Word: film
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Rohmer came to film renown late - he was past 50 by the time My Night at Maud's was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. But he came into film early. Born Jean-Marie Scherer in the province of Lorraine, Rohmer moved to Paris, taught literature, worked as a reporter, wrote a novel. In 1950 he co-founded the Gazette du Cinéma with two other future filmmakers, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard. Within a few years they - and François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol - were writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, which Rohmer...
...colleagues became directors whose names were dropped at the better cocktail parties in London, New York City and Tokyo, Rohmer trudged along at the magazine and made shorts and feature-length pictures that got little notice. My Night at Maud's changed that. The soufflé-light, dialogue-heavy film - the first to be shown with subtitles in the Cannes festival competition - enchanted audiences with its tale of a man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) committed to one woman (Marie-Christine Barrault) but willing to stay the night with the divorced Maud (Françoise Fabian) just ... talking. After the pyrotechnics...
...light and pleasant as a Rohmer work often was - attractive people falling in love, at least with the idea of love - it was a taste not everyone cared to acquire. Quentin Tarantino, the great enthu-woozy-ast of world cinema, offered this very qualified recommendation of Rohmer's films: "You have to see one of them, and if you kind of like that one, then you should see his other ones. But you need to see one to see if you like it." He makes Rohmer's movies sound less like caviar, more like artichokes. Gene Hackman, in his role...
...other two new movies in wide release were both romantic comedies. Youth in Revolt, approximately the 67th film in which Michael Cera tries to lose his virginity, amassed $7 million on 1,873 screens - not bad at all. It managed a higher per-screen average than Leap Year, the widely reviled rom-com that sends Amy Adams to Ireland to find true love and get very wet and muddy. Leap Year took in $9.2 million. The direct competition for Adams, who played Julie in Julie & Julia, was in another romantic comedy about a woman who must choose between...
...list, the weekend's winner was Daybreakers, a vampire thriller that dared to make the creatures icky and predatory, not sweet and sexy in the Twilight fashion. A three-day total of $15 million doesn't seem like a bundle, in Avatar terms, but when you consider that the film was made in Australia back in 2007 for just $20 million, the Daybreakers gross was, if not a box-office banquet, at least a decent bite...