Dangerous Beauty (1998)

Wikipedia on Veronica Franco:
In 1565, when she was about 20 years old, Veronica Franco was listed in Il Catalogo di tutte le principale e più honorate cortigiane di Venezia, which gave the names, addresses, and fees of Venice's most prominent prostitutes; her mother was listed as the person to whom the fee should be paid. From extant records, we know that by the time she was 18, Franco had been briefly married and had given birth to her first child; she would eventually have six children, three of whom died in infancy.

As one of the più honorate cortigiane in a wealthy and cosmopolitan city, Franco lived well for much of her working life, but without the automatic protection accorded to "respectable" women, she had to make her own way. She studied and sought patrons among the learned. By the 1570s, she belonged to one of the more prestigious literary circles in the city, participating in discussions and contributing to and editing anthologies of poetry.

In 1575, Franco's own volume of the poetry was published, her Terze rime, containing 18 capitoli (verse epistles) by her and 7 by men writing in her praise. That same year saw an outbreak of plague in Venice, one that lasted two years and caused Franco to leave the city and to lose many of her possessions. In 1577, she unsuccessfully proposed to the city council that it should establish a home for poor women, of which she would become the administrator. By then, she was raising not only her own children but also her nephews, who had been orphaned by the plague.

In 1580, Franco published her Lettere familiari a diversi, "Letters written in my youth," which included 50 letters, as well as two sonnets addressed to King Henry III of France, who had visited her six years earlier. We have little information for her life after 1580. Records suggest that she was less prosperous in her later years but was not living in poverty. However, she published no more writings.

Summertime (1955)

The Crimson Pirate (1952)

His Girl Friday (1940)

Mike Wallace interviews Ben Hecht in 1958 via University of Texas:

HECHT: How do you know I wrote “The Iron Pettycoat”? I took my name off it.

WALLACE: I know you did. For reasons best known to Ben Hecht, the New York Times said, “He declined to have his name mentioned in the credits. A witness to the finished picture may readily figure out why.” Uh – why – why do you get involved in such trash?

HECHT: Well, uh, it wasn’t trash when I started. You see a movie begins like most things with an idea and then it turns out that the inventor of the idea who was usually the writer is a stowaway. He has the privileges of a stowaway. He has no powers to assert himself and about ten or fifteen villains including his own incompetence usually corrupts that he – the reason he thought of – in this particular case, “The Iron Pettycoat,” the corruption came through the recutting of the movie and the movie was written for a lady, Miss Katherine Hepburn, and ended up instead as a role for the hero, Mr. Bob Hope, Miss Hepburn was removed from in by fifty percent. I got irritated and took my name off it – it had nothing to do with the movie I wrote.

WALLACE: But the fact of the matter is that you’ve said time and again, Ben, that you’ve sold out – you sold out to make a buck, isn’t that true?

HECHT: Well, what do we all do – you’re making a buck, I’m making a buck, I don’t sell out anything. I’ve written three hundred short stories and kept alive by working in the movies. You cannot have two homes – one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast …

WALLACE: Well wait, wait, wait, Ben. Now in one breath you say Hollywood puts together trash and the next breath you say, “Give me a hundred thousand dollars and I’ll grind out whatever you tell me and who cares what it does to the American mind.” Isn’t that about what you say?

HECHT: No, well I – I leave that guilt up to the movie makers. I just do what I’m told. I take assignments, I used to work on newspapers. I took assignments. I take assignments from movie people and there’s very little a writer can do to improve a movie. The writer’s usually paid not to assert himself, not to intrude and one of the reasons that Hollywood has – come a cropper.

WALLACE: Well, now wait….

HECHT: The writer has had nothing to do with the situation.

WALLACE: The writer has nothing to do?

HECHT: Nothing to do.

