Movie Magazine International Blog

By Moira Sullivan The Frameline Film festival is in full swing through the end of Gay Pride month, up through the Pride Parade on June 29. The LGBT event features narratives, shorts and documentaries from around the world, and prides itself on taking the best films out there from this world. It is an eclectic pageant with films about gay men, lesbians, transgenders and bisexuals. Coverage of the festival primarily deals however with films made by men about men and this year is no exception. In putting the L in LGBT first this report is about films made about lesbians primarily by women at Frameline this year. My guess is that films about lesbians today or yesterday are either too threatening or dismissed as nonexistent. Hence the paucity of mention in corporate media about these films. In trying to be all things to all in the LBGT equation many of these films are only screened once this year . There are several features about lesbians this year which mostly share a low budget profi...

By Moira Sullivan The Swedish Entry for Best Foreign Language Oscar is FORCE MAJEURE by Ruben Östlund. It was part of the Official Selection of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize Winner during Pablo Trapero’s reign as Jury President for this division. Swedes love to travel to the French Alps and this typically Swedish family takes time out for such a winter holiday. They are first snapped by a professional photographer on the slopes and look like the ideal family with father, mother and two children. The holiday, however, seems uneventful and routine, almost sterile in the depiction of traveling up the alps by ski lift and down by skis, retiring to the hotel room and piling in the bathroom with the family brushing their teeth together. Only the hotel cleaner knows that something is amok with this family who wind up spending time outside the room and eventually have a major family crisis. It is customary at ski resorts to blast the snow to bri...

Nicole Kidman plays 'Grace of Monaco' The 2014 Palme d'Or went to "Winter Sleep" by Nuri Bilge Ceylan on May 24. Ceylan is a veteran who has received other runner up prizes. The universal appeal of "Winter Storm" with many philosophical comments about life spoke to the jury headed by Jane Campion. The presenters of the top award, Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman, were in Cannes for the "Cinema de La Plage" (cinema on the beach) screening of "Pulp Fiction". "Pulp Fiction" was a milestone in film history, but the night belonged to Ceylan whose film is a 210 minute morality tale about a former actor who runs a hotel in remote Anatolia. As winter approaches, he is alone with his young wife and her sister going through a divorce. The cold weather makes the hotel not only a shelter but a site where the three must confront their feelings. There were critics who would have preferred that the Palme d’Or went to Xavier Dolan ...

Jane Campion, President Movie Magazine International will again be at the Cannes Film Festival, this time for the 67th festival held from May 14 to 25th with Jane Campion as Jury President. The festival started off with the debut of the out of competition film "Grace of Monaco" directed by Olivier Dahan and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelley, and Tim Roth as Prince Rainier. The film will not be released at least for now in the US according to distributor Harvey Weinstein. The Royal Family of Monaco has boycotted the Cannes festival because of the film, which takes liberty with details about life of Grace Kelley. It is generally understood that Grace Kelley was ambivalent about her life as a princess in Monaco and was homesick for the US, and preferred speaking English as much as she could. Dahan claims that his film is not a biopic, but reality, and that the film is about cinema. Critics have blasted the film, not because of the controversy but because of the sha...

By Moira Sullivan *Spoiler Alert* Debuting at the Cannes film festival last year in the official competition was Young and Beautiful , in French young and pretty (Jeune et Jolie) a typically French film involving lots of sex with a beautiful woman. It displays the kind of homework that Lars von trier could have done for his film Nymphomaniac Volume 1   and Volume 2 . This time it is Francois Ozon who missed some classes on his subject. His tabloid film form of four seasons and four songs does not succeed in imbuing the film with any notable quality. It is the film where every scene is filled with the beautiful face of his lead actress 24 year old Marine Vacth . As such it is a role that will bring her forward in her career and even like Catherine Deneuve who transcended playing the beautiful prostitute from home, and not from the street, ( Belle de Jour , France 1967) it will be the cornerstone of Vacth's by which all subsequent films will be judged. The 17 year Isab...

