"All's well that Buñuels."

Nice one, Flickhead. He's proposing "the world's first Luis Buñuel Blog-a-Thon, a/k/a/ Buñuel-a-Thon, to be held between September 24 through 30."

As it happens, in today's New York Times, Dave Kehr reviews a "sloppily produced" Buñuel double feature from Lionsgate, Gran Casino (1947) and The Young One (1960): "[T]he period circumscribed by these two films feels like a distinct epoch in his career, a time when this avowedly Marxist filmmaker was working for a wide audience rather than a cultural elite. His return to Europe would be at the behest of that elite, and his reputation rocketed accordingly."

Also out this week is Criterion's release of The Milky Way (1969): "The anecdotal screenplay, by Buñuel and his favorite French collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière, is a compendium of amusing heresies and apparent contradictions drawn from the theological history of the Roman Catholic Church." In the end, "not all of Buñuel's Mexican movies are trivial, and not all of his French movies are staggering masterworks. But all of them are very much worth seeing."

Posted by dwhudson at August 21, 2007 10:16 AM