WALLACE: We’ve talked about this – this week with another top screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, who admires you very much, by the way. He’s the fellow who wrote “Marty” and “The Bachelor Party” and he said this, he said, “It’ all up to the individual writer.” Chayefsky said, “I’ve never written just for the money in my life, I’d rather hand the money back than write something just because somebody else tells me to.”

HECHT: He sounds like little Goldilocks. (Laughs) He’ll change his mind after he’s been out here a while.
WALLACE: If I may switch the subject … abruptly Ben … do you get any consolation at all from religion?

HECHT: Uh, no. I regard religion as a part of a rather odd mythomania which has persisted in the world … I think that anybody that gets consolation from religion is much the same as scientists who might get consolation from the delusion that the world was flat. Religion is changed … God has different coloration, different meaning today…

WALLACE: You’re a Jew?

HECHT: Yes.

WALLACE: …. Means nothing to you?

HECHT: … no more other than I was a Kentuckian.

Easy Living (1937)

Senses of Cinema tries rescue director Mitchell Leisen's reputation by assassinating Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges:

“Leisen was competent and stylish at his best.” Film historian Steven Bach gives the majority view. “He could always make a picture look better than it was, but never play better, for he had no sense of material.” (1) Condescending but benign next to Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges, writers whose early Hollywood careers were built on their scripts for Leisen films: “On TV,” Wilder said, “I would watch only a picture by a director I hated. There is no director I hate that much. Not even Mitchell Leisen.” (2)
Wilder and Sturges, in later years, bewailed the havoc Leisen wreaked on their scripts. Painted him as a flamboyant gay aesthete, who preferred décor to drama, party dresses to pithy dialogue. Who deleted pages of script at the whim of his leading lady – focusing instead on a vase of white lilies on a table, a muscular Grecian statue in a corner of the Grand Salon. Flickering and insubstantial as a celluloid ghost, his oeuvre embodied Susan Sontag's definition of camp. It was “decorative art, emphasising texture, sensuous surface and style at the expense of content.” (3) For Wilder, the problem with Leisen was simple. “He was a window dresser.” (4)

Ironically, though, Midnight (1939) – a frothy romantic farce directed by Leisen from a Wilder script – is a sharper and more stylish satire than Wilder's own Sabrina (1954) or Love in the Afternoon (1957). A socially-conscious soap opera, Hold Back the Dawn (1941) – again, written by Wilder but directed by Leisen – packs a far greater punch than Wilder's own Ace in the Hole (1951). Lacking Wilder's pervasive sourness and contempt, Hold Back the Dawn views its hicks and whores and schemers through a veil of sympathy, suggesting they might have reasons to act as they do

Similarly, Easy Living (1937) – a “screwball” comedy shot by Leisen but scripted by Sturges – is as frenetically funny as The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). Yet it has a quality that Sturges' film wholly lacks, a visual and emotional grace. Their second teaming, Remember the Night (1940) parades Sturges' love of small-town Americana. But Leisen, with his drastic cuts to the screenplay, makes it heartfelt rather than hokey. Mercifully, he eschews those Sturges forays into cornball excess.

Leisen, glimpsed in this new light, is no longer a swishy hack. He's a subtle and stylish auteur who could add heart and humanity to the brittle sophistication of Billy Wilder, lend grace and elegance to the boisterous Americana of Preston Sturges. In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson hails Leisen as “an expert at witty romantic comedies, too reliant on feeling to be screwball, too pleased with glamour to be satires – and thus less likely to attract critical attention.” (5)

Cornball excess? Has this guy even SEEN these movies?!?! There has to be a way to appreciate the work of one director without making this childish and two dimensional argument against Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges.

The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

Pat and Mike (1952)

Watch Recount!

