Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling

The only dramatic feature directed by Richard Pryor, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling—boldly constructed, deftly composed, infuriatingly maligned in its time—is on @tcmtv.bsky.social at 3 a.m.:
www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

Word, on Jean Eustache's birthday (he'd have been eighty-seven), on Numéro Zéro and its fundamental place in his body of work: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

The second act, Steadicam Theodicy, is even greater than the first, but the intermission was too long.

Movie of the Week: “What’s Up, Doc?” Peter Bogdanovich made a screwball comedy in retro-style and added the colossal catastrophe comedy of silent films.

Peter Bogdanovich's exuberant catastrophe comedy What's Up, Doc? embraces romantic chaos and parses it in uproarious detail; in retrospect, a very sad comedy (at @movingimagenyc.bsky.social at 3:30pm in 35mm.)
www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

Despair

In honor and memory of Tom Stoppard, who, adapting Nabokov's Despair for Fassbinder, made it personal: the dialogue dances over the very vortex that nearly dragged him in and instead cast him out: www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...

Such Great Heights: Busby Berkeley Speaks

(Eddie Cantor fascinates me: his self-aware gaze and gestures have always struck me as writing in action:
www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...
www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

With more classic Busby Berkeley on @tcmtv.bsky.social tonight (42nd St. and Gold Diggers of 1933, plus the aquatic erotics of Million Dollar Mermaid), a couple of words from a while ago, one on Berkeley himself and another on the Depression and Eddie Cantor, who brought him from stage to screen:

The two on the beach together

Gloria Grahame & Bogie in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, 1950
The still photographer on the set was Irving Lippman.
#stillonset

"Ray - who was married to Grahame at the time - endows the couple’s intimate moments with a bittersweet ardor."
- Richard Brody

@tnyfrontrow.bsky.social

Heureux de lire la belle et enthousiaste critique de Hedda par @borisbastide.bsky.social dans Le Monde; à ne pas rater, un film formidable en lui-même et une réinterprétation géniale de la pièce d'Ibsen.

Dvd Notes THE RHYTHM METHOD

(and James Cagney dances); mentioned in one of my first DVD pieces way back; Berkeley is one of my first obsessions, from when I first started going to revivals; he should be listed among the greatest directors. www.newyorker.com/magazine/200...

Mentioned seeing the Rockettes when I was four, at Radio City, before The Music Man; someone wondered that it was just a brief show before the movie; I cited Footlight Parade, about stage "prologues" to movies; here, Busby Berkeley provides them; at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social at 7 in 35mm.:...

Orson Welles’s Shattering “Othello”

11/27/51: Orson Welles' Othello
Astonishing production, film
More:
@jhoberman.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/m...
Katherine Bayford/ @bwdr.bsky.social: www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2021/12/19/o...
@tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

8 things about Albert Maysles | MZS | Roger Ebert Eight things the writer wants you to know about Albert Maysles, the pioneering documentary filmmaker who died last week at age 88.

BOTD Albert Maysles!!
Movies:
@tnyfrontrow.bsky.social - w/the Beatles: newyorker.com/culture/rich...
@jhoberman.bsky.social - Salesman: nytimes.com/2018/01/24/a...
And More:
@kateyrich.bsky.social: www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20...
@mattzollerseitz.bsky.social
www.rogerebert.com/mzs/eight-th...

“The Secret Agent” Is a Political Thriller Teeming with Life The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho conjures fateful interconnections among vivid characters living in the grip of military dictatorship.

It's as engrossing to remember and write about as to watch: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Secret Agent is astoundingly ample and generous—passionately engaging drama, sharply realized characters, copious and far-reaching dialogue, richly developed context, exciting action, finely detailed design, form yielding political and emotional jolts; opens today @lincolncenter.bsky.social:...

Didn't know there was Train Dreams discourse; seeing it in Sundance and again now, found it sluggish and trivial. Baby food, spoon-fed, no second level, hardly a first one; voice-over the best part—if it had 10x more and 3x the pace, could be an OK Best Live Action Short nominee.

