Tag: Cannes

6 Degrees: Friday Flix

We are now officially in the Summer Season for films and there are a few I’m looking for over the next few months. Lady Macbeth and Dunkirk are two, and Will Ferrell’s new comedy is another that may pass muster.

Of course, the super hero season never ends, and the latest is Wonder Woman. My review is posting soon, and the recommendation is: You can wait for the small screen and rent Dr. Strange if you haven’t seen it yet. Of course, the ingenue who debuts as Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot, is very pretty, and the supporting cast is fairly decent. But it has been hyped as something it is not, which is a really good movie. It’s just an okay movie, but it’s nothing to write home about (in my humble opinion-which is that of a film critic!).

What else is happening? Turner Classic has a great lineup of Audrey Hepburn movies this month. She really is something to write home about. If you have not seen some of her best work, then set your DVR to record: Roman Holiday; The Nun’s Story and How to Steal a Million.

TCM also has a new blog, Streamline, and one of the interesting pieces is Revisiting Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Branagh is also going to appear in director Chris Nolan’s Dunkirk in July. Another post is about the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. As I’ve stated many times, if you are trying to choose between the documentary work and the feature film, nine times out of ten choose the documentary. This one is far superior to the film that Sean Penn did about Harvey Milk.

In Film Comment, writer Mark Harris has an excerpt from his book, Pictures at a Revolution, about the films from 1967. The sixties marked a big turning point in cinema, with the old Hollywood dying out and the studio system gone, the new breed of filmmakers were trying to find different ways to tell the story. And there was a lot of innovative thinking as well as actual re-tooling of the entire process of film-making. And the newest type of filmmaker, the independent film producer and director evolved and came into their own in this era.

Harris talks about the James Bond films, and in particular You Only Live Twice and Casino Royale. Also this week, 6 Degrees magazine features an interview with one of the prize-winning past winners of Cannes, Lauren Cantet, who won for The Class in 2008. The full list of winners at Cannes is discussed and the roundtable of critics, including Chaz Ebert, talk about their craft in 2017.

One recently released horror movie that has been receiving lots of praise is It Comes At Night: As defined by what the meaning of the word “IT” is! There’s a good discussion about the beautiful women featured in Wonder Woman that are….of a certain age. It’s good to see older women in films, but the problem has always been that there are only a few choice parts for women over 40, while men…of a certain age-from John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart through Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt all get to work in romantic and leading men parts where their female counterparts are usually relegated to roles for mothers and small supporting parts. It hasn’t changed that much in Hollywood yet!

There’s a review for The Exception on rogerebert.com. It didn’t get a good one-and neither did Churchill. There’s a review of the kids movie, Captain Underpants, on the Macguffin website. And Tom Cruise’s The Mummy has opened with decidedly mixed reviews. There’s one piece reminding us that the 90’s film of the same name was actually pretty good.

There are remakes, and then there’s the concept of the “shared universe” as discussed by Mike Ryan on Uproxx in the post: “Enough, Already, with this Shared Universe Trend.” Apparently, the Marvel comic universe has competition from the rival “Dark Universe”, which may just be a way to garner interest for a bunch of comic-book movies that the studios are desperate to plug. At any rate, the film critic universe still stands by the silly and old-fashioned notion that a good movie is hard to find. And not all of the comic flotsam floating around in these mixed universes contain good movies. As I am wont to say when someone is waxing lyrical about this film or that: “I’ll be the judge of that.”
We all will as we keep going back for more! See you at the movies-ML

6 Degrees: Friday Flix

 

Welcome to June, and we are officially starting to see the summer roll-outs for the Hollywood Summer Film Season. Starting with Wonder Woman, which has had some great reviews so far, we are seeing some of the early winners and losers. As we started listing them last week in the Summer Film Newsletter from 6 Degrees, it seems that King Arthur was an early casualty.

And at Cannes, the list of winners is included in this week’s 6 Degrees magazine. Sofia Coppola was awarded Best Director for her remake of the Clint Eastwood vehicle that is starring Nicole Kidman, The Beguiled. And the top prize went to a Swedish film, an art-world satire called  The Square.

 Some other surprises or break-out performances at Cannes included great reviews for Adam Sandler and Robert Pattinson (of Twilight fame). And one of the former darlings of European cinema, Fugitive Director Roman Polanski’s film, Based on a True Story, was said to be sadly flat. You never can tell…

 So…after Cannes, and before July 4th drops, there are some other note-worthy articles this past week. The number of LGBT characters in films, as with women and women directors, is still far short from where they could be as represented on film and in the film world. Jessica Chastain also discussed the way females are portrayed in films and describes it as “disturbing” during an interview at Cannes. There are some who are working to change the way things have always been done in Hollywood, but the entrenched attitudes have been around for over 100 years (as depicted in my book, 6 Degrees of Film).

