champo

this is the best thing you’ll see all week. and it’s only monday, so that means it must involve werner herzog as the internal monologue of a plastic bag in ramin bahrani’s seriously excellent short film, Plastic Bag.

this is truly wonderful stuff (the fortunate result of a kismet between two like-minded filmmakers) and 18 minutes impeccably well-spent. you won’t regret it. even if you don’t have an easily explicable hetero lust for an old german filmmaker. yet.

david! you found it! oh my, day (+week?) made. i feel a great affinity to this bag - probably more than i do to say, characters in most of the films i have seen this year, minus a few. ah, plastic bag.

also, why was this not nominated last night? how do shorts nominations work, anyone? because i saw about two minutes of the awardwinning short and had to fastforward before it caused me to harm myself… whereas this…whereas this…

marcthesharc:

If Filmmakers Directed The Super Bowl (SlateV).

This is massively fantastic. And just perfect pairings:

Tarantino: A whole bunch of Super Bowls, with focus not on plot but on violence.

David Lynch: Giants-Pats (too bizarre for actual words and images).

Wes Anderson: Steelers-Cardinals (sentimental).

Jean-Luc Godard: Super Bowl I, Packers-Chiefs (unabashed love the extreme end of American culture).

Werner Herzog: Bears-Pats (most ferocious walloping, football red in tooth and claw).

UPDATE: my further suggestions:

Steven Spielberg: Jets-Colts (1969)

Alfred Hitchcock: Cowboys-Bills I (1993)

Spike Lee: Ravens-Giants (2000)

Judd Apatow: Redskins-Dolphins (1983)

its difficult to say which segment is most brilliant, but it must go to werner’s unedited reapplied talk about a different sort of bear.

The Race to Save Film Classics

garagestudio:

Martin Scorsese is not just the most avid cinephile, but also a passionate film preservationist. Three years ago Scorsese started the World Cinema Foundation to rescue neglected films from various corners of the world. And a year ago The Auteurs was bestowed with the honor of being a distribution partner for the foundation and offers four of the restored films for free in an online cinema. This growing interest and urgency in saving film has recently been covered by CNN.com’s The Screening Room in their article “Scorsese and friends race to save film classics from destruction”:

“Film preservation is always an uphill battle. There’s never enough time,” Scorsese said at Cannes last year.

“One has to think of history in the past 3,000 years, how much literature was lost. So, whatever we can do now, we’re going to save something.”

On a Scorsese related note be sure to check out our Martin Scorsese Mini-Retrospective: Music & Redemption.

final scene of pygmalion (1938) with leslie howard as higgins and wendy hillier as eliza. howard always annoyed me as sad-eyed ashley wilkes - i mean, who would ever chose him instead of rhett, please. but as higgins, i just love him…the character was always made so much less appealing to me because of rex harrison’s performance. i realize the difficulty of not wanting to give into the higgins more when watching mr howard here - if i were transformed eliza i would never leave 10 wimpole street - freddy sucks anyway. i love the expression on his face when she comes back in at the very end. love it.

wolfandfox:

durgapolashi:

Celebrating its 60th anniversary, The Third Man will be playing a two week run at Film Forum

cmasonwells:

Hein Heckroth, “The Ballet of the Red Shoes” (1948)

The zenith of Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece THE RED SHOES comes during its 17-minute ballet number, but Heckroth, a surrealist painter, was the one largely responsible for the famed sequence’s design. He made hundreds of oil paintings (like the one above) that were turned into an animated film, which in turn inspired the set-piece’s choreography and score.

maudite lunettes noirs!

(from varda’s cleo 5 a 7, pantomime film-in-film starring jean-luc godard and anna karina)

“ The iguanas are the best thing in the movie. And I must have five minutes of iguana time! And if I don’t have my full five minutes of iguana time, I will never make another movie again!

— Nicolas Cage quoting a Werner Herzog gem from the set of the inexplicably Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is incidentally the winner of the inaugural “why david is too busy frothing at the mouth to possibly sleep this week” award. (via theecstatictruth)

If there’s an extra ticket… would you go with me?