[Coronavirus Film Festival -- movies that suddenly became relevant!]

Today's New Yorker ...

A Critic at Large Our Fever for Plague Movies Hollywood loves nothing more than killing off humanity, but watching contagion films feels different now. By Anthony Lane

[Actor Michel Piccoli (1925-2020)]

I saw Piccoli in Themroc (1973) when it played at the very first Toronto International Film Festival and thought he was terrific.  I haven't seen it since and I suspect it may not have weathered as it wasn't terribly PC even back then.  It is about a man who "drops out" and literally turns his apartment into a cave.  If memory serves he even drags women back there too.

[HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM]

Tuesday, May 19

6 a.m.  The Mad Genius (1931).  With John Barrymore.

[Death Takes No Holiday -- The Obituary Thread]

Montreal's Monique Mercure dies at 89 after 60-year acting career

Author of the article:

Susan Schwartz  •  Montreal Gazette

Publishing date:

3 hours ago  •  2 minute read

  Monique Mercure arrives on the red carpet at the Monument National on St-Laurent Blvd. for TVA's Gala Artis in Montreal on April 25, 2010. She died at the age of 89 overnight on Saturday.TIM SNOW / The Gazette

 

The distinguished Canadian stage and screen actor Monique Mercure, who performed in more than 100 roles in French and English theatre in a career spanning more than 60 years, and appeared in dozens of films and several television series, has died at 89.

She died overnight Saturday at Maison St-Raphaël, a palliative-care centre in Outremont, of throat cancer.

On Sunday, there were tributes and messages of condolence on social media from friends, fellow artists and politicians, including Quebec Premier François Legault and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said Mercure “helped promote Quebec cinema beyond our borders and her legacy will live on through her work.”

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante tweeted that “on stage as on screen, big or small, Monique Mercure shone and marked our imagination, our culture and our history.”

Simon Brault, director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts, said his friend of 30 years was “fiery, brave and determined” and “she also had a sense of humour and self-deprecation far too rare in a world that takes itself so seriously.”

Born Marie Lise Monique Émond in Montreal on Nov. 14, 1930, Mercure studied music at l’École Vincent-d’Indy and dance with Ludmilla Chiriaeff. In 1949, she married the composer Pierre Mercure and they had three children before separating in 1958.

Although she studied drama in Paris at l’École Jacques-Lecoq in Paris and at the Montreal Drama Studio, she considered herself self-taught and said that experience was her teacher.

The Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia called Mercure “one of Canada’s great actors of the classical and modern repertory,” who performed in Quebec and France and in English in England, the United States and across Canada. Productions in which she had roles were as wide-ranging as Albertine en cinq temps by Michel Tremblay, La Mouette (The Seagull), by Anton Chekhov’s  L’hiver de force, by Réjean Ducharme, Molière’s Le Tartuffe de Molière and Les Troyennes/Trojan Women, by Euripides.

Her Canadian film credits include Mon oncle Antoine, by Quebec director Claude Jutra, the 1998 drama The Red Violin and J.A. Martin, photographe, which earned her the Palme d’or for best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her role as Rose-Aimée.

Directors with whom she worked in her international film career included Robert Altman, Claude Chabrol and David Cronenberg: She won a Genie for best supporting actress in Cronenberg’s 1991 science-fiction drama Naked Lunch and another for her role in Piers Haggard’s film Conquest.

On television, she played in Sous le signe du lion, Le retour, Innocence, Miséricorde, Monsieur le ministre, L’Héritage, Providence et Mémoires vives.

In 1993, Mercure received a Governor General’s performing arts award for lifetime achievement and the Prix Denise-Pelletier. Mercure was named to the Order of Canada as an Officer in 1977 and promoted to Companion in 1994. She was director of the National Theatre School from 1991 to 1997 and artistic director from 1997 to 2000. In 1998, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Toronto.

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

The winner of the 2019 Mar del Plata Film Festival Best International Picture was …

Fire Will Come (2019) Oliver Laxe, Spain

 

The winner of the 2019 Mar del Plata Film Festival Best Argentine Picture was …

Angelica (2019) Delfina Castagnino, Argentina

 

Co-winners of the 2018 Mar del Plata Film Festival Best Latin Picture were ….

I Never Climbed the Provencia (2019) Ignacio Aguero, Chile

The Fever (2019) Maya Da-Rin, Brazil

[Coronavirus Film Festival -- movies that suddenly became relevant!]

The Quiet Duel (1949).

A surgeon gets syphilis from a patient when he cuts himself during an operation. The doctor's life is destroyed, but unlike the patient, he doesn't destroy others along with him.

[HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM]

Monday, May 18

4:15 p.m.  The Omega Man (1971).  Dystopian Chuck Heston film that was scheduled before the recent pandemic hit our shores.

