Movie Magazine International Blog

By Moira Jean Sullivan Time Now is a new independent film starring Jenny (Eleanor Lambert, the daughter of Diane Lane and Christopher Lambert), written and directed by Spencer King. Lambert as Jenny, who looks more like her father than mother, is investigating the death of her brother Gonzo (Sebastian Beacon) accompanied by her five-year-old son. Lambert returns to her hometown of Detroit with Rolling Stones t-shirt, once the center of the auto industry with palatial gas guzzling sedans still roaming the streets. One of the local joints Gonzo hung out is an African American nightclub with live music where her friend Tanja (Paige Kendrick)works. It is frequented by Kash, (Xxavier Polk) a rap recording artist who keeps his producer up all night in the studio. These scenes are some of the best in the film and the contrast with a dying city from the industrial age provide a great context. Kash used to know Gonzo and tells Jenny they pushed each other as artists. Gonzo also had his ...

By Moira Jean Sullivan The Velvet Underground by Todd Haynes was presented out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in July, a documentary on the experimental music group who did live shows and put out four albums in the 60’s. They were New Yorkers and hated the west coast scene: flower power, the hippies and Phil Graham , according to drummer Moe Tucker actress and Mary Woronov. Founded in 1964 by singer guitarist Lou Reed, Welsh multi-musician John Kale, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Angus MacLise - later replaced by Moe Tucker, you can hear Moe’s beat in the bands famous "Venus in Fur". Andy Warhol was misidentified as the leader of the band but his brief association is confirmed in the documentary, also that he was fired by Lou Reed. German singer Nico was also in the band who is often referred to for her beauty rather than her music. According to John Cale, Nico was indifferent to the superficiality of the scene especially Warhol and spe...

By Moira Jean Sullivan PTSD: THE WALKING WOUNDED directed and written by Ash Patino is a new ON DEMAND film that opened October 1, by David Lionheart , founder of ‘Play for Your Freedom’ , a nonprofit charitable organization that helps veterans and their families transition from military life to civilian life through fitness and sports and build community. PTSD: THE WALKING WOUNDED shows the efforts of David Lionheart, a civilian in helping his community while healing his own wounds. A victim of sexual abuse he came from a broken home. The story of a friend in the military and his experiences of trauma were instrumental in Lionheart’s creation of wellness camps for veterans and victims of abuse. Lionheart says that the bridge for veterans to get re-integrated after military service is not enough especially events where veterans meet other veterans. In fact, 20% of veterans suffering from PTSD veterans commit suicide. One of the interviewees, Jillian Nadiak, has raised over 25...

Moira Jean Sullivan Cecilia Mangini has been filming and photographing nearly her entire life and was the first female documentary filmmaker in Italy. In the documentary presented at Venice. In The World in Shots she collaborates with Paola Pisanelli who provides some movement to her stills and puts together her life with old passports, photographs, programs and artefacts from her spacious apartment in Rome. In fact, it is a living archive, with Cecilia telling us the background, her thoughts instead of a voice over after her death. She is in Iran at an Italian Retrospective of Documentary Film l in 2018, and that year she is also at Créteil Films De Femmes in a public meeting with festival director Jackie Buet. The filmmaker is in Vietnam, with photographs she intended to use for a film with her husband Lino Del Fra Lwhich Pisanelli animates with sound effects of gunfire. She is at art galleries looking at great works of art. There are clips from her films such as "To ...

By Moira Jean Sullivan Three top awards went to women behind the camera at the 78th Venice Film Festival that ended Sept 11. The Golden Lion went to Audrey Diwan’s abortion drama “Happening” in what jury president Bong Joon Ho deemed a “unanimous decision". The film is about a student in provincial France, Anamaria Vartolome, who realizes she is pregnant during the countdown to her final examinations. The film comes at a time when abortion rights are being hotly debated in the US. After a 12 year absence from feature filmmaking Jane Campion does it again with a Silver Lion for The Power of the Dog at Venice based on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. At the press conference with cast and Campion said that the “climate has changed” for female driven films. As for The Power of a Dog she remarked that she “doesn’t calculate in terms of gender but thought it was an amazing piece of literature”. Venice does not have the same criteria for films as Cannes that a film must first ...