Miller's Crossing (1990)

Peter's Nite
Salmon, roasted potatoes, spinach, brownies, sorbet.
Stuart in Cannes cat burgling jewelry from celebrities

Time Magazine's Top 100 Movies:

Leave it to the Coen brothers -- the writer-producer-director team who were the film finds of the '80s -- to discover ferocious drama in words, character, atmosphere. Their inspiration for Miller's Crossing was a pair of Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest (which provided the milieu of a corrupt city ruled by warring gangsters) and The Glass Key (which provided the plot of an aging boss and his young adviser involved with the same woman). To this blend the Coens have brought a teeming cast of sharpies, most of them spectacularly, thoughtfully venal. They speak wittily but often don't mean quite what they say; listeners must find clues in their equally eloquent silences.Like Red Harvest, but unlike most movies, Miller's Crossing has a good novel's narrative density. The film finds a dozen angles in the battle between Leo O'Bannion (Albert Finney), the Irishman who has run the town for years, and Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), the volatile, flirtatious Italian who is itching to seize control. Their bone of contention is Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), a gambler too greedy to live long but too cunning to stay dead. His sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) has stolen Leo's heart and is ever ready to fence it. Nice crowd. Shuttling among them, wooed and wounded by them all, is Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), an existential hero with a black Irish soul. We spend most of the movie racing after Tom's mind, trying to figure what devious plan it will spin next.The Coens have tempered their style from the daredevil camerabatics of Blood Simple and Raising Arizona; they now seek the extra fillip of incident and character in the corner of every frame. Each of the hard gents in Miller's Crossing finds his own space and his own reasons for pushing others out of it. Leo, for example, is given a blaze of glory as he defends his life against Caspar's goons. To the strains of Danny Boy he strides from his home, machine gun flaring, a dinosaur who refuses to die. "The old man," one friend says wistfully, "is still an artist with the Thompson." The Coens are artists too, and their cool dazzler is an elegy to a day when Hollywood could locate moral gravity in a genre film for grownups.

Miller's Crossing,The Glass Key and Dashiell Hammett by Paul Coughlin via Senses of Cinema:

Joel and Ethan Coen's film, too, is influenced as much by the casting of Gabriel Byrne as any specific reference to Hammett's heroes. The Continental Op of Red Harvest is middle-aged, overweight and short. The casting of Byrne allows for the psychological assurance, self-confidence and icy demeanour to be physically reproduced in the sturdy and unruffled presence of the tall and lean actor. Tom is 'a man who walks behind a man, whispers in his ear', he is the brains behind Leo's operation, and he is the heartless centre of Miller's Crossing. Hearts and minds vie for attention in the Coens' film. Tom contemplates the importance of reason in his decisions, he uses an analytical approach to support a basis for all of his actions. On several occasions Tom is framed alone in his room, pensively smoking a cigarette, the consternation on his face signifying a man lost in the realm of his own thoughts. The central enigma of Miller's Crossing is Tom's agenda, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) suggests it is to woo and win her, Leo implies that Tom is motivated by loyalty, but Tom remains implacably obscure about his strategies and their intentions. Arguably, Miller's Crossing is precisely about Leo's revelation to Tom of his intentions to marry Verna, for it is this incident which precedes and then instigates the events which follow; events which culminate with a bonding so substantial between Leo and Tom that it must eventually become untenable.

The King of Kong (2007)

Nora's Nite
(Stuart flaked!)

AV Club interviews Billy Mitchell:

The story didn't end with the movie, though: Billy Mitchell, a successful restaurant owner and hot-sauce mogul in Florida, unsurprisingly took umbrage at the way he was portrayed. Though the beginning of the film paints him as a hard-working businessman who bettered himself via the same principles that made him good at gaming, it quickly casts him as a man who a) may have sent minions to examine his rival's game console, b) won't face a worthy opponent in a live match, c) may have cheated to keep his title, and d) is generally self-absorbed and awful. To what degree those things are true is a matter of debate. While Mitchell claims to this day that he hasn't seen the movie, he insists (in the few interviews he's given) that he was portrayed unfairly, and that the film is inaccurate. That's where The A.V. Club was willing to leave things—with an excellent documentary that, like all documentaries, can't possibly paint a completely accurate picture. Until about a week before the DVD release of The King Of Kong, when Billy Mitchell called our office.

