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Babylon—all three hours of it, not only disappoints. It offends. Damien Chazelle, Oscar winning director of La La Land, presents the lives of several fictionalized Hollywood wannabes and stars during the final years of silent filmmaking and the transition to sound films from the mid-1920s to 1930.
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Oh, to have been in Northern California earlier this month when the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presented the 1929 silent film masterpiece Pandora’s Box with live musical accompaniment by the Club Foot Orchestra and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The event took place at the Paramount Theater in Oakland on May 6.
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Empire of Light, although flawed, is an intelligently conceived drama that held my interest. It is written and directed by Sam Mendes. Mendes is one of the most influential theater people in Britain. In the U.S., Britain, and much of the rest of the world, he is lauded for his film work including Skyfall, 1917, Road to Perdition, and the series The Hollow Crown. In 1999, he was awarded an Oscar for Best Director of American Beauty.
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Maybe because comedies are easier sells to the viewing public than dramas of old age… Maybe that is why Tom Hanks' recent film, A Man Called Otto, is categorized as a comedy-drama, rather than a straight-down-the-line drama. I find two hours of screen time about a man insulting those around him and drowning in the misery of his beloved wife’s death lacking in laughs, at least for the most part.
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The Oscar-nominated film Tar is an enigma. Written and directed by Todd Field, whose previous films, In the Bedroom and Little Children, won numerous awards and audience approval. His much-praised Tar tells the story of a gifted orchestra conductor named Lydia Tar. Critics have raved about this film, a few calling it the greatest cancel-culture film ever made.
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Steven Spielberg has made a semi-autobiographical version of his boyhood years called The Fabelmans. It’s a film that has been nominated for 7 Oscars. Sammy Fabelman is a fictional portrait of Spielberg as a youth. As the film unfolds, we meet the whole Fabelman clan, including a somewhat unbalanced mother (Michelle Williams) and a mild-mannered acquiescent computer-genius father (Paul Dano). Their stories are worth following. And why would they not be? The screenplay is co-written by Spielberg and the talented Tony Kushner with whom Spielberg developed the recent remake of West Side Story.
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World War One seems light years away. More than 100 years ago, in fact. Fighting occurred in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific, and Asia. France, England, the U.S., and others of the Allies faced Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Approximately 9 million soldiers met their deaths on the battlefields, and 5 million civilians died from the side effects of war – hunger and sickness.
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Last month the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University shared two important Yiddish film restoration projects at a screening at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center.
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We think of female leads in silent films, and what do we imagine? Too often it’s the virginal beauty, the delicate little angel, who is easily victimized and often must find the love of a man to fulfill her aim in life. Young, or even older women, who cannot make moves without the consent of parents or the man in their lives…. D.W. Griffith set this precedent in motion with childlike and demure female leads. But he wasn’t the only culprit to refuse to see women as full-spirited human beings.
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Andy Warhol dominates the world of independent cinema in the 1960s. Or not. Maybe that’s just the way we have been trained to remember what went on eighty years ago. Look a little deeper and find that the 1960s was an inspired time for many creative artists who had discovered the magic that they could make with an 8mm, 16mm, or 35mm camera!