skimpole

Thanks. There aren't that many films next month that I was looking to, so it's nice that the few I was looking forward to aren't going to be gone.

Arguably it might be a better idea to broadcast the original BBC series. Incidentally, Gibson apparently helped Downey quite a lot here, showing faith in him when he was otherwise uninsurable and unemployable, and helping revive his career.

I recall that The Best Years of Our Lives ends with Dana Andrews finding true love with a second marriage. How many happy divorces are there in pre-1970 movies?

I don't have the exact line, but in Lang's Spies, the villian says he is as "wealthy as Ford" but pays considerably "less in taxes."

I saw five movies over the last two weeks, and they were a fairly respectable bunch. The Bad Sleep Well was a tough intelligent thriller by Akira Kurosawa, with Toshiro Mifune giving an effective low-key performance. I'm not a really big fan of the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, but Winter Sleep was the first movie of his I really warmed to as he shows the failures of a quasi-intellectual as both a husband and a local landlord, much of which is presented in a series of intelligent conversations. I read Young Torless back in the nineties, and I'm afraid I don't remember it very well, and the fact that I paid only peripheral attention to the movie when it was on television meant that it had only a limited effect. If A Damsel in Distress isn't quite of the same calibre as the same year's Shall we Dance, it does have a charming Joan Fontaine, amusing comic relief from Gracie Allen, and a wonderful set piece in a fun house. Noah isn't entirely successful, with perhaps too much taken from The Lord of the Rings and some unimaginative confrontations towards the end. But the beginning actually shows an interesting use of CGI while Aronofsky's presentation of the legend is both theologically interesting and genuinely strange.

This strikes me as unfair, since the main reason that Stewart and Novak didn't win for Vertigo was because Hollywood didn't appreciate it, while condescension towards thrillers and preference to middlebrow blockbusters explains why Notorious, Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest didn't win.

This information from Quora tells us about who has actually directed the most academy award winning performances: http://www.quora.com/What-director-has-directed-the-most-actors-to-Oscar-winning-performances Here are the figures: Directors with Most Acting Nominations 36 - William Wyler, 24 - Elia Kazan, 21 - George Cukor, 20 - Martin Scorsese, 20 - Fred Zinnemann, 18 - Sidney Lumet, 18 - George Stevens, 18 - Mike Nichols, 17 - Billy Wilder, 16 - Stanley Kramer, 18- Woody Allen, 15 - John Huston. Directors with Most Acting Awards 14 - William Wyler, 9 - Elia Kazan, 6 - Fred Zinnemann, 7- Woody Allen, 5 - John Ford, 5 - Martin Scorsese, 5 - Clint Eastwood, 5 - George Cukor, 4 - Jonathan Demme, 4 - Victor Fleming, 4 - John Huston, 4 - Sidney Lumet, 4 - Hal Ashby, 4 - James L. Brooks. But who should have actually won the most oscars? Confining myself to lead performances only, here's my choice: Hitchcock (5) Bergman, Hawks, Kiarostami, (4) Donen, Dreyer, Kubrick, Polanski, Satyajit Ray, Rivette, Scorsese, (3)

Has anyone else read Raphael Samuel's criticism of the 1987 Little Dorritt, which has some nice things to say in contrast to the enormous Nicholas Nickleby production?

I too agree that David Niven should have a star of the month, though I'm disappointed we don't have Death on the Nile. We do have what I believe is the TCM premiere of A Clockwork Orange, though not The Shining. We have a large assortment of movies by female directors. Oddly enough we don't have Daisies, and I would prefer other movies by Gillian Armstrong. I believe the showing of La Chienne is a premiere, and we see Andrei Rublev for the first time in some years.

I've got nothing either way.

Well's here's one in poor taste: Mr. Garrison: Well, I'm sorry, Wendy, but I just don't trust something that bleeds for five days and doesn't die. (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.)

I saw four movies this week. Bed and Sofa was the best of them, with this Soviet silent movie having a particular sexual frankness that would not really be seen again until its end. Lyudmila Semyonova's portrayal of the woman at the center of the triangle is particularly worth noting. Donkey Skin is certainly a movie made by an auteur, since only an auteur would make a fairy tale movie that children couldn't actually watch. While interesting visually, the score is less distinguished than in his two earlier movies, nor is the story as involving as Lola or Bay of Angels. This Happy Breed was one of David Lean's first movies, and I'm afraid this adaptation of a Noel Coward play is closer to Cavalcade in supporting the assumptions of its well-healed audience than in getting the effect of Brief Encounter. Finally there's Magic in the Moonlight, which while not a bad movie, and while some have seen more depths to Emma Stone and Colin Firth's performances does seem rather predictable in Allen's clashes between faith and reason, pessimism and optimism and love and rationality.

