celluloid Dreams head Hengameh Panahi in Cannes this morning. She helped usher in a new phase for online film library, The Auteurs, which has unveiled a partnership with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and re-branded itself as ‘MUBI.’

Under the pact, detailed today at a Majestic Hotel press event, MUBI’s collection of international, independent and classic cinema will be available to European PlayStation3 users. MUBI will be a free, downloadable application that allows anyone with a PS3 in designated territories access to its library. PS3 users in the U.K., Ireland, France, Italy, the Iberian peninsula, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Benelux and Nordic countries, Australia and New Zealand will have access to MUBI’s collection beginning in Autumn, 2010. Plans for North America are said to be still pending.

Included in the downlodable offering is the entire work of Belgian/French filmmaker, Agnes Varda (“The Gleaners and I”). MUBI and Sony call it “the first time that the complete work of such an established filmmaker will have been available to watch globally on the Internet.” Additionally, Mexican collaboration, “Revolucion,” which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and will screen in Cannes this week will be available on MUBI on the anniversary of Mexico’s revolution and ahead of its worldwide DVD release. Work from the Coen brothers and Tarantino as well as Latin American directors and restored shorts are among the array of films that will be available to users"

So I know a few friends that if they don't have a PS3 maybe should buy one fast. But don't despair if you can't afford one, the films are all available at the good old The Auteurs site that from today the opening page reads as follows.

Dont' panic... We just changed our name. We are now MUBI. Your Online cinema. Anytime, anywhere.

Now it's important that you update your bookmarks as the new address is http://mubi.com/home or www.mubi.com. Still, to check and watch Agnes Varda films in one page you have to go to http://www.theauteurs.com/agnes-varda (!) so, go figure, they must be in the transition phase.

I'm really glad to learn that now PS3 owners can now also watch interesting world cinema besides only playing (lol!), hope my particular friends in Spain enjoy the new film distribution outlet as much as they enjoy playing.

Obviously The Auteurs did more than just changing their name to MUBI as with more platforms come more new viewers and more viewers means more new films! Excellent.

Cheers!!!

This is the ad at Playstation

Three Short Films

My other passion was Advertising and when the lines become blur with my first passion, Films, the end result is quite interesting. Always wanted to work in Europe for an European brand. Did worked in Europe for an European brand, but never allow us to do something like this or hiring such amazing directors. Check the short films/long-form ads for Lady Dior, starring Marion Cotillard.

Lady Noir directed by Olivier Dahan (from La Môme fame)



Lady Rouge Directed by Jonas Akerlund (Music video)



Lady Blue Shanghai Written and directed by David Lynch (very Lynch!!)

This video looks a lot better at Lady Dior site.

Part 1



Part 2



Can you guess what Dior is advertising? If you can't just mark the following word to find out. [Handbags].

Sharing with YOU Loyal Movie On Readers

For the first time I’m going to share with you all how I follow Cannes fest. I’m doing it so perhaps some of you will join me for a few days and could ‘party’ together.

Everything starts at the Official Site where info will be pouring slowly, so you have to be patient for them to upload everything. As patience is not my virtue I always watch on TV the opening but this year I wont be able as now I live in a country where the satellite provider unannouncedly stopped TV5 Monde transmission. So I’m hoping that Canal+ uploads the opening ceremony faster than the official site and maybe (wish me success) I’ll find a site that broadcasts TV5 Monde online and viola, will watch it live. Yes, have several sites ready, but I wont know if they work until the show is broadcasted, so if you wish to watch it live check this site as surely I’ll post the link.

What follows comes from different sources. Some Press calls and conferences are really fun-to-watch, last year had a blast watching Almodovar, let’s hope that this year we find some amusing ones. This kind of videos come only from the official site, they’re the best and if you have bandwith strongly recommend to watch them in high definitition. Also Canal+, as an official partner, loads tons of videos but most are not really interesting, so what I don’t miss is Zapping Cannois that gives me a glimpse of everything that happens and if I’m interested in something in particular just browse the site to find the video with all the information.

The best place to find excellent information and videos is arte.tv that’s definitively more selective in what they upload to their site plus their interviews are less gossipy and more cinema interesting.

Then comes the reading from people that actually are in Cannes. Unfortunately this year my favorite net writer won’t be in Cannes and I surely will miss his peculiar writing, still he’ll be covering the fest from the same side of the world I am. Luckily I have another writer that I like to follow exclusively for Cannes coverage as his ‘darkish’ humor absolutely is my kind of humor; love Peter Bradshaw from British newspaper the Guardian. He’s already in Cannes and today’s article is just great reading for Cannes movies that never crossed the English channel and (some) much less the big ocean. Fortunately many are or will be available in DVD which up-to-today is the most greatest (and cheapest) cinema invention ever (for me).

I avoid reading Cannes films reviews, but if I’m really curious about an especific film surely I’ll read (some) of what Todd McCarthy writes if he saw that movie. Yes I check gossipy news too. The most serious writer is Anne Thompson that since she went to indiewire she’s a lot more free to write lighter articles, but the drawback about these two ex-Variety writers is that many times what they write has a very American pov against a more international one. Speaking of Variety, they’re promoting new writers and if their site allows me to read more articles than 3 a month, surely I’ll check them.

For true gossip I read Paris Match (lol!), Premiere (France), and use google latest news search in French (avoid English or you’ll get mostly annoying American news). Here is where I learn stuff like what in the world is Aish doing in Cannes this year? (LOL!) plus stuff about thousands of films that didn’t got into any Selection but are being promoted in Cannes marche, the biggest in the world.

Surely I’m forgetting something, but this gives you an idea of how I’ll spend the following days until May 23 when the festival closes. Afterwards I close the book until next year and the greatest party of the year is over for me. Sadly the wait starts until I’m able to watch whatever films ‘I have to’ watch, a wait that sometimes takes up to 2 years (if not more).

Always say that I have to go to Cannes and always hope for ‘next year’. Hope never dies and well let’s hope that next year I’ll be writing live from Cannes.

Cheers!!!

Lynn Redgrave

Lynn Redgrave passed away last Sunday. RIP. There is one movie that impressed my young mind and possibly set a path for what became my future. Georgy Girl. I never forgotten that film or Lynn Redgrave performance as Georgy and will never forget.

My sincere condolences go to the Redgrave family.