By Monica Sullivan In the 1980's AIDS hit San Francisco like a bomb.  You lost friends and relatives you thought would be part of your life forever.  In some ways I still think of them that way.  Some of the top writers in the city were lost to us forever.  We mostly focused on people in San Francisco in the war against AIDS, but there were other people fighting just as hard in the rest of the country.  One doctor, many miles away, was Anthony Fauci, whom I did not become really aware of until a tourist ship arrived in San Francisco in early 2020 with passengers who caught a new disease called Covid 19. Another epidemic had started in San Francisco.  Frantic people searched desperately for a vaccine and learned about the disease from Dr. Fauci, who was the voice of sanity in an insane time.  We got conflicting information from conflicting government agencies.  Yes, it was a terrible nightmare.  Many persisted in cooperating with Dr. Fauci's...

The Vikings spoke with the elves on arrival to Iceland according to the introduction to this documentary Seer and the Unseen by Sara Dosa . So does an Icelandic seer and Lorax – elf spokesperson - grandmother Ragnhildur “Ragga” Jónsdóttir. She has seen how they live, their homes and their restaurants and an Elf Church and there are other believers who have not seen but believe. While we don’t get to see the elves, some helped in the making of the film. We hear the testimony of Icelanders and breathtaking shots of the Icelandic peninsula. More than 50% of Icelandic citizens believe in the elves so the environmental movement is active and important in the preservation of lava rock, the homeland of the elves, and through seers they communicate about what parts of the land it is important to preserve. The film opens with footage of Icelandic volcanoes and it is the formation of lava rock that became the home of elves. The elves are part of Icelandic folklore and old Norse poems ...

By Moira Jean Sullivan The 78th Venice Film Festival is being held 1-11 September with three main competitions – the Venice (Venezia) official Competition, Horizons (Orizzonti) or visionary film, and Lion of the Future (Luigi De Laurentiis) for a feature debut. President of the official competition jury is Bong Joon Ho for the official competition (South Korea). Jane Campion will debut her latest film The Power of the Dog and her first completed feature film in 12 years. The film is set in Montana in the 1920's and stars Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Benedict Cumberbatch. "The Power of the Dog" is an adaptation from a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. Dunst plays a widow who moves to Montana with her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to be with her husband George (Jesse Plemons) on his family ranch. His brother (Cumberbatch) is not happy with his new in-laws. The film was meant to debut at Cannes but the festival has a policy to only screen films that will debut in theatres ...

By Moira Jean Sullivan The opening moments of DUNE are about a planet whose spices have been mined for a greedy mercenary foreign power. The invaders of Arrakis or Dune can't help but evoke the might of the present Russian territorial invasion. The spices allow people to see into the future with their deep blue eyes and communicate with their mind. Humans have extraordinary powers of slow motion and the patriarchal tribe Fremens learn to survive in the desert full of huge sandworms. Dune directed and co-written by French-Canadian helmer Denis Villeneuve premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Villeneuve's films are mythic, bold and cathartic. He made Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016) and brought his production designer Patrice Vermette, to Dune . Dune is set in the future of 10,191 AG with gargantuan halls and mammoth spacecraft and water craft, made of impenetrable materials with legions of soldiers. The architectural landscape looks part Blade Runner Tyrell C...

When was the last time you experienced something truly strange ? Take a hero's story arc, delivered with amazing artwork, and throw in a touch of tarot card wisdom and you have the recipe for one of the most mind altering films of the year. Cryptozoo a film that opens Friday at Landmarks Embarcadero and Berkeley cinemas, unlocks some fresh wonderful weirdness that opens your inner heart like the mental triple bypass we all need. Cryptozoo is an adult tale of a hero trying to protect and rescue the magical beasts of the world. An open mind and some patience pays off with a wild and refreshingly different story that shakes up your senses.  And while I appreciate that we live in a time when full on animation armies deliver big budget entertainment at a fevered pace, it also feels good to set all that corporate polish aside and enjoy something that takes you out of the mainstream into bold new creative territories the bigger studios aren't ever likely to explore.  Crypto...