[Coronavirus Film Festival -- movies that suddenly became relevant!]

                                  

[HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM]

Sunday, May 17/18

3:45 a.m.  Vadim Mister Cool (2016).  Guaranteed to have a lot of beautiful women in it.

[15 Favorite American Actors and Actresses All Time.]

Robert De Niro

Jack Nicholson

Humphrey Bogart

Al Pacino

Marlon Brando

Gene Hackman

Robert Duvall

Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Spencer Tracy

Sean Penn

Anthony Quinn

James Cagney

Paul Newman

Jack Lemmon

Jeff Bridges

 

Mery; Streep

Katharine Hepburn

Bette Davis

Diane Keaton

Ellen Burstyn

Jessica Lange

Sissy Spacek

Jane Fonda

Julianne Moore

Faye Dunaway

Amy Adams

Irene Dunne

Annette Bening 

Thelma Ritter

Shirley Maclaine

 

I had to disqualify Olivia de Havilland and Claudette Colbert

[Movie lines you'd use as an epitaph--how morbid!]

"What the hell happened?"

[Coronavirus Film Festival -- movies that suddenly became relevant!]

Matt Corbin, a vacationing magazine writer, takes a fishing trip to Minnesota, and stumbles across a lake in which all the fish have mysteriously died. The locals are tight-lipped about it, but Corbin learns that a group of former-Nazis-turned-Communists have purchased a lodge on an island in the middle of the fish-killing lake, and have built some kind of laboratory. Never one to pass up a chance to sell a story to a magazine, Matt decides to investigate. His only ally is Janet Keller, the sister of the local doctor who has been caught up in whatever those nefarious Commie-Nazis are up to. What they are up to, with Soviet financing, is the development of diseases to use in bacteriological warfare against the United States, starting right there in Minnesota.

[HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM]

Saturday, May 16

8:08 a.m.  The Eyes Have It (1931).  Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy short.

 

10 a.m.  Popeye: Flies Ain’t Human (1941).

 

11:30 a.m.  Rufus Jones For President (1933).  Short subject with Ethel Waters and Sammy Davis Jr.

 

8 p.m.  The General (1925).  Buster Keaton’s masterpiece.

[Your Favourite Foreign Language Films]

1977

and I’ve also seen …

Moonlight Sword and Jade Lion (1977) Karl Liao, Taiwan

Double cheese please!   I should give this the benefit of the doubt and say perhaps this period martial arts film is for kids. Every thirty seconds or so a fight spontaneously erupts, usually no one gets hurt and then it ends just as inexplicably as it started.  This film also stole music from Morricone’s The Big Gundown.  It didn’t help any that I saw a dubbed version.

[Name An Outstanding Performance From An Actor You Don't Normally Think Is That Good]

Karlheinz Bohm as Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom (1960).

[Coronavirus Film Festival -- movies that suddenly became relevant!]

A doctor's already-shaky marriage is tested to an even greater extent when he has to contend with a smallpox epidemic.

[HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM]

Friday, May 15

James Mason Day!

9:45 a.m.  Lolita (1962).  Sorry Gregory Peck, but I thought James Mason gave the best performance this year.

[Name An Outstanding Performance From An Actor You Don't Normally Think Is That Good]

Kristie Alley in Deconstructing Harry (1997).

[Coronavirus Film Festival -- movies that suddenly became relevant!]

UK scientists find a cure for plague but their government, fearing its military-biological potential, keeps the discovery secret until a scientist is duped into giving it to a foreign power.

[HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM]

Thursday, May 14

Edward G. Robinson SOTM

8 p.m.  The Whole Town’s Talking (1935).  One of Eddy's best.

[Name An Outstanding Performance From An Actor You Don't Normally Think Is That Good]

James Belushi as Dr. Rock in Salvador (1986).

[Coronavirus Film Festival -- movies that suddenly became relevant!]

(1962) Terry-Thomas, Alex Nicol, Honor Blackman. A man's death of smallpox at London airport sends officials into a panic as they conduct a frantic search for the carrier. Nice performances and a good script. 35mm.

[HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM]

Wednesday, May 13

6:45 p.m.  The Expert (1932).  Haven’t seen this one and it looks interesting.  By Archie Mayo with Dickie Moore.

1:30 a.m.  Song of India (1949).  With Sabu and Gail Russell.

[Coronavirus Film Festival -- movies that suddenly became relevant!]

               

[HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM]

Tuesday, May 12

10 p.m.  A World Apart (1988).  Barbara Hershey, Jodi May and Linda Mvusi shared the Best Actress Award at Cannes for this.  Worth seeing.

Gaby A True Story was on the original schedule but not anymore.