Movie Magazine International Blog

Blonde  (2022) converts the  'Marilyn prose' of the novel by Joyce Carol Oates (2000) into imagery in a relentless travesty devoid of integrity and ridden with clichés. Oates calls it a "penetration" of the fictitious self of Marilyn Monroe and was used by Andrew Dominik as a "bible" for his film.  Many Netflix spectators describe that they reached a saturation point after 20 minutes. Oates' first chapter is mirrored in these opening scenes:  the leitmotif of closeups of Monroe in her white briefs forced into unsolicited sex in casting auditions or twirling on the set of  The Seven Year Itch; g rowing up as an infant in a bureau drawer with a mentally unstable mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson); receiving  a birthday present, a photograph of her absent father placed over her bed by her mother; the fire set that results in the child being placed in an orphanage. The language of  Blonde  is torpid and  dramatic: "I will punish myself, despite...

By Moira Jean Sullivan © Alejandro Mejia, AMC. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. BITTERBRUSH is a beautiful hand-crafted documentary about two woman who are seasonal workers hearding cattle in the montatins of Idaho. They live there and take care of the lifestock. In a refreshing documentary style, Mahdavian leaves the herders on their own to tell their story with an expert framing of motion.   Emelie Mahdavian wrote the shooting script and directed the film. She has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Davis. While studing at Davis she ran the Davis Feminist Film Festival. Her academic research explores dance, film, gender and cultural performance. The subject of her doctoral dissertation was dance and flm during and after the the civil war in Tajikistan. Emelie is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah. Here now is an exclusive interview with Emelie and Movie Magazine International from April 28, 2022 where Bitterbrush screen...

Moira Jean Sullivan Zar Amir Ebrahimi delivered a powerful statement at the press conference after she was awarded the, best acting award for Holy Spider , one of the most talked about films at the 75th Cannes Film Festival. The actor spoke about how she was forced into exile in 2006 by a smear campaign for an underground video tape where she was proclaimed to be an actor. She said she had been "saved by cinema". In Holy Spider she plays a journalist fighting for social justice for slain sex workers. " This film is about women , it's about their bodies, it's a movie full of faces, hair, hands, feet, breasts, sex -- everything that is impossible to show in Iran". The film is inspired by the true story of a working class man who killed prostitutes in the early 2000s and became known as the "Spider Killer". "Holy Spider" suggests there was little official pressure to catch the murderer, who ends up a hero among the religious right. ...

By Moira Jean Sullivan It was perplexing to listen to Ruben Östlund accept his second Palme d’Or. As he said at the press conference after the closing ceremony, it could be a mistake the first time, but the second time it is is probably not. Not everyone agreed it was the best film this year nor one of the films expected to win. However, the entire sound team - Andreas Franck, Bent Holm, Jacob Ilgner and Jonas Rudels won the Vulcan award - Prix Vulcain de l’Artiste Technicien - awarded by the Superior Technical Commission of Image and Sound. Östlund latest films such as The Square (2017) embrace the absurdity of politics by a director from a multi-party social democratic country. Sweden's has shifted from left to right in the past few years ending years of neutrality to be a part of NATO. Currently the leading party is the Social Democrats but with only a third of the seats , with a third shared by the Conservatives (Moderaterna) and a third by the problematic and alarming ...

By Moira Jean Sullivan Baz Luhrmann’s highly anticipated Elvis that debuted at Cannes in May is an enticing seductive film by an innovative film artist. Unfortunately, the film has more to do  with Tom Hank’s role as Elvis’s business manager Tom Parker than Elvis. Luhrmann controls the camera and editing in making Parker the main attraction with this narrative about the man who claimed he "made" Elvis. Putting Hanks in almost every scene is a major flaw. The film begins with the death of Parker and a voice over that this is his story. Could this be atonement for Elvis that this business manager robbed the artist of his life and true artistry? Closeups, cutaways, and reactions of this corpulent, oily gambler make one incredulously wonder how Elvis let him  have so much control over him. The film shows that Elvis knew about this hypnotic con man and tried to stop him. As a magnificently talented man he ironically left his career to be managed by a megalomaniac. The emph...

