GreenCine Daily: Fests and events, 6/28.

June 28, 2008

Fests and events, 6/28.

Milos Forman: The Formative Years opens at Facets Cinematheque runs through Thursday; the Chicago Reader picks the highlights.

"Douglas Fairbanks caused a sensation in 1920 with The Mark of Zorro, the first in a series of costume spectacles that launched an entire genre and defined Fairbanks's contribution to popular American culture," writes David Jeffers at the Siffblog. Monday evening at Seattle's Paramount Theater.

"It was a rare find: a film version that had been shot in 1964 during rehearsals for the Broadway version of Shakespeare's play," reports Victoria Laurie in the Australian. "The New York theatre critics went wild about John Gielgud's modern-day staging, and [Richard] Burton in his role as Hamlet. The rare film will be shown for the first time in Australia, for one screening only at Perth's Astor cinema next month. Since its rediscovery, the film has only been screened three times in Britain and once in Los Angeles." There is, however, a DVD. Via Movie City News.

Dalí: Painting and Film arrives at MoMA and Roberta Smith finds it "a strangely piecemeal, open-ended and inspiring exhibition... The show tracks the traffic of images, themes and ideas between Dalí's films, both realized and not, and his more static efforts, including paintings, drawings, letters, illustrated notes, scenarios and other ephemera." Sunday through September 15.

Dali & Film More from Randy Kennedy: "'I'm in Hollywood,' Salvador Dalí wrote in a postcard to André Breton in 1937, 'where I've made contact with the three American surrealists, Harpo Marx, Disney and Cecil B DeMille.' Dalí's devious wit was legendary, but in this case it appears he was being sincere. The same year, in Harper's Bazaar, he sang Hollywood's praises as an ideal incubator of Surrealism whether Hollywood knew it or not."

Also in the New York Times, for Ken Johnson, Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement Three Installations, Two Films, at the Whitney through October 12, is "a smart, tightly focused study of the formal and conceptual underpinnings of Mr McCarthy's art: his work stripped to its bare, abstract yet still metaphorically resonant essentials."

Michael Buening in PopMatters on Film Forum's Tatsuya Nakadai retrospective, running through July 17: "In an interview in Joan Mellen's collection, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, the director Kobayashi says of Nakadai, 'I still feel he was one of a small group of actors who combined the traditional Shingeki background with the fresh innocence and energy of our postwar generation. He could thus effectively represent both pre- and postwar people.'... Few actors have worked such varied masters: Ichikawa, Naruse, Kobayashi, Kurosawa, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kihachi Okamoto."