He was ostensibly just thanking us for ordering some of his hot sauce—and looking for our suite number for the shipment—but after I'd chatted with him for about 10 minutes, I asked if he'd like to continue our conversation, and make it an official interview. He agreed, and an hour of sometimes-pointed, sometimes-rambling conversation followed. To his credit, Mitchell is well aware that a Donkey Kong score isn't the most important thing on earth, or even in his life. But he's at least slightly bitter—and heartily determined to get his side of the story across. He comes across as friendly but almost amazingly self-centered, and a good deal more charming than Kong lets on. (Some of the DVD's bonus footage offers a better glimpse into what may be the "real" Billy.) He had plenty to say about specific points the movie raises—for instance, he says that in one key scene, the filmmakers edited out several seconds to make it look like he snubbed his nice-guy rival. In the interest of fairness, The A.V. Club tracked down Ed Cunningham and Seth Gordon to respond to some of the allegations. And the saga continues. What follows is two separate conversations that took place about a week apart, the first with Mitchell, and the second with Cunningham and Gordon. They're edited together for the purposes of clarity and flow.

Billy Mitchell: You see me in the movie, and I'm wearing different types of patriotic ties. You saw the movie. What impression did the movie give you? And then I'll tell you the real truth.

The A.V. Club: Well, the movie clearly makes you out to be the bad guy. Or do you mean specifically about the ties?

BM: Did I come across like a staunch Republican, or like a NRA guy or a 9/11 guy, or something like that? The truth is, I started wearing those ties to competitions in 1999, because in the race for a perfect game of Pac-Man, there was another guy, a counterpart from Canada who's really good, and we were in our race, in our quest for a perfect game. He called himself Captain Canada, and he actually wore a Canadian cape, a flag. I just wasn't gonna be that goofy. The American flag tie's about as goofy as I would go. Sometimes interviews take a funny angle like that. Sometimes they want real serious questions about truth and lies and deception. And sometimes they just want the humor, the funny stories, and that's fine, too. And whatever you wanna do is fine.

AVC: Let me ask you about a specific scene in the movie…

BM: Okay, I'm ready. You're gonna ask me about the scene where I walk behind Steve.

AVC: Yeah.

BM: Do you believe that I actually told you the question you were gonna ask me? So find humor in that, and go ahead and put it in your review.

AVC: I'd guess this is a question you're getting a lot.

BM: Either that, or I can read your mind, and you should hang up the phone quickly. Recall the scene in your mind. I'm walking with my wife—my trophy wife, which we'll talk about later. Um, what part of the country are you in? Chicago? Is that where you were born? Or where you grew up?

AVC: I grew up in Milwaukee.

BM: Very good. That plays a point later… We're on the record here so, I'm gonna watch what I wanna tell you. Are we on the record?

AVC: Yes.

BM: After spending a night out with my family, and dropping off one of the people who was participating in the contest there, I went to drive away, and my wife said, "You don't wanna go inside?" And so we walked in, and Ed Cunningham put the microphone on me. I didn't have any objection to that. I wouldn't—I mean, I don't have anything negative, period. Walking into the arcade, I went game to game, and at each game, I reminded my wife who the person was that was playing. One of the very first games—I don't know that it was the first, but it was one of the first—was Steve playin' Donkey Kong. And as I walked past him… Now you've got the movie in your mind, the camera is looking at me from behind or from the front? As I'm walking toward him.

AVC: I don't recall.

BM: You've gotta watch this movie, man! I'm givin' you these test questions! Okay, so the camera's watchin' us, and as we walk past him, this guy in the movie [Sarcastically.] who I've never met and I've never even said hello to, because I'm so nasty and arrogant… As I was just about behind him, he turned and he said, "Hi, Billy." Okay. You don't really—somebody you've never met—would you just say "Hi, Billy," that casually? Then it cuts from a perfectly good camera angle that's following us to the opposite side, where me and my wife continue walking, and I say something to the effect of, "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." Is that what you're talking about?

