Word: ingmar
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...Colbert Report has an occasional segment called "Cheating Death," which is introduced by the image of Stephen facing the hooded figure of Death over a chessboard. That's a reference to the 1957 film The Seventh Seal, a medieval morality play written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Colbert, who switches chess pieces while Death is distracted, parodies the role of a knight (Max von Sydow) who puts his soul on the line to save a few lives during a season of plague...
...time, the foreign films that made an impact with the cognoscenti were mainly from France, Italy and Japan. Bergman, though, was a one-man film movement; his instant eminence created a cottage industry of Bergmania. Janus Films, with U.S. rights to most of his pictures, ran Ingmar Bergman festivals in theaters around the country. Full-length studies of his work appeared in English, French, Swedish. In 1960 Simon & Schuster published a book of four of his screenplays (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician). For a generation of budding cinephiles, that settled it. Film...
...born in Uppsala, on July 14, 1918, to a Lutheran minister and his wife - two figures, one forbidding, the other warming, who inspired many characters in Bergman films, and who appeared with little fictional orientation in his late works Fanny and Alexander, The Best Intentions and Private Confessions. Young Ingmar, we'll guess, was a broody, moody soul with one artistic passion: the magic lantern he was given as a child, and whose miraculously moving images he would later remake and replace with his own. His autobiography is called The Magic Lantern and is mostly a litany of his loneliness...
...Which could be why I liked it. To place a sensitive story in a male-epic genre - to dramatize feelings of angst and personal betrayal worthy of an Ingmar Bergman film, and then to dress them up in gaudy comic-book colors - is to pull off a smartly subversive drag show. With, yes, 25 mins. of fabulous fights. Peter's tussle with Sandman, and his aerial battle with the supersonic skateboarding New Goblin, are plenty snazzy. But anyone can do that; in action movies, everyone has done that. What's better, in a threequel, is rethinking the characters, the franchise...
...akin to the argument that tries to make movies art by defining them as pictures seen on a wall (museum pieces) rather than illustrated stories. Yet Ingmar Bergman and Preston Sturges, to name just two great "directors," are primarily not visual stylists but writers. Similarly, Kurtzman and Spiegelman are remarkable less for their draftsmanship than for conjuring a world and giving it narrative shape, density and bite. You don't see their work so much as you read...