The Festival de Cannes Quinzaine des réalisateurs - Directors' Fortnight premiere of Maria Schneider, 1983 by Elisabeth Subrin was held May 26 featuring actor Manal Issa, 31, Aïssa Maïga, producer actor and director, 47 and Isabel Sandoval, Filipino filmmaker, 40. The film shot in 16mm is a recreation of a 1983 segment from the documentary series Cinémas Cinéma where Schneider is interviewed by producer Anne Andreu. Together with other filmmakers, Subrin's said that her interest in Maria Schneider began when she was asked to work on an unpublished screenplay for Antonioni's film Technically Sweet in 2008.  It was never made and Antonioni instead made The Passenger (1983) with Maria Schneider and Nicholson. In 2014 Subrin started a blog dedicated to Maria Schneider called Who Cares About Actresses?. The year before media interest was rekindled in Maria Schneider's experience on the set of Last Tango in Paris ( 1972 ) directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The #METOO m...

By Moira Sullivan The 75th Cannes Film Festival may not rival last year's event with films selected after the worst of the pandemic but its virtues like all Cannes festivals are evident. The lineup of 22 films features five films by women, a slight step up after the heavy activism of filmmakers and actors in 2018 festival in side bars with seminars and meetings: Claire Denis, Kelly Reichardt, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and later additions Leonor Serraille with Un Petit Frère and Charlotte Vandermeersch, co-director of The Eight Mountains ". Since 2015 there has been a visible #METOO presence and supporters of gender equality such as Agnès Varda, Ava DuVernay, and Cate Blanchett - president of Cannes Jury in 2018. When asked about this Blanchett answered: “A few years ago there were only two, and I know the selection committee has more women on board than in previous years, which will obviously change the lens through which the films are chosen. But these things are not go...

By Moira Jean Sullivan The Northman is a highly crafted new film by US director Robert Eggers written by Icelandic author Sjón. The film is steeped in Old Norse mythology and set in 10th century Iceland. Old Norse later developed into the dialects of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The set design and historical setting of the film was meticulously researched with a team of experts. The film uses FMX sequences such as an ongoing erupting volcano with naked Viking duels on molten lava. The Viking prince, Young Amleth (Stellan Skarsgard) witnesses his father King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) killed and his mother Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman) carried off by his uncle Fjölnir -The Brotherless (Claes Bang). Amlet spends several years planning to revenge these deeds. He consults with a Seeress (Björk dressed in a woven coarse barley headdress, with cowrie shells and chicken feet) and is aided by mystical fairies and creatures such as ravens put on his path. Viking seeresses worked w...

By Moira Jean Sullivan ANAÏS IN LOVE by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet is a French romantic comedy about Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier), a 35 year old woman who on the practical side of life is able to talk her way through not paying her rent, or lodging, or showing up at college or finishing her thesis on passion. Such folly is on the surface of a clever and vibrant young woman who has unfulfilling relationships with a young man she shares an apartment with and Daniel, a stingy older married man (Denis Podalydès) she is having an affair with. But she falls in love with his wife (Valeria Bruni Tedesci) that she has never met who is a writer. She rents out her apartment to a Korean couple and takes off for a writing seminar to meet Emilie. During this time Daniel drives to the seminar for an unarranged meeting with his wife. At a film screening for the seminar, Elie has chosen John Cassavetes Opening Night (1971) with Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara –a film about a writer who ironically...

