May 5, 2007

Film Comment. May/June 07.

Lee: A Romance The retrospective Lee Marvin: The Coolest Lethal Weapon screens at the Walter Reade from May 11 through 24 and, in the new issue, Brynn White gets Film Comment readers in the mood: "Marvin could go from a snarl to a laugh in a split second, and mean both of them equally. In fact, sneers and laughs generally went hand in hand."

There are two Jean-Daniel Pollets (1936 - 2004) ripe for rediscovery argues Chris Darke, "the auteur of poetically 'ruined' works and the director of fictional features."

Chris Chang calls for a distributor for Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach and reviews the "exquisitely bleak yet thoroughly transcendent" Radio On.

"[W]ith modern Malaysian cinema so stuck on Tsai [Ming-liang], how timely it is that this prodigal son should at last come home with I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, his latest meditation on fecal urban anomie and feverish 'happy endings,' set among the slummiest side-streets and half-finished architectural skeletons of Malaysia's monsoon-moist first city, Kuala Lumpur," writes Chuck Stephens.

Online exclusives:

Paul Mazursky: Show Me the Magic

  • Richard Corliss, from the March/April 1975 issue: "While Robert Altman and Richard Lester have recently muted their talent to outrage, and produced the oddly academic Thieves Like Us and Juggernaut, Paul Mazursky keeps tugging away at the lunatic fringe of American comedy."

  • From the March/April 1978 issue, Terry Curtis Fox's interview with Mazursky, who'd just completed An Unmarried Woman.

  • Roger Ebert in that same issue: "Mazursky has never before made a film as good as An Unmarried Woman, though - but then few American directors of recent years have. He's never quite gotten through an entire movie before without losing the tone at some point, maybe because it is so hard to make audiences laugh, care, and think at the same time."

The Magic of Paul Mazursky: A True American Original runs at the Walter Reade through Thursday.

And just yesterday, Mazursky was a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.



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Posted by dwhudson at May 5, 2007 5:24 AM

Comments

just a little update on chuck stephens' article> instead of outright banned, "i don't want to sleep alone" is releasing at only one screen in Malaysia. http://www.cathayholdings.com.my/cineplexes/
cp_picturehouse.html

Posted by: ben at May 5, 2007 7:26 AM

So I guess we have to assume Tsai did accept the cuts that the censors wanted:

http://www.pulpmovies.com/gagwatch/2007/03/limited-unbanning-of-i-don’t-want-to-sleep-alone/

For those who read the review: I've heard that most of Tsai's films have been banned/censored/undistributed in Malaysia - not just the new one.

And, Tsai is from sleepy Kuching, Sarawak, on the island that used to be known as Borneo, and he has said he didnt visit KL till the late 90s. So if it is a 'homecoming' its a very wayward one...

Posted by: ben Slater at May 6, 2007 7:33 AM