2013-05-31

Announcement : Summer 2013 Director Retrospective


As the poll closed this morning with a clear advance by Preston Sturges we can now declare that the Summer of 2013 will be tainted with the films directed by Preston Sturges. There are fourteen titles found in his directorial credits and if time and availability are present there might be some films that he only was credited as a writer.

2013-05-27

Limitless

Limitless (Neil Burger, 2011)
Based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, Limitless is the story Eddie Mora (Bradley Cooper) a writer who has troubles writing a novel, loses his girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) and slowly falls into alcoholism. One day he meets his ex-brother in-law and discovers a drug that gives him the power to use more than 20% of his brain. Well, it’s like as if he can use it all. With this jump star the becomes limitless in the possibilities of his life.

2013-05-24

Poll : Director Retrospective

As a theme for this summer I’ve chose to do my first director retrospective. Narrowing down to four choices wasn’t that easy. Especially, since I could have put 500+ names down there for you to vote! Taken from Andrew SarrisAmerican Directors and Directions. They are all American directors that marked in some way Film History.
I haven’t seen many of their films and any of these directors that will be featured here this summer will be a pleasure to discover.
Anthony Mann
Author of many Westerns starring James Stewart, Mann is also a Film Noir director that made his mark and is now regarded as one of the most influential directors of his time.




Preston Sturges
A great director who knew how to write witty comedies and that made few films despite their grand impact. For contemporary movie lovers the Coen bros are admirers of his work.



King Vidor
This is a director I’ve never watch a movie before and I was planning on discovering his The Big Parade.





Raoul Walsh

He was a director and thrillers, film noirs, war movies, gangster films were some of the most notable genre from his most known films.




So vote and fill my summer with great viewings!

2013-05-20

À nos amours

À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)
Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) is sixteen years old and she sleeps with a different boy every night. This makes her family mad and her parents even split. She seems to be empty and needs the presence of boys to fill a neverending void. Made in 1983, À nos amours is considered as one of Maurice Pialat’s masterworks with L’enfance nue and Van Gogh. Its subject, sex with a multitude of partners in the world of young adults is still an important one and as of nowadays teenagers seem to start having sex in a younger age than ever before. Pialat’s objective camera works like a documentary observer that captures the life of a family that is torn from inside. The love between the father and the daughter, the love/hate relationship of Suzanne with her mother and the older brother that is involved despite his disgust for all of this.

2013-05-17

L’enfance nue

L’enfance nue (Maurice Pialat, 1968)
François is a ten years old boy who lives in a foster family. He doesn’t get along with his sister, he steals, he hurts her cat, and he misbehave in every way possible. Later he goes to a new family, the Thierrys. His new brother, Raoul loves them as if they were his real parents and he treats François as his own brother. His foster family loves him and takes care of him. François seems to get better but he has a penchant to get back to his old habits of bad child.

2013-05-15

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966)
Set in the future of an imaginary country, this tale of a dystopian future was originally written by Ray Bradbury in his novel of the same name. Starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie this film directed by François Truffaut was one of the films I wanted to watch for a long time since I discovered the films of this auteur. Since he did not make a lot of genre films, and the ones he directed were very unique like his Vivement Dimanche! which is an ode to Hitchcock’s thrillers or Le dernier métro a film on the German occupation in France. Fahrenheit 451 is his sole entry in the Sci-Fi genre and I was intrigued to find what he did with the great novel of Bradbury.

2013-05-13

Soylent Green

Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973)
Thorn (Charlton Heston) lives with Sol (Edward G. Robinson) in 2022 and they form a team of detective and researcher respectively. Sol being older has regrets of the evolution of the world and how just food isn’t the same anymore. Instead of eating crackers of Soylent Green they were eating real food. The detective story is about the assassination of a rich man called Williamson (Joseph Cotten). Thorn’s supervisor asked him to close the investigation but being stubborn leads Thorn to disover the truth about the society and the explanation of the murder.

2013-05-11

Saturday Morning Music Post – Amorphis, Tegan and Sara, Suffocation, + blindspot : The Ramones

Last year I posted few times about music but I felt that it might not be the right place to do so here on Le Mot du Cinephiliaque. But the nice blogger, Chris over at Movies and Songs 365, is doing half and half movie reviews and music/album reviews. This grew in my mind and I’ve decided to take this feature back on track and try to feed it as much as I can. It mostly will feature recent releases of all kind of genres since I enjoy a lot of musical styles. Sometimes, I’ll add a blind spot album that I’ve been discovering lately.
Let’s do this alright?

2013-05-10

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)
This low budget (100 000$) precursor to the action film genre is one of the most interesting movie made by director John Carpenter. Openly influenced by Howard HawksRio Bravo and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Assault on Precinct 13 is the story of survival of a group trapped together just like in the aforementioned masterpieces. They must defend themselves in front of a gang of street killers that swore to revenge the death of six of them.  While holding a cult status, it is also a very solid cinephile pick when it comes to references to previous films like Sergio Leone’s or stories by Alfred Hitchcock.

2013-05-08

Being John Malkovich

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
An unemployed puppeteer (John Cusack as Craig Schwartz) finds a job in an office that is situated between the seventh and eight floor of an old building. The ceilings are very low and the office space seems to be designed for dwarfs. Schwartz works as a filing clerk and has an obvious crush for his colleague (Catherine Keener) while still being married to Lotte (Cameron Diaz) a zoophile who takes care of many many animals as a living. One day at work Craig finds a passage that leads him to John Malkovich’s body and mind. Seeing the profit, he starts a business with Keener and charges 200$ for 15 minutes to be into someone else’s life. The use of the passage gets, as expected, too important and the involvement of every character in the story is at some point very dramatic and funny.

2013-05-06

Late Saturday Morning Music Post – Steven Wilson, Bad Religion, Hatebreed, M83, Tame Impala, The Black Angels


Last year I posted few times about music but I felt that it might not be the right place to do so here on Le Mot du Cinephiliaque. But the nice blogger, Chris over at Movies 365, is doing half and half movie reviews and music/album reviews. This grew in my mind and I’ve decided to take this feature back on track and try to feed it as much as I can. It mostly will feature recent releases of all kind of genres since I enjoy a lot of musical styles. Sometimes, I’ll add a blind spot album that I’ve been discovering lately.
Let’s do this alright?

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