May 10, 2006

Dispatch #132

We salute our moms in particular with this pre-Mother's Day edition of GreenCine Dispatch. Thanks to moms and those with maternal instincts everywhere!

#132 | May 9, 2006


"Will, am I a bad mother?"
"No. No, you're not a bad mother. You're just a barking lunatic." -- About a Boy.

We salute our moms this week, by featuring a few of our own mom's favorite films, and with a list of mother-related films - both on the home page. Check 'em out, and many blessings to mothers everywhere.

"Yasujiro Ozu creates a poignant and exquisitely realized portrait of devotion, separation, and familial love in Late Spring," writes Acquarello at Strictly Film School. "Stripped of a manipulative and artificial storyline, Late Spring reveals a sincere concern for the plight of the common man, an affectionate celebration for the subtle beauty of everyday life, and a profound sympathy for the inevitable passage of time." What's more, this special two-disc edition features Tokyo-Ga, Wim Wenders's tribute to Ozu.

Alexander Sokurov's stunning Mother and Son may be slow of pace but patient viewers will be rewarded with one of the most beautiful and poignant films of the last few years. It is the story of the love shown by a young man who cares for his dying mother, set against a dream-like, storybook backdrop, but describing couldn't begin to do justice to a film that moves the soul . Sokurov moves as an expressionistic painter or poet might and the film is just that - a painting or a poem, at twenty four frames a second. A moving experience.

Now playing via GreenCine's Video-on-Demand: In the madcap farce My Father, My Mother, My Brothers & My Sisters, Victoria Abril plays a free-spirited single mother with three children fathered by different men. When she takes her brood on vacation and encounters all three fathers, the holiday turns disastrous. It's fun for the whole family!

Available only via VOD ($3.99).

 

More like this: Early Summer | Tokyo Story More like this: Russian Ark | Father and Son More like this: Dinner and Driving | He's a Woman, She's a Man

Yet another fine film snubbed by the Academy this year is at the center of this week's new releases, among other highlights:

The New World (2005; $20.98). Though it barely made a dent at the box office and was all but snubbed by the Oscars (excepting one nomination for cinematography), Terrence Malick's The New World "was the movie that inspired the most fervent devotion" among a certain circle of critics last year, as J. Hoberman actually rather understated it in the Village Voice in March. "With the exception of my few dear friends in that august body, [the Academy members] are idiots," wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Are you getting the idea now that if you haven't seen it yet, you'd damn well better?

Munich (2005; Special Edition; $28.95). "With his latest film, Steven Spielberg forgoes the emotional bullying and pop thrills that come so easily to him to tell the story of a campaign of vengeance that Israel purportedly brought against Palestinian terrorists in the wake of the 1972 Olympics," wrote Manohla Dargis in the New York Times in December. "An unsparingly brutal look at two peoples all but drowning in a sea of their own blood, Munich is by far the toughest film of the director's career and the most anguished." And, many would argue, among his best.

Writing in the New York Times, Dennis Lim recently called Carlos Reygadas's second feature, Battle in Heaven (2004; $19.45) , "an anomaly among today's explicit art films, which often deploy sex more as a stunt than a subversion." Jonathan Marlow spoke with the controversial director at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Fateless (2005; $24.45). "Adapted from Nobel laureate Imre Kertész's autobiographical novel of an Auschwitz boyhood, the Hungarian film Fateless has a remarkable absence of sentimentality," wrote J. Hoberman in the Voice in January. "The movie is obviously artistic, but there are no cheap or superfluous effects. It's almost mystically translucent.... This isn't a movie that I'd have thought possible; it's an auspicious opening for the new year."

Also out this week: The 400 Blows (Criterion) (1959; $23.89), a re-release of Truffaut's classic debut; Rumor Has It (2005; $25.45); the original The Poseidon Adventure (1974; $16.45) returns in a special two-disc edition; Queer as Folk: The Final Season (2005; five discs; $72.59); Scrubs: Season Three ($32.95).

New Anime:
Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo Chapter 4 (2004; $23.45). "Gankutsuou, the latest effort from legendary director of Blue Submarine No. 6 and the Last Renaissance segment from The Animatrix, is without a doubt one of the finest anime series ever made," writes Zac Bertschy at the Anime News Network.

A complete list of this week's New Releases | Coming Soon | New Releases Archive | Your Queue

 Author D.K. Holm has given GreenCine an exclusive interview with... himself. But then you'd expect something a little unusual from the author of books on R. Crumb and Quentin Tarantino. The self-discussion includes a few questions about Film Soleil - and about what that means, exactly.

Look for a brand new primer coming your way shortly, as soon as we fix our flux capacitor: Time Travel movies.

Our award-winning film blog, GreenCine Daily offers up dispatches from New York's Tribeca fest, in addition to notes and tips from all over the cinematic world.

"We don't just watch movies - we experience them. We're inhabitants as well as observers, safe in theatres and living rooms yet inwardly out on some emotional limb. We feel by proxy whatever passes on the screen and we like it that way, especially when it comes to the more unpleasant human experiences." That's from GreenCine's Weepies primer, by Marlee MacLeod. And that's our genre of the week, perfect for moms who love those tearjerking classics like An Affair to Remember and Sophie's Choice. Have a good weep with your mom on Mother's Day.

 

The GreenCine member list of the week is: DVDs with Great Surround Sound Mixes, by oldkingcole. Geek out and rock out!

Also: Join our new discussion thread about the upcoming summer movie season.

Our next screening at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be on Wednesday, June 7 as we proudly present René Clément's And Hope to Die. More details next week!
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Posted by cphillips at May 10, 2006 4:43 PM