Movie Magazine International Blog

By Moira Sullivan It has been 25 years since Ang Lee’s epic 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon' was released.  The stunning aerial cinematography and martial arts kinesis choreographed by Yuen Wo-Ping with cinematography by Peter Pau were sensational on its release and still hold magic. The film won Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, Best Original Music Score, and Best Set Decoration at the 2001 Academy Awards. Now a new 4K restoration of the film is out in the Bay Area.  The film stars Michelle Yeoh (Yu Shu Lien), Zhang Ziyi (Jen Yu), Chow Yun Fat (Li Mu Bai) Cheng Pei Pei (Jade Fox) and Chang Chen ('Dark Cloud' Lo). However this story comes across in broad strokes on the screen the subtleties show that it is actually about three skilled female warriors Yu Shu Lien, Jen Yu and Jade Fox whose talents have been eclipsed by their teachers, fathers and brothers. It is exciting to reintroduce this background with the new restoration. It is as powerful as know...

By Moira Sullivan Florian Zeller is an exciting director who has made two relevant and meaningful films about difficult subjects. He explores a daughter's relationship with her father who has Alzheimer's in The Father (2020), and in The Son (2022)a father's relationship with his chronically depressed young son. His latest film provides a painful look at a tortured young man. The seemingly bottomless pain is seldom so openly revealed. Even if Hugh Jackman as Peter is excellent, the stellar performance is Zen McGrath as Nicholas, Peter’s son. The film debuted at Venice in September. While it seems to be Peter’s new marriage to Beth (Vanessa Kirby)and their new infant that has made Nicholas majorly depressed it could also be the bust up of Peter and Kate (Laura Deren) Nicholas’ parents. The film script sets up plenty of draconian evidence for why Nicholas is depressed with flashbacks to when the original nuclear family was harmonious such as on idyllic holidays. But, Nic...

By Moira Jean Sullivan  © Sony Pictures Classics Living is a finely crafted film set in England in the 1950s by South African director Oliver Hermanus based on  Ikiru (To Live),  a film made in 1952 by Akira Kurosawa inspired by a novella by Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). The British version of Living in full regalia is now in San Francisco Landmark Theatres written by Nobel prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro with rights granted by the Kurosawa estate. Ishiguro who has seen Ikiru many times before fused his own memories of Britain’s pre-and post-War culture in this latest production. The setting is an England being rebuilt after the war and focuses on the efforts of the government planning department to renew the façade and structures of London. Aimee Lee Wood and Bill Nighy   © Sony Pictures Classics Bill Nighy plays veteran civil servant Williams, a bureaucrat in a city department. He is head of a small team commuting to Lond...

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...