The Brothers Karamazov: Fyodor Karamazov: Gene Hackman Dimitri Karamazov: Tom Cruise Ivan Karamazov: Ralph Fiennes Alexei "Alyosha" Karamazov: Johnny Depp Smerdyakov: Steve Buscemi Father Zosima: Paul Scofield The Grand Inquistor: Clint Eastwood

Would Barry Lyndon have been a better film if the lead had been played, as was apparently possible at some point, by Robert Redford instead of Ryan O'Neal? Or would it have just been more popular?

Looking at theyshootpictures.com top 1000 movies, the following are the highest rating missing on DVD: A Brighter Summer Day The Mother and the ------ The Travelling Players Celine and Julie Go Boating Then there are all the movies that were on New Yorker DVD when that company went bankrupt. Good to see that The Confession is now on DVD.

I also agree with classicsuz. Lancaster's performance is so remarkable that one forgets that it isn't actually his voice. Aside from being on the Criterion disc, the dubbed version appeared several years ago on AMC, and the little I saw of it was not at all inspiring.

Jake LaMotta is still alive? That is kind of weird.

I'll second The Sweet Hereafter, and I like My Winnipeg.

This topic may have occured before, and even more likely the title. Last week I saw a sitcom where a character tried to get a former girlfriend back by subtly undermining her current boyfriend. As one might expect this blew up in his face, but it led me to wonder about the techniques movie characters use to get their lovers. Now some romantic comedies have unhappy endings (Annie Hall, Manhattan), others have gheir lovers already happily connected (The Thin Man), while in others the plot isn't so much winning the other as having them fall in love in the first place (It Happened One Night) There are romances where the couple faces serious exernal obstacles, such as the malevolent prince in The Princess Bride or the unlucky scientist who reveals that Daryl Hannah is a mermaid in Splash. Of course in movies that are not romantic comedies lovers can act rather violently--Teresa Clare murders Alec D'Urbeville in Tess and is hanged for it at the end of the movie. But what are the most amoral measures in the movies that people have successfully used to win their lovers? I'm inclined to think of Cary Grant's ruthless persuction of Ralph Bellamy in His Girl Friday and Lee Tracy's manipulations in Bombshell. Any other ideas?

I saw four movies last week, and surprisingly all of them were worth watching. The Emigrants isn't as good as Here's Your Life, and the version shown on TCM had an appalling English language dubbing job. And the confrontation between the bigoted official clergymen and the former prostitute did not win any points for subtlety. But the long voyage across the Atlantic does show a certain power. Jeremiah Johnson was also interesting with a downbeat theme suitable to its subject matter that Hollywood probably wouldn't try today. The Immigrant is certainly better than the last James Gray film I saw. While this story of a Polish immigrant suborned into prostitution doesn't make clear the brutality of the trade the way Vivre sa Vie so memorably did with such concision, (or even the much lesser film Ken Russell whose title I can't give because the auto-censor will cancel it), it does have a degree of dignity and intelligence. Marion Cotillard is impressive, bur arguably Joaquin Phoenix is even better as her pimp who under his manipulative patter and apparent ease of corruption reveals both flashes of violence and even more surprisingly, the vestiges of a conscience. But the best movie of the week is clearly Inside Out which, if not the most profound movie about childhood, shows remarkably inventiveness and beauty, as well as considerable wit and fine vocal performances from the quintet of voices in her head.

Madhabi Mukherjee

Seriously, we haven't had these yet? Casablanca Ugarte: You despise me, don't you? Rick: If I gave you any thought I probably would.

I liked The Innocent. It would be nice if TCM showed it.

Away from Her. Arguably Atlantic City is a Canadian film, or a French-Canadian production, notwithstanding its French director, American stars, and American setting. David Cronenberg is arguably the greatest of Canadian directors, and Videodrome and Dead Ringers are arguably his best Canadian films.

J. Hoberman, long time and former Village Voice critic, now DVD reviewer for the New York Times.