Casino Royale, which gave the James Bond franchise a good shot in the arm, is being released this week on
DVD, and so why not mention a new James Bond podcast.
Cinematical has issued its first Bondcast that’s filled with news, rumors, speculations, stories and general minutiae about all things Bond. They”ll have a new episode every two weeks, and, reader be warned, the hosts are fairly over the top in their idolization of Bond. And you may need to be as reverential to enjoy the ride.
It’s old news that the Sundance Film Festival has gone corporate. Some still protest that fact.
Others accept it, seeing it as an unavoidable reality in an era when even our sports stadiums bear corporate names. And yet still others choose to focus on the good that comes along with the bad. One upside to the corporatization of Sundance is the slick media that the festival organizers have made freely available on iTunes this year. Since the festival started on January 18th, Sundance has released a series of video podcasts on iTunes that feature directors and screenwriters talking candidly about their newly released films. Most of these videos run 3–4 minutes in duration. However there are a couple offerings that last a good hour. Generally speaking, you’ll want to have a nice broadband connection to make these downloads fairly quick and painless, and, from there, you can either sync them to your iPod, or just watch them on your desktop with iTunes (you can download iTunes for free here).
Separately, iTunes is also making available for a small fee ($1.99 each) a total of 32 short films that have been presented at this year’s festival. But, let us offer you this small tip: these videos can be streamedat no cost from the Sundance web site.
Finally, on to YouTube. The poster child of the Web 2.0 movement, YouTube has created a channel dedicated to the Sundance festival. And here visitors can find daily video coverage of the festival, interviews with filmmakers, and video blogs that capture the festival experience from the vantage point of independent filmmakers. To give you a feel for what you’ll find in the YouTube channel, we’ve posted a sample video, which features filmmaker Arin Crumley reviewing (with some salty language, hence caveat emptor) the short films shown on Day 2 of the festival:
Oodles of print have been written about Sacha Baron Cohen’s film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” And there’s perhaps not a great deal more to say about it, other than it’s remarkable how well the film has been received by America’s cultural establishment. Edgy, shock comedy that uses racial and gender stereotypes to subvert racial and gender stereotypes usually doesn’t go down so well with highbrow critics. But, in this case it did. The Washington Post called the film “a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high- and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, … [and] sexism.” (Platonic ideal? Borat?) Of the film, The New York Times said “The brilliance of ‘Borat’ is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.” Then, we heard Terry Gross, of NPR’s Fresh Air, gush over the comic in her amusing interview with Baron Cohen. And lastly, the British comic has been nominated for an Oscar by Hollywood’s film elite.
If any further proof was needed that Baron Cohen has been embraced by the cultural vanguard, then let this video serve as final witness. In 2004, Harvard invited Baron Cohen to speak at “Class Day,” the big traditional event that takes place the day before commencement. And here you get him speaking to students and parents not as Baron Cohen, but as Ali G., all in a light-hearted way. (For more on this visit, see the article in the Harvard Gazette.)
Robert Altman has died at 81, leaving behind a legacy of ambitious films. After making his mark with MASH in 1970, Altman’s career moved along in fits and starts. He would give us The Long Goodbye in 1973, Nashville in 1975, unfortunately Popeye in 1980 (and nothing else too remarkable during the 1980s), then two career-reviving films, The Player and Short Cuts, in 1992 & 1993, and Gosford Park in 2001. Despite being a five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, Altman never received an Oscar until this past year, when he received a lifetime achievement award, recognizing his distinctive film-making style. Glimpses into discrete slices of American life (Hollywood, the country music scene, the fashion world, etc.), large casts, long improvised scenes, complex mosaics of characters — these were all trademarks of Altman’s filmmaking, and what his legacy will call to mind.
Janus Films has spent the last 50 years bringing classic foreign films to American audiences, exposing them to the works of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and François Truffaut, among others. To celebrate its half-century anniversary, the film distribution company has done something pretty remarkable. It has released on DVD a collection of 50 classic films, which include Black Orpheus (Camus), M (Fritz Lang), The 400 Blows (Truffaut), Grand Illusion (Renoir), Seven Samurai (Kurosawa), The Seventh Seal (Bergman), La Strada (Fellini), and The 39 Steps (Hitchcock). You’ll love the Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films if you’re a diehard film buff, but not if you’re light in the wallet. Even when bought at a discount of $650, the collection still runs a hefty hunk of change. But it’s nothing that a home equity loan can’t fix.
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Casino Royale, which gave the James Bond franchise a good shot in the arm, is being released this week on
