Word: cinema
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have been scrawled on napkins; their emotions were spiked with absinthe. Films poured out of Godard, two or three a year, and each was an incendiary device--an event for his admirers, an affront to the cinematic status quo. Andrew Sarris called him "the analytical conscience of the modern cinema." Because of Godard, it seemed, movies would never be the same...
Contempt is hardly Godard's best or most evocative work, but it exposes his feelings for the seductive lie of movies: that "cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires" (the same line is quoted in For Ever Mozart). A French playwright (Michel Piccoli) is hired for a rewrite job by an American producer (Jack Palance) who has eyes for the writer's sexy wife (Brigitte Bardot). With its polyglot cast and mixed-doubles leering, Contempt gets the Babel and Babylon of filmmaking down perfectly...
...Capri, the most rapturous music (by Georges Delerue, his violins sawing and soaring like Philip Glass in ecstasy). And, always, pretty women. A Ziegfeld of the Left Bank, Godard reinvented Jean Seberg and discovered Anna Karina, Juliet Berto, Maruschka Detmers, Myriem Roussel, Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy--glories of Gallic cinema. In Contempt he saves Bardot from cheesecake notoriety. She's smart, sensitive, brutal, doomed...
Richard Corliss's piece "Sex! Violence! Trash!" on so-called exploitation movies of the past belongs in the third category because of its lack of focus and misinformation [CINEMA, July 7]. Corliss branded my father, Edgar G. Ulmer, "the vagabond king of grade-Z films." My father's films did not purvey either sex or violence; perhaps their budgets were sometimes trashy, though only by necessity. None of his films were exploitive in the sense used in the article, but all were exploitable--read marketable--by virtue of my father's creativity as a director. His movie Detour...
...Still, before the decline, we had in a young Elvis "a terrific crooner who was closer, in intonation, vocal virtuosity and care for a song?s mood, to Bing Crosby than to any singer of the past 30 years. In that trap, as this set proves, he found triumph." CINEMA: "After 40 years," writes Corliss, "Jean-Luc Godard can still astonish and amuse in the cinematic shorthand he virtually created. Now two of his films, both about moviemaking, are on view: the 1995 'For Ever Mozart' and 'Contempt,' his 1963 meditation on sex, lies and celluloid." Both newly restored after...