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Ingmar Bergman Dead at 89

Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman is dead at 89. The Local calls his work immortal, as did many of his colleagues.

Until now I’ve been misremembering the title of one of his movies as Three Smiles of a Summer Night, a 1955 romantic comedy. I’d say that most of his works I’d seen were depressing and that Smiles was one of the few that wasn’t. But I couldn’t even remember the title properly, so perhaps I should keep that to myself.

Scott Smith’s Imperfect Ten

The nice folks at Coudal Partners are hosting Scott Smith’s Imperfect Ten, “wherein one man breaks all ten commandments before breakfast.” It’s Friday (March 10th, even), go watch. 10, adultery, cheat, coudal, covet, film, honor, idolatry, imperfect ten, lie, murder, sabbath, scott smith, sex, short film, steal, ten commandments, video, worship » about 100 words

Criticism of Modern Movies

We’ve all heard it before, but we just can’t get it out of our heads. Today’s movies make us feel dumb. Paulina Borsook joins the chorus and condemns contemporary cinema by praising movies of the 60s and 70s:

They were movies made for adults, even if they had been mainstream movies and/or nominally rated PG. They made presumptions about the intelligence of their audience, didn’t need things to be boldly spelled out, and they were predicated on the assumption that their audience was capable of making inferences. No semaphoring! No high-concept! Satire as opposed to scatology! Shades of gray in motive and character! Minimum numbers of car crashes! No fish out of water! No hilarious mixups!

Interestingly, she also found praise for The Interpreter:

The female characters didn’t simper, and didn’t seem like 30 going on 13 (hey, wasn’t there…). They were about themselves, subject rather than object.

The male characters had interior lives that made them seem human, creatures capable of emotional nuance.

So what else does she recommend? She’s made a list. Interestingly, all of this appears at GreenCine.com, a Netflix competitor I’d not heard of before it got a recommendation at O’Grady’s PowerPage.

The Codex Series

This, from Chris Anderson: The Codex is a 20 episode series of machinimas made on Xboxes running Halo 2. The result caught the attention of his six- and eight-year-old children, and then him. Machinimas are computer animated in real-time, using video games to create the environment, and human “puppeteers” to drive the action. The action […] » about 200 words

Grizzly Man

David Edelstein’s review of Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man, describes Timothy Treadwell as …a manic but lovable whack-job who doggedly filmed and obsessively idealized the bears that would ultimately eat him… The film is made up largely of the bits of the hundreds of hours of video that Treadwell himself shot during his 14 years […] » about 300 words

Grizzly Man

Within the last wild lands of North America dwells an animal that inspires respect and fear around the world. It is the grizzly bear, a living legend of the wilderness. Grizzlies can sprint thirty five plus miles an hour, smell carrion at nine or more miles, and drag a thousand-pund animal up steep mountains. The […] » about 400 words

Movie Night: House Of Flying Daggers

I’ve been a fan of Zhang Yimou’s[1] films since, well, for a while now. But I’m also a huge kung fu fan — Jackie Chan especially — so House of Flying Daggers was quite a treat. It’s not that I didn’t like Hero, or that Daggers was particularly funny. To the contrary, it’s tale of […] » about 200 words