 One of the trends that is encouraging surrounds the opening of  Wonder Woman and how much positive feedback the female director and some of the reviews have garnered. There’s a good article in Vanity Fair about tracing Wonder Woman’s Cinematic Origins also.

 One amusing piece from earlier this week was about Johnny Depp and his predilection for having his lines fed to him through a microphone. And honestly, if I was Depp and had to literally walk through the performances he has given for basically the same movie over and over, I might be tempted…

 There’s a good piece in The Guardian from director John Boorman talking frankly about some of the problems and challenges as he filmed the classic Deliverance, with Ned Beatty and Jon Voight. There’s also in the Guardian, an article discussing some of the pitfalls in trying to remake another classic, the Al Pacino gangster film Scarface, directed by Brian de Palma. And for those who are looking for something a little different in their film viewing, Rolling Stone has a list of “Alternate-Summer Movies” to preview.

 Some of the films with positive reviews, besides Wonder Woman, include the new drama about Winston Churchill, and the kids movie based on the best-seller, “The Adventures of Captain Underpants.”

 For film buffs like me, there’s an article talking about the classic Marx Brothers film, Duck Soup, from 1933, directed by Leo McCarey. At times, the Marx Brothers could be a bit irritating to me, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Duck Soup and the plot surrounding the mythical Freedonia.

 And in that vein, the newest books about film are recommended in the Out of the Past Blog. The original film, The Beguiled which was mentioned above as being remade by Sofia Coppola and starring Nicole Kidman, was a vehicle for Clint Eastwood back in 1971. He was playing another anti-hero, but this one was not as commercially successful as his other major hits in the day, so this is an interesting choice for a remake. The original is reviewed in 6 Degrees magazine.

 There’s a review of the upcoming  Lady Macbeth and also a list of the top ten movies from 1947! So check out the 6 Degrees magazine, and the Summer Film Newsletter that we released last week. Hope you are enjoying the summer days and look forward to seeing you at the movies!-ML

6 Degrees Summer Newsletter

 

Happy Summer to all our Readers and followers! This is the Summer Film Newsletter from 6 Degrees…At this writing, the Cannes Film Festival is in full swing. Here’s hoping that the Festival will bring to light some new, standout performances and notable films.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the Summer Premieres are starting earlier each year. One of the first fatalities of the early openers has occurred with King Arthur: Legend of the Sword from director Guy Ritchie. One of my favorite review titles came from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers: “Welcome to to a King-Sized Pile of Crap.”

One of the most anticipated openings as far as the Summer Blockbuster category has been Wonder Woman, which opens in early June to kick off what is also known as the Summer Comic Book Hero Season. The other notables have been the Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, which made a lot of money-no surprise. And the Alien: Covenant film is one of the continuing prequels in the Alien series, which has done well.  

Some of the anticipated kids movies are the fun sounding Captain Underpants, also opening in June. Also for kids, there is Cars 3, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which opened in May, and another Despicable Me movie with Steve Carell.

There’s the serial brigade: with Transformers: The Last Knight. There’s the remakes: The Mummy with Tom Cruise, My Cousin Rachel with Rachel Weisz and The Beguiled with Nicole Kidman.

There’s sci fi  flick: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets as well as War for the Planet of the Apes (another sequel/remake/rehash?).  For the documentary enthusiasts, there’s Letters from Baghdad in June and An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power in August….

I’m looking for Dunkirk slated for July 21st and starring Tom Hardy. Lady Macbeth with Florence Pugh is set for July 14th. And Charlize Theron is in Atomic Blonde, an action pic opening July 28t

Other notable actors and openings are Once Upon a Time in Venice with Bruce Willis-June 16th; Baby Driver on  June 28th; Spider-Man: Homecoming on July 7th; and another Charlize Theron film The Last Face on July 28th.

All in all it’s not a bad lineup. There are a few good films that are most likely watchable, and that’s sometimes hard to find when so many films are remakes or sequels/serials that don’t break new ground. Which is why Cannes and other film festivals are so important, as they often bring into prominence the smaller films with low budgets that are more interesting and have new faces and talent lurking under the radar.

There isn’t any one type of film that tells us that Hollywood is on the way out, but the handwriting has been on the wall for at least a decade or more. There are so many choices out there, with Indies and Bollywood vying for the same audiences, and the double-edged sword is that there’s a lot of talented directors and actors who are working in films with small budgets and are on the cusp of making it. But there’s also a higher than ever demand to keep cranking out the same stale formulaic versions of yesterday’s hits because they still make money for the studios! So that’s not going to change anytime soon.

But, there are a few art house movies that make us sit up and take notice. And I almost forgot….Will Ferrell is making a comedy, The House, set to open on June 30th, so let’s hope there are a few laughs along the way as we prepare for a long hot summer in the U.S.

Be on the lookout for the 6 Degrees Friday Flix posts and the latest installments in our 6 Degrees of Film magazine that will highlight some of the week’s top film news and news of note from Hollywood. Till next time, see you at the movies!-ML

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