Classic Corner: Out of the Past — Crooked Marquee Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 thriller is one of the greatest of all films noir, full of dangerous dames, cigarette smoke, and Robert Mitchum not giving a damn.

11/25/47: Out of the Past!!!
Peak #Noirvember w/Mr. Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas [D Tourneur/DP Musuraca]
More:
@szacharek.bsky.social: time.com/collection/1...
@tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/goings-on-ab...
@splicedpersonality.bsky.social: crookedmarquee.com/classic-corn...

Behind the Scenes of an Iconic Godard Scene

Band of Outsiders, tonight at 9 at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social contains one of Godard's, and the cinema's, most famous—and most widely misunderstood—scenes; word from a while ago about what's ignored, both by those who discuss it and those who pay homage to it:
www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

The Front Row: “Autumn Leaves” Robert Aldrich's 1956 film with Joan Crawford provides crucial backstory to “Feud,” Ryan Murphy’s miniseries about the frenemosity between Crawford and Bette Davis.

Autumn Leaves (winter arrives); Robert Aldrich and Joan Crawford; tune in fast, on @tcmtv.bsky.social at 10pm and see why Berlin (giving him best director at the 1956 festival) caught on long before critics here did:
www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

11/23/59: Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins (US)
[DP Decaë] w/Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy
Stakes strong claim to "1st New Wave Film"
Rafferty: www.criterion.com/current/post...
@tnyfrontrow.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...
@railoftomorrow.bsky.social: criterioncast.com/reviews/blu-...

“Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face” Brings a Star’s Genius to Light A new biography traces the self-transformative creation of the most movie-made actress of classic Hollywood.

It details the infuriating high-hatting of Crawford by Bette Davis and the artistic basis of their differences (not to mention differences in quality, between the essence of movie acting and theatrical pomp):
www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Scott Eyman, author of the terrific biography Joan Crawford: A Woman's Face, will introduce Dancing Lady, in which she stars with Clark Gable; far from a great film but her gaze is at full strength @filmforumnyc.bsky.social 3:20pm (plus Crawford's home movies, which he discusses in the book).

A movie that takes place where you're from.

Richard Brooks’s “Fever Pitch” Never Got Its Due Disdained by critics at the time of its release, the 1985 film, starring Ryan O’Neal as a compulsive gambler, possesses a grim, ironic power.

Reminded in the other place that Richard Brooks's Fever Pitch, starring Ryan O'Neal, opened forty years ago today; it's terrific—but the nostalgia industry often ignores great movies already wrongly disdained in their time: www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

The Free French

A couple of words on Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Deuxième Souffle (second only to Le Cercle Rouge among his films), one on its tale and its tone, the other on the history embedded in it; it's at @filmforumnyc.bsky.social today at 3
www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...
www.newyorker.com/culture/rich...

French Disconnections

Short word from a while back on Melville's Un Flic (Dirty Money), from
when it came out on DVD, what it's symptomatic of, and where it suggests Melville was heading when he died; it's in @filmforumnyc.bsky.social Le Heist Français series at 2:40pm in 35mm.:
www.newyorker.com/magazine/200...

Kajillionaire

A Year in Reading: Richard Brody - The Millions Richard Brody reflects: "In the past few decades, my years in reading have been nearly coextensive with my years in riding..."

Greatly enjoyed the piece by @kevinlozano.bsky.social in @newyorker.com on Malcolm Cowley's life of literary reclamations; I looked closely a few years ago at one of them—of William Faulkner—and the resulting correspondence:
themillions.com/2022/12/a-ye...

I didn't like growing up in a suburb, but at this time of day and year, late-fall late-afternoon after school, it always looked its best.

Auteur Story: the Council of Ten from
Oct. 1956 @cahiersducinema.bsky.social with dismissals of La Prisonnière du Désert (i.e., The Searchers), Boetticher's The Magnificent Matador, Dwan's Slightly Scarlet; favorites are three musicals: It's Always Fair Weather, Brigadoon, My Sister Eileen.