France
We shot Dead Certain in the French Alps during seventeen intense days in the winter of 2014. A post-epidemic thriller, we wanted the film to feel desolate and lonely. The quaint town of Monnetier-Mornex offered a perfect setting:
No matter what the critics say, film festival juries frequently appear to be in their own little bubble where they award the top prize to the film with the most political relevance, instead of the best artistic qualities. Last year at Cannes, the middling immigrant drama Dheepan trumped some of the year’s most widely acclaimed movies, from Son of Saul to Carol, for the festival’s top prize. But this was far from the only area critics were left bemused, as Rooney Mara’s performance in Carol suffered the indignity of sharing the Best Actress award with the unhyped Emmanuelle Bercot in My King.
In Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a treatise about the human condition, he wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” For many people the work they do is pointless, only going far enough to provide limited sustenance while killing the spirit inside which yearns to be free. Naturally, this is nothing new.
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations, with each week being a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations! This week’s theme is female-directed French films.
First released with Kung-Fu Master! in 1988, Jane B. Par Agnès V.
Entering the world of an Agnès Varda film requires coming to terms with who she is as a filmmaker. She understood and explored the ways in which documentary and fiction are inextricably linked while generally eschewing linear narratives, working instead to show her own complex relationship with her films as she made them. Films like Jane B.
One of the hardest things to decide when reviewing a film is if the intentions behind the production feel genuine. One aspect that always arises during the Oscar/Award periods is actors doing roles or movies being made purely for “Oscar bait”. The idea of making a movie purely for the sake of gaining awards attention is somewhat cynical, but the transparency of movie production nowadays makes this something that sadly may have some truth behind it.
It’s been a week now since the world was shocked by a string of attacks throughout the city known world over as the civic symbol of love. Paris is many different things to many different people, and whether or not one has had the occasion to even visit, it is likely that they at least hold some associations with it, something representative of its ranking it among the world’s top tier metropolises. With Paris, as with most things, there is no better window into the place it holds in the hearts of those looking both from the outside as well as within as the frame of the movie screen.
It may be fair to say that in the film industry, any motion picture that is not spoken in the English language is tagged under ‘foreign’. As we all know, Hollywood cinema is dominant among the world of film due to technological advancements, box office strategies for blockbusters, and stardom. For this reason, audiences are usually very selective when it comes to watching ‘foreign’ films.
Every year I seem to arrive at an impasse with horror films. Like many other lovers of the genre out there, we will always have love for Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers (just tell Rob Zombie to cut it out). But when you’ve seen one too many teens by the lake, and you hear Freddy say “bitch” one time too many, you realize there’s more to the genre than just blood lust and hockey masks.
A young Montana boy named T.S. Spivet leaves his rustic home and heads to Washington D.
Le Havre (2011) is a still, quiet and dryly hilarious film. It has many of the qualities of a Japanese master like Mizoguchi, but if he had emigrated to a small French port and had been forced to make working class comedies. It focuses on a shoe shiner called Marcel Marx whose wife contracts a seemingly terminal disease.
I first saw Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in the early 2000s; it was a VHS copy playing on a big old JVC television that had a similar depth to a Toyota Aygo. I have since seen Saving Private Ryan a large number of times, but my reaction to its first 25 minutes remains unchanged, a reaction of shock, recoil and deep admiration for the people who executed this excellent, transformative piece of filmmaking. My knowledge of WW2 was minimal at this time, but I roughly knew the basics.
We all know that mainstream Hollywood loves making movies about show business. Heck, there was an article on this very website recently that outlined the Academy’s obsession with rewarding movies that either celebrate or send-up the showbiz lifestyle. Clouds of Sils Maria is a very different take on that same subject.
This is a continuation of “Beyond Hollywood’s Mafia” with more great gangster films from around the world. There’s a rich tapestry in this field to draw from, as films influence filmmakers, writers and directors making more and more fascinating movies about crime. Some directors may have already appeared in the first list, but all these titles are new and differ, one way or another from the first installment, enjoy!