AgnesVarda Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Bunches of "B" news for you:

• When trying to bring together many years of life, one will often focus on a certain aspect that links it all. For the 80-year-old French filmmaker Agnès Varda, that is beaches. Variety reports that she has a new documentary feature on the way called Les plages d'Agnes. She says of the film: "If you open people, you'll find landscapes. In my case, you'll find beaches." How sandy! Roissy Films has picked up the doc's overseas rights, and the film will screen at Berlinale this year.
• Meanwhile, Variety has posted that Toshiaki Karasawa is going to head up Toho's science fiction trilogy 20th Century Boy. With a solid $57 million budget (which sounds much more impressive as 6 billion yen), the film will shoot in a number of countries, from the US to China, with the first flick to be released on August 30. Based on the comic by Naoki Urasawa, Boy focuses on the creepy premise of "a store manager (Karasawa) who wrote a prediction about the end of the world when he was a teenager, which seems to be coming true." The project also features Etsushi Toyokawa and Takiko Tokiwa.
• To wrap things up, there's some more Ballast news for you. It already got a solid review from our James Rocchi at Sundance, and an international deal with Celluloid Dreams. Now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the stateside rights have been picked up by IFC. With a deal in the six-figure range, the company will give the film a day-and-date release through First Take, IFC network, and VOD. It may be a dark and heavy piece of cinema, but it still looks worth the time. However, there's no word, yet, on a release date.

Oscar season is upon us and with it comes the discussion of film legends who never won an Academy Award. While on this topic, it is important to acknowledge how many great producers are ignored by Oscar due to the fact that foreign films are rarely nominated for Best Picture. Carlo Ponti was such a great producer, and with his death today, he misses the opportunity of ever receiving an Academy Award, even a lifetime achievement honor.

Ponti is not well known, but he should be. Aside from the fact that he discovered Sophia Loren, whose film career he jump-started and who he married (twice -- kind of), he also produced films for many of the masters of cinema, including Antonioni (Blow Up; Zabriskie Point; The Passenger), Fellini (La Strada), de Sica (basically any of his starring Loren), Demy (Lola), Godard (A Woman is a Woman; The Riflemen; Contempt), Polanski (What?), Melville (Le Doulos; The Forgiven Sinner), Forman (The Fireman's Ball), Varda (Cléo from 5 to 7) and Lean (Doctor Zhivago). Some of his films were nominated for the foreign language Oscar, and a couple won the award, but Ponti was only nominated once, for Zhivago, in the Best Picture category (which is oftentimes considered the Best Producer category). Of course, he did get to help his wife win an Oscar, at least -- for de Sica's Two Women.