Al Pacino to Shout Again... as King Lear!
Director Michael Radford, who cast Al Pacino as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, has cast him again... this time as Lear.
This is interesting, since Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen have also played Lear within the past several months. (Remember this report from last May?)
Browser: "Penelope." Terry Gilliam. Cinema and the City. Whit Stillman. Denby's Oscar rant.
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Someday, Charlie Kaufman will make a movie about the career of Terry Gilliam, depicting the astonishing, relentless calamities that befall the imaginative director. Everyone knows that Heath Ledger died in the middle of filming Gilliam's upcoming picture. If you've seen Lost in La Mancha, you know what I mean - the ongoing disasters (natural and otherwise) that overturned his Quixote film. Turn the clock back even farther, and there was Baron Munchausen's box office catastrophe, and before that... well, where do you start in talking about Brazil?
Well, did you know that Gilliam was recently hit by a car that was backing up... and his back was broken?
Here's the latest on Gilliam's life and achievements, a story stranger than any of his films.
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Michael Leary on "Where is the Cinema?"
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I'd like to follow that by asking Where is Whit Stillman? Articles like this one remind me how much I love what he's done, and how much I'd like to see more.
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[url="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/02/09/090209crci_cinema_denby"]David Denby goes on an admirable rant:[/url]
[quote]Is it the seamlessly blended amber and caramel colors, the slowly gliding camera work? Or is it the sentiments that fall like flakes of wet snow into the dialogue? Many elements join to make the beautifully crafted “Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” with a running time of two hours and forty-seven minutes, the best picture in years for a postprandial rest (popcorn division).
As you may have noticed, 2008 was not a great year for movies. There was nothing comparable to the hair-raising “There Will Be Blood,” or the ravishing “Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” or the sinister “No Country for Old Men,” from 2007.
Even so, a nod for best picture could have gone to more deserving movies, such as Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married,” which settles down into a revelatory examination of a family’s anguish and joy; or “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh’s startling look at the power and the limits of goodness; or even the animated masterpiece “WALL-E,” with its vision of the end of industrial civilization and its ironic salvation in an anodyne space station decorated in cruise-liner moderne.
The total of thirteen nominations for “Benjamin Button” has to be some sort of scandal. “Citizen Kane” received nine nominations, “The Godfather: Part II” eleven, and this movie, so smooth and mellow that it seems to have been dipped in bourbon aging since the Civil War, is nowhere close to those two. In fact, of the five nominees for best picture—“Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “The Reader,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” and “Benjamin Button”—only “Milk,” a bio-pic with a thrilling sense of history and lots of jokes and sex, has the aesthetic life and human vitality that warrant its nomination.[/quote]
6. More to come, most probably.
Pray for the family of Michael Dubruiel.
Author and blogger Michael Dubruiel died today. He was an inspiring writer.
Please pray for his wife, one of my favorite bloggers, Amy Welborn, and for their young children. Amy shared this heartbreaking news on her site today.
Casting News So Extraordinary, I'm May Not Sleep Tonight
Shusaku Endo's Silence is the most harrowing novel I've ever read (yes, even harsher than The Road), and one of the most moving and profound.
I've been reading about Martin Scorsese's plans to make a film version for several years now, trying to imagine how anyone could translate that riveting nightmare of a story to the big screen.
Well, if he's going to do it, he certainly moving in the right direction. This news is going to make it hard for me to think about anything else for a while....
Thanks to Peter Chattaway for the link.
The highlight of the Super Bowl is already on YouTube.
UPDATE:
OKAY, OKAY... so the YouTube link is dead.
Who cares? Now you can see it in HD on Apple's trailers page.
Answering questions about Cyndere's Midnight and more
Jake Chism at The Christian Manifesto asked me a bunch of questions... and I answered them.
Lo and behold, here's the conversation, chock full-o revelations about Cyndere's Midnight, my favorite movie of 2008 (which won't be released until 2009, if it is ever released at all),
The Class (2009): Looking Closer's Film Forum
I'll be reviewing The Class soon. But for now, let me encourage you to see it as soon as you can. It's one of two 2009 releases I've seen that will probably end up in my Top 10 of 2009 next December.
Here's a roundup of reviews at IFC Daily.
Reeling.
I'm still exhausted and delirious from the inspiration and nourishment I found last weekend in the company of some talented artists.
I would write about it, but I'm back into the white-water of busy-ness, so that will have to wait.
Until then, I'm grateful that my new friend David Taylor has found the time to write so eloquently about the blessings of that time with new friends and well-crafted art.
And by the way, David Taylor's essay A Holy Longing, which was recently published in CT, is fantastic. Read the whole brilliant thing.
Thursday at 12:30: Cyndere's Midnight at SPU
On Thursday at 12:30, in the Library at Seattle Pacific University, I'll be reading from Cyndere's Midnight and saying a few words about the next volume in The Auralia Thread.
Copies of Auralia's Colors and Cyndere's Midnight will be for sale there, along with free Auralia Thread posters. And I'll be answering your questions about the books and the upcoming volumes.
I hope to see you there!