AVC: Yes.

BM: Okay. Now this is what you do for a living? I'm only being funny here to drive a point home. I don't want you to put across that I was mean to you, because I'm not, I'm happy here. But let's think of this: This is what you do for a living? Now I'm gonna say it again, and you tell me what this means: "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." You don't hear somethin' in that?

AVC: I'm not getting it. You'll have to let me know what I'm missing.

BM: I obviously stood there and talked to him. "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." That's why they cut one camera angle to the other, 'cause when I stood behind him, and I waited for the precise moment, knowing Donkey Kong… You know where the monkey falls down on its head? You've got like, maybe 10 seconds of little rhetoric that you can, whatever, without disturbing somebody? And I reminded my wife, "This is Steve, remember we met him? He's the guy from Seattle. He's the other Donkey Kong guy." She goes, "Oh, yeah." I go, "How they treatin' ya?" That—my line to him is, "How they treatin' you," or "How is it treatin' you?" And he said, "Not good." And I go, "No?" He goes, "No, I just can't get it together," and he didn't get a good score that weekend. And I said, "All right, well, hang in there." And I walked away.

AVC: And you're saying they cut that out, right? None of that's actually in the movie.

BM: Right. So what they did was, he says, "Hi, Billy," cut! And then it's: "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." If I stood there and talked to him and his guy died, [people would say] "Look at this: He can't even let the guy play in peace." You can see that angle, right? I didn't wanna stand there, I didn't want him to feel intimidated, I didn't want anyone to think that I was stealin' his secrets.

Move Over, Darling (1963)

Pamela's Nite

Trivia via Wikipedia:

This was originally to be a comeback vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, under the working title of Something's Got to Give. Dean Martin was cast as Nick Arden, and the director was George Cukor. Monroe was fired for seldom showing up for shooting early in its production cycle, appearing in only about 30 minutes of usable film. Unable to complete the movie, and having already sunk a considerable amount of money into the production and sets, 20th Century Fox went ahead with the project, under a new title, new director, and recast stars. At first, they tried to continue with Lee Remick in Monroe's place, but Martin balked at working with anyone else and that version was never completed. Doris Day and James Garner were eventually cast in the roles originated by Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife. Chuck Connors played the Randolph Scott role, replacing Tom Tryon, who'd been cast in the Monroe version.

Garner accidentally broke Day's rib (during the massage scene, when he pulls her off of Bergen). Garner wasn't even aware of what had happened until the next day, when he felt the bandage while putting his arms around her.

The producers scheduled the scene with Doris Day riding through a car wash for the last day of shooting because they were concerned that the detergents might affect her complexion. When the scene went off without a hitch, they admitted their ploy to Day, then used the story in promotional materials for the film.

Context via DVDVerdict:

Perhaps the most fabled movie of the 1960s, this one was meant to be a comeback vehicle both for Marilyn Monroe, whose career was reeling from three years of flops, and Fox, which was reeling from big budget overruns on Cleopatra. The blonde bombshell was to be teamed with laid-back swinger Dean Martin for some risque business—including a few modest glimpses of a skinny dip on camera.

However, it was not to be. Monroe was fired from the movie for absences due to sinusitis. The actress went on a publicity offensive to win back the role, but died before she could return to the set. Thus, it became Marilyn Monroe's last, unfinished movie—a permanent reminder of a comeback that might have been. The project was buried, but since Fox had a script and was still under financial pressures, they decided to resuscitate it with Doris Day and James Garner as the couple reunited by fate.

Of course, you might not remember those things immediately, since the movie was fabled as Something's Got to Give. When it finally hit theaters in 1963, it had been made over as Move Over, Darling.