By Monica Sullivan “The Automat”, now in release in America, talks about a time when the country was dominated by the company that served simple, tasty, delicious food..  At its height it was a very important part of American culture.  The food was good, and filling, and people loved it.  They liked to eat food and meeting their friends at the automat.   When I first saw Doris Day's movie called “That Touch of Mink” with Cary Grant, Gig Young, Audrey Meadows, and John Astin, I didn’t know how close the automats were to being over.  It was a funny movie and is always a lot of fun to watch on the tube.  One of the main characters worked in an automat.  Tha would be Aurey Meadows.  The automat served a larger function than just food for a long, long, long, time.  The fact that the automats are long   gone now does not mean that people have forgotten them.  Far from it.   The automat was known for serving good, sol...

By Moira Jean Sullivan In a parallel section of the 44th Creteil International Women Film Festival this year (March 11-20) was a history of directors in different genres of cinema including horror. One of the latest films in the rape-revenge genre is simply called Revenge by Coralie Fargeat (2017). With a rich cinematography the film is set in a modern architectural villa in a desert landscape with long corridors and an outdoor pool. Italian actress Ingrid Lutz plays Jen, a young aspiring actress who has been promised a career start in Los Angeles by her married boyfriend Richard. Her young bronze body clad in bikini seems to be a provocation to the cinema goer and to unannounced visitors – disturbing predators who arrive at the villa. A night of frivolous dancing leads the next day to rape, and Jen will not be placated by Richard’s plan to make it all go away. Her resistance leads to being pushed off a cliff, but she has a locket with dried scorpions and a cigarette lighter and...

By Moira Jean Sullivan Eva Husson has presented films twice at the Cannes Film Festival -- Girls of the Sun in the official selection in 2018 and Mothering Sunday included in the Cannes Premiere Section of the 74th Festival de Cannes in May. It is an extraordinarily well-crafted film with a provocative narrative structure, based on the novel by Graham Swift, recipient of the British Hawthorndon literary award. The film begins with shots of three young boys; two are children of the Nivens and who died in World War I . The third child is Paul Sheringham, the only survivor and what remains of the Nivens' and Sheringhams' bond. The slow motion of a galloping horse sets the stage for the milestones in Jane Fairchild’s life that she feels set her on the path of becoming a writer, including being given a Paxton typewriter. The pace of the film provides the opportunity to contemplate the sumptuous imagery. In discontinuous continuity the story telling enfold showing time in...

By Moira Jean Sullivan One of the parallel sections of the 44th Créteil International Women Film Festival this year (March 11-20) was a history of directors in different genres of cinema made by women. This included short film programs with directors such as Germaine Dulac, Lois Weber, Maya Deren, and Ida Lupino. Also of interest was the horror genre and several exceptional horror films were presented including The Countess from 2009 made by French actress and director Julie Delpy, an historical film about the life of the Hungarian countess Erszebet Bathory. It is not often that a horror film is made with such rich detail as this film about a woman who was afraid of aging and who used the blood of young female virgins to keep herself forever young. She falls in love with the young son of Count György Thurzó (William Hurt) - Istvan, (Daniel Bruhl). The Count prevents him from meeting the Hungarian Comtesse who is to be married to the daughter of a wealthy Danish merchant. Erz...

Sidney Lumet’s The Group from 1966 features a stellar female cast of eight women attending Vassar back east in the 1930’s. Only three of the actresses are still living today – Candace Bergen as the mysterious Lakey, Mary Robin Redd as Pokey who everyone is surprised when she later gives birth to twins and Kathleen Widdoes as class valedictorian Helena. The film is based on Mary McCarthy’s best-selling novel from the same year. It would be a great film to do a remake of though the main theme is less glaring of interest today regarding the sexual repression of the women and pressure to fit an ideal - the marrying and housewife type. Actually, one film does come to mind that is relatively recent starring Julia Roberts as a teacher at Wellesley women’s college in the 1950s Mona Lisa Smile (2003) with the same pressure on female students. Joanna Pettet as Kay is the exception to the blue-blooded requirement of "The Group" but is the catalyst of the narrative with her pro...