Parallax View

DVD/Blu-ray: Mario Monicelli’s ‘The Organizer’

Sean Axmaker — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:21:14 +0000

Mario Monicelli, one of the most prolific and popular directors of post-war Italian cinema, never earned a reputation in the U.S. like his compadre, Federico Fellini, despite the international success of numerous films, from Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) to A Very Petit Bourgeois (1977). Perhaps it’s because his preferred genre was comedy, notably the commedia all’italiana, a mix [...]

Restoring the Lost ‘Metropolis’

Sean Axmaker — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:22:48 +0000

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, which runs from Sunday, May 13 through Friday, May 18, 2012, is dedicated to helping the National Film Preservation Foundation raise money to score and stream the recently unearthed reels of The White Shadow, a silent film from director Graham Cutts that young Alfred Hitchcock worked [...]

Moments Out of Time 1987

Richard T. Jameson — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:18:47 +0000

[Originally published in Pacific Northwest, January 1988] • Hope and Glory: Down among the green leaves of his family’s backyard garden, young Bill Rohan (Sebastian Rice Edwards) confronts the wizard Merlin, while in the house the stillness of the adults ’round a grumbling radio signals that the Second World War has just been declared…. • [...]

MOD Movies: Tod Browning and Lon Chaney – Partners in Madness and Obsession

Sean Axmaker — Sun, 13 May 2012 22:56:25 +0000

DVD/Blu-ray: ‘Bird of Paradise’

Sean Axmaker — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:34:31 +0000

There was a vogue for South Seas exotica in the late silent and early sound era, films made up of varying degrees of ethnographic revelation, social commentary, and erotic spectacle. Moana (1926), Robert Flaherty’s documentary portrait of life in Samoa, is the first expression of this idealized screen fantasy (every scene was carefully staged for his cameras), [...]

Supercharged Actor-Director Collaborations

Kathleen Murphy — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:22:58 +0000

When a director throws a cinematic frame around an actor, literally dictating how audiences will see the man or woman caught in the camera’s gaze, that’s real power—and it can be a form of possession. The high-voltage connection—between a filmmaker’s visual imagination and the performer who brings it to life—can be mutually productive, a fertile [...]

The View Beyond Parallax… more reads for week of May 11

Editor — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:20:17 +0000

The only links page that matters… except for all the others. Seattle screenings and cinema events are surveyed at Parallax View here. A few months ago you couldn’t throw a rock without beaning a think-piece on silent cinema prompted by The Artist and Hugo. Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books caps the [...]

Seattle Screens: Silent Rarities and ‘Children of Paradise’

Sean Axmaker — Thu, 10 May 2012 23:07:37 +0000

Tim Burton will try to cast his Dark Shadows across the worldwide domination of The Avengers this weekend, but while these splashy, fantastical Hollywood heavyweights battle it out for box supremacy (and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel reaches out the older demographic), there are plenty of alternatives for discerning filmgoers. The UCLA Festival of Preservation [...]

‘I Wish’: More Poetry From Kore-eda

Kathleen Murphy — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:31:57 +0000

Japanese Railways commissioned writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda to make I Wish as publicity for the Shinkansen bullet train. In response, the director of Still Walking” one of 2010′s best, delivered a cinematic poem. Nothing much happens in this happy tribute to the gentle art of being human, unless you count a bunch of immensely likable kids taking a long [...]

DVD: ‘The Samuel Fuller Film Collection’

Richard T. Jameson — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:37:38 +0000

A year after its landmark release of Budd Boetticher’s “Ranown” Westerns, Sony showcases another great maverick filmmaker. Samuel Fuller spent most of his career in B pictures, creating ultrapersonal, formula-defying films that got little notice from workaday reviewers but impressed sharp critics like Andrew Sarris and Manny Farber. His streetwise worldview, his voice, his advisedly [...]