It's a comedy reborn from a tragedy in another respect as well, since it was inspired by 1911's Enoch Arden, a silent drama based on Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem about a man lost at sea who returns to find his wife remarried. If you're paying attention when Doris Day talks with Polly Bergen about an old movie she recalls, you'll realize that this one had a previous comic treatment—as My Favorite Wife, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Repulsion (1965)

Peter's Nite
Microscopic portions of salmon, baked vegetables, brownies
Or, as Stuart would put it: "Dead rabbit, dead rabbit, dead rabbit..."

Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy" via Greenmanreviews:

One could easily get the impression from his films that director Roman Polanski does not recommend apartment life. Three of his films, forming an unofficial trilogy, concern characters -- apartment dwellers all -- who variously succumb to different kinds of insanity.

In Repulsion, Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian manicurist, lives with her sister and her sister's fiancee in a London apartment. The couple go away on a vacation, leaving Carol alone in the flat. While they are away, Carol begins hallucinating that she is not alone in the apartment. A man appears in her dressing mirror for a split second then disappears. Hands reach out from the walls and molest her. She is unable to function otherwise, forgetting to eat and leaving food out to rot.

This culminates in a rape sequence where Polanski hints at the reality by including only the "real" sounds -- a clock ticking, Carol's own breathing and heartbeat, and the rustle of the sheets as she fights her "attacker." The trauma of this experience completes Carol's break with reality. When a friend later calls on her, concerned that she hasn't been to work, she takes him for an intruder.

Upon viewing Repulsion, many psychologists commended Polanski's accurate depiction of schizophrenia. They were surprised when Polanski admitted that he and co-screenwriter Gerard Brach had simply written Carol's behavior as a natural response to the circumstances. They had done no research.

Biography on Polanski:

Director, actor. Born Raimund Polanski, on August 18, 1933, in Paris, France. At the age of three, Polanski moved with his family to his father’s native city of Krakow, Poland. In 1941, his parents were imprisoned in various Nazi concentration camps, where his mother eventually died in Auschwitz. In order to escape deportation, Polanski lived with several different Polish families until he was reunited with his father in 1944.

As a teenager, Polanski developed his acting skills in radio dramas and films. In 1954, he enrolled at the Polish National Film Academy in Lodz, where his body of work consisted of short films and documentaries. Upon his graduation, he appeared in a number of movies—many of which were the work of famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda, including Lotna (1959), Innocent Sorcerers (1960), and Samson (1961). In 1962, he directed his first feature-length film, Knife in the Water . The international recognition that followed, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, gave Polanski the chance to bring his movies to a more mainstream audience. The following year, he moved to London, where his next offering, the psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), was considered equally compelling by critics and audiences.

In 1968, Polanski moved to Hollywood, making his American film debut with the classic thriller Rosemary's Baby, which featured exceptional performances by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Despite his burgeoning film career, Polanski endured a devastating tragedy the following year when his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult. The extreme violence experienced by Polanski throughout his life was often reflected in his films, which tended to focus on the darker themes of alienation and evil—most notably, in the modern film noir Chinatown (1974), featuring John Huston, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway.

In 1977, Polanski was indicted on six criminal counts for having sexual relations with a minor. The alleged act took place with a 13-year-old girl, in the home of the actor Jack Nicholson. Both Nicholson and his longtime girlfriend, actress Anjelica Huston, testified against Polanski when the highly publicized case was brought to trial. Polanski pleaded guilty to one charge of unlawful sexual intercourse and underwent six weeks of psychiatric evaluation at a state prison in California. Although additional criminal charges were still pending, Polanski fled the United States after his discharge. (While authorities are not actively seeking him out, he does face the possibility of prison if he returns to America.)

