Christopher Nolan recently announced a new project entitled Quay, a documentary short about two British stop-motion animators. Set to premiere next week, it’s a far cry from Nolan’s blockbusters in both scope and subject matter. Yet it’s clearly a personal project, with Nolan using his clout and money to promote two obscure filmmakers. Every artist …
The Conversation is a new feature at Sound on Sight bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their third piece, they will discuss Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. **** Landon’s Take: The cultural impact of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up would be very difficult to overemphasize. Upon release, Andrew …
In his book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, journalist Rick Pearlstein posits that Nixon, one of history’s most reviled presidents, manipulated social trends, tense racial crises and even war to assume the office, and, perhaps inadvertently, created the way the Right and Left deal with each other in the present day. The scars of the seventies indeed still hang like a dark cloud over Washington, its internal systems ravaged by covert bugging operations and illegal payoffs. With Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations and Wikileaks at the forefront today, America has once again regressed into paranoia, though nothing in contemporary cinema compares to the violent, bleak reactions filmmakers had to the Watergate scandal. The occasional modern conspiracy thriller, such as Closed Circuit, typically winds up under the radar these days. Why? Because America already saw this show, and now it’s on Blu-ray.
There’s something inherently lonely and tortured about being a director. Yes, you’re the tyrant of the set and dictator of the vision, but you’re also the man (or woman) behind the curtain, the puppet master who never appears on stage….unless you’re Clint Eastwood or Quentin Tarantino. Or Alfred Hitchcock….or Roman Polanski…ANYWAY, the point is that …
Boss Season 2, Episode 7: “The Conversation” Written by Angelina Burnett Directed by Nelson McCormick Airs Fridays at 9pm (ET) on Starz Kane returns from his treatment in Toronto a ‘new’ man. Which is to say, he’s back to his old ways- politically cunning and almost without sympathy for those who suffer under him. He’s apparently no …
If I may, I’d like to quote from Entertainment Weekly’s review of the just released 70th anniversary Blue-ray release of Casablanca (1942). According to Chris Nashawaty’s piece, when the script arrived at Warner Bros. in December of 1941 “…there wasn’t an ending yet…the movie was just one of 50 in Warner’s crowded pipeline at the …
Undertones: Volume 11 Having the misfortune of being dwarfed by the releases of the critical and commercial giants, The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather II (1974), The Conversation (1974) stands as somewhat of an under-appreciated gem in the Francis Ford Coppola filmography. Though lauded by critics upon its release, it was not a hit at …