By Moira Sullivan Lars von Trier: rebel without a cause I reported on Nymph (O) maniac Volume 1 by Lars Von Trier last week and will now review 'Volume 2' of this project by the Danish director who has brought talented actors such as Stellan Skarsgard, Uma Thurman, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jamie Bell to the table. The second part of the film opens this weekend at the Landmark Theaters in San Francisco. To be in a von Trier film has its rewards and virtues. It is usually a fast lane to Cannes, and to international attention in the film market.What you should know about both volumes is that von Trier doesn't really know what a nymphomaniac is. As Seligman (Skarsgård), says to Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), "you’ve had sex with hundreds of men - why would one more make a difference" as he attempts to force himself on her. Joe is a woman making a confession of her deeds through the years to this supposedly insightful and sympathetic man. The entire time we a...

By Moira Sullivan For the past several years, Catherine Deceive has not chosen films where she can be a diva; she is an actress that is interested in doing good work. That doesn’t bar others from others seeing her as a cult goddess. She made her career in early films such as Belle Du Jour in which she plays a high-class prostitute who in actuality is a bored housewife. Films like this brought her to fame, but in later years she began to play  women who were realistic. There is a mystique around Denueve and in part she has contributed to it but in her latest films she lets her hair down and takes on roles that don’t always put her in her best light. Her latest film is  On My Way    directed by Emmanuelle Bercot (scriptwriter for jury prize winner at Cannes Polisse, France 2011).  Deneuve provides a personal touch. She plays Bettie, a former beauty queen (Miss Brittany) who soon after winning is in a car accident of major consequences. She then decides ag...

By Moira Sullivan Renaissance style photo used to promote 'Nymphomaniac at Cannes 2011. The press conference with Lars von Trier after the screening of his 'in competition' film   Melancholia   at the 2011 Cannes gave insights into the workings of his mind. There had been a lot of discussion about the comments that led him to being banned from the festival that year, bungling comments in bad humor that came across as anti-semitic, and it was obvious to all that the Danish director has poor people skills. Claiming his next project would be a porn film with Kirsten Dunst (who immediately said no) and Charlotte Gainsbourg, the two actresses in Melancholia smiled nervously and laughed away the alleged film that von Trier was planning. That film is now out in limited release, Nymphomaniac, Volume 1. The claim that von Trier writes “great parts for women” is not altogether true unless you applaud him for writing parts for tortured women. One of von Trier’s early stu...

By Monica Sullivan For music lovers who don’t know any better, girl bands tend to be a supplement to a study of the real bands, conducted and staffed by men.  “The Girls In The Band” is an illuminating film about real bands conducted and staffed by women.  Once upon a time, Ina Ray Hutton was one of those band leaders.  She was not a musician but she knew how to assemble and organize a good band, and she could dance, which added to her group’s appeal. During the forties, when many male musicians were serving in the military overseas, great girl bands were welcomed and appreciated onstage.  Offstage, they faced the same problems as the men, suspicion and all the assorted pitfalls of one night engagements.  Some chose to remain on their touring buses when they weren’t performing: it was easier than dealing with racial bigotry, and endless hassles with hotels and restaurants.  After the war, a number of gifted female musicians chose to leave their bands an...

By Monica Sullivan Not too many people know about "The Slipper and the Rose" and that's a shame.  To be sure, there's a surfeit of "Cinderella" movies on video shelves competing for our attention, but this version has always been among my favorites.  It was originally released at 146m., an uncomfortable length for children, and reissued in 1980 at 127m.  The late 1970's were not a particularly receptive time for musicals, unless they reinvented the genre, like "Saturday Night Fever", "Grease", "Rock'n'Roll High School", "All That Jazz", "The Blues Brothers" or "Fame."  "The Slipper and the Rose" was definitely a musical out of its time. There's much to appreciate in Bryan Forbes' valentine to the classic fairy tale, though.  For one thing, there's Richard Chamberlain as Prince Edward.  Then in the swashbuckling phase of his long career, Chamberlain is clearly ha...