Kim Morgan on Repulsion:

The obscure, slippery and decayed complexities of such desire are conveyed brilliantly in Repulsion. The diseased atmosphere of Carol's womb is meticulously created with Polanski's use of camera angles, sound effects and images of clutter. Though music is used effectively, Polanski relies more on amplifying the sounds of everyday life--the ticking of a clock, the voices of nuns playing catch in the convent garden, the dripping of a faucet--to convey the acute awareness Carol acquires in response to her fear. Polanski also dresses the film with pertinent details that further exemplify both Carol's madness and the aching passage of time: Potatoes sprout in the kitchen, meat (rabbit meat, no less) rots on a plate and eventually collects flies, various debris of blood, food and liquids form naturally around Carol. The film's inventive use of black-and-white film, wide-angle lenses and close-ups creates an unsparing vision of sickness, and Deneuve's performance is effectively mysterious. The viewer, however, is able to empathize with Carol, which is how she lures us into her web in the first place. As Polanski cameraman Gil Taylor muttered during filming, "I hate doing this to a beautiful woman."

Yet one loves to do this to a beautiful woman, especially one like Deneuve--at first. Deneuve's loveliness makes Carol's madness more palatable (her unfortunate suitor thinks she is odd, but he can't help but "love" this gorgeous woman), but eventually it becomes horrifying. Carol is not simply a Hitchcockian aberration of what lies beneath the "perfect woman," she is the reflection of what lies beneath repressed desire--in men and women. Polanski has a knack for casting women who are nervously exciting (Faye Dunaway in Chinatown is a blinking, twitching mess), and therefore dangerous to desire. He makes one insecure about longing for them. Deneuve is certainly nerve-racking. She is so physically flawless that she often seems half human: An anemic girl, she can barely lift up her arm, yet at the same time she is highly sensual, an ample, heavily breathing woman with more than a glint of carnality in her dreamily vacant eyes. Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery--she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain. What Polanski finds intriguing and revolting is perceptively female, making Repulsion a woman's picture more women may want to know.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Nora's Nite

Screenonline:

Originally shot for television in six weeks on a low budget, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was directed by Stephen Frears, from author Hanif Kureishi's first screenplay. Originally shot on 16mm, it was so well received by critics at the Edinburgh Film Festival that it was internationally distributed for cinema on 35mm. Heralded as one of Britain's most commercially and critically successful films of 1986, it earned Kureishi an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

My Beautiful Laundrette was ground-breaking in its bold exploration of issues of sexuality, race, class and generational difference. It also sparked controversy, particularly within the Asian community, which was disgusted by its perceived degrading representation of Pakistanis. At a New York demonstration by the Pakistan Action Committee, banners called the film "the product of a vile and perverted mind".

Much of the outrage was targeted at the homosexual affair between Omar and Johnny, whch develops from a genuine mutual fondness through the buzz of sexual experimentation, before hinting, at the end, at something deeper. On the way, it survives several obstacles, including Johnny's racist connections and Omar's resentment.

The film highlights a dilemma at the heart of the immigrant experience - the desire to belong to Western society while maintaining a clear sense of Pakistani identity. The two brothers, Nasser and Papa, demonstrate this cultural conflict. An ardent intellectual socialist, Papa belongs to old school Pakistan because, like most first generation immigrants, he believes fervently in education combating racism and is vehemently against the greed and conservative economics of Thatcherism.

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

MOVIENITE 10TH ANNIVERSARY BLOW OUT!!!!!!
Pamela's Nite

Tom Stoppard via New York Times:

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, Tom Stoppard has consistently brought an insider-outsider's amused detachment to playwriting and a buoyant theatrical athleticism to philosophy, physics and semantics. Born in 1937, he became an international celebrity with his first produced play, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1967), which re-told Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from the perspective of two hapless courtiers on the sidelines of the main events. The verbal pyrotechnics and philosophical game-playing that animated Rosencrantz" have been part of his signature ever since.

"Jumpers" (1972) is a metaphysical murder mystery, while "Travesties" (1974), set in Zurich in 1911, imagines an encounter among Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara. Occasionally criticized for emphasizing intellectual cleverness at the expense of emotional substance, much of Mr. Stoppard's work in fact directly addresses the conflict between head and heart, between philosophical ideals and debunking reality -- themes eloquently pursued in "The Real Thing" (1982), "The Invention of Love" (1997), "The Coast of Utopia" (2001), a three-play cycle about 19th-century Russian intellectuals, and "Rock 'n' Roll" (2006), set in Czechoslovakia and Cambridge in the late 1960's and the 1990's. Mr. Stoppard's work as a screenwriter includes "Brazil" (1985) and "Shakespeare in Love" (1998)

Mel Gussow on Stoppard and Shakespeare via NYT:

With ''Shakespeare in Love,'' Mr. Stoppard takes a more leisurely approach, opening up his story to include the world of Elizabethan theater: its factionalism, chicanery, self-interest and rigidity. Periodically, Mr. Stoppard has touched on theatrical matters: the play within the play in ''The Real Thing'' and in ''The Real Inspector Hound.'' But in ''Shakespeare in Love'' the theater is center stage, and all contemporary resonances are intentional, as when an actor asks a producer his identity and the man replies, ''I'm the money.''

Queen Elizabeth herself, as incarnated by Judi Dench, proves to be a figure of surprising liberality, at least in the arena of theater and romance. In addition to Marlowe, John Webster is in the lineup as a youth with a sadistic streak, and there is more than a hint that the lady Viola will inspire a future Shakespearean comedy.

Rashômon (1950)

Stuart's Nite

Ebert on Rashomon:

Shortly before filming was to begin on "Rashomon," Akira Kurosawa's three assistant directors came to see him. They were unhappy. They didn't understand the story. "If you read it diligently," he told them, "you should be able to understand it, because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible." They would not leave: "We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don't understand it at all."
Recalling this day in Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa explains the movie to them. The explanation is reprinted in the booklet that comes with the new Criterion DVD of "Rashomon." Two of the assistants are satisfied with his explanation, but the third leaves looking puzzled. What he doesn't understand is that while there is an explanation of the film's four eyewitness accounts of a murder, there is not a solution.
Kurosawa is correct that the screenplay is comprehensible as exactly what it is: Four testimonies that do not match. It is human nature to listen to witnesses and decide who is telling the truth, but the first words of the screenplay, spoken by the woodcutter, are "I just don't understand." His problem is that he has heard the same events described by all three participants in three different ways--and all three claim to be the killer.
"Rashomon" (1950) struck the world of film like a thunderbolt. Directed by Kurosawa in the early years of his career, before he was hailed as a grandmaster, it was made reluctantly by a minor Japanese studio, and the studio head so disliked it that he removed his name from the credits. Then it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, effectively opening the world of Japanese cinema to the West. It won the Academy Award as best foreign film. It set box office records for a subtitled film. Its very title has entered the English language, because, like "Catch-22," it expresses something for which there is no better substitute.
The first time I saw the film, I knew hardly a thing about Japanese cinema, and what struck me was the elevated emotional level of the actors. Do all Japanese shout and posture so? Having now seen a great many Japanese films, I know that in most of them the Japanese talk in more or less the same way we do (Ozu's films are a model of conversational realism). But Kurosawa was not looking for realism. From his autobiography, we learn he was struck by the honesty of emotion in silent films, where dialog could not carry the weight and actors used their faces, eyes and gestures to express emotion. That heightened acting style, also to be seen in Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" and several other period pictures, plays well here because many of the sequences are, essentially, silent.
Film cameras are admirably literal, and faithfully record everything they are pointed at. Because they are usually pointed at real things, we usually think we can believe what we see. The message of "Rashomon" is that we should suspect even what we think we have seen. This insight is central to Kurosawa's philosophy. The old clerk's family and friends think they've witnessed his decline and fall in "Ikiru" (1952), but we have seen a process of self-discovery and redemption. The seven samurai are heroes when they save the village, but thugs when they demand payment after the threat has passed. The old king in "Ran" (1985) places his trust in the literal meaning of words, and talks himself out of his kingdom and life itself.