FrancoisTruffaut Tagged Articles at Cinematical
400 Screens, 400 Blows - 'Wild' Man Truffaut
Filed under: Classics », Foreign Language », Columns », 400 Screens, 400 Blows »
400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.
A small distributor called The Film Desk has one film in release on just a couple of U.S. movie screens. It has received very little notice from anywhere in the press or the blogosphere. It's an older film, from 1970. It's considered to be something of a classic, but it's not really one of the essential classics, nor is it one of those "unsung" or "forgotten" classics. It's currently available on DVD, so no big gaps have been filled in. I'm not even sure to what extent, if at all, the new print has been restored. But, due to lack of a press screening, I went to see it last Friday with an audience, and it made my week.
What's the Deal With: French Thrillers in 2008
Filed under: Action », Classics », Drama », Foreign Language », New Releases », Box Office », Distribution »
Maybe you've seen them, maybe you haven't, but French thrillers are making a comeback in North America. That's good news for people uninterested in art houses solely for the sake of watching foreign films: You don't have to be a Francophile to appreciate smart, meticulously generated suspense, and that's exactly the appeal of several French movies hitting American theaters this year. A steady mixture of warm reviews and positive word-of-mouth appears to have helped Guillame Canet's breathlessly entertaining drama Tell No One land an impressive $240,858 at 18 locations. Earlier this year, veteran auteur Claude Lelouch, long known for his cinematic explorations of eroticism and lawbreaking, remained thematically consistent with a delightfully complex story of double-crossing novelists and dysfunctional families called Roman de Gare. The movie made over $25,000 on two New York screens when it opened in late April, and eventually pulled in more than $1.5 million after expanding to theaters around the country. It's not hard to argue that Tell No One and Roman de Gare put most recent American thrillers to shame. North America, once the haven of film noir, appears to be outsourcing.
As journalist Erica Abeel recently observed in an interview with Canet, "French filmmakers are currently making the best old-style Hollywood thrillers." It's not the first time for a country that has a long history of borrowing from American cinema, and often improving on it. At the beginning of the French New Wave in the early 1960s, former Cahiers du Cinema critics like Jean Luc-Godard discovered Hollywood genre films and decided to make their own loopy versions. The results were often strangely philosophical and experiment works, ranging from Godard's Breathless to François Truffaut's ambitious Shoot the Piano Player.
DVD Review: Bonnie and Clyde (Special Edition)
Filed under: Warner Brothers », DVD Reviews », Home Entertainment »
Where exactly does Bonnie and Clyde rank in the American pantheon? It's a bona-fide classic, to be sure. It placed on the American Film Institute's Top 100 in 1998 and again in 2007. It's also on the IMDB's Top 250 list. Upon closer inspection, however, it's far more than a perfect, polished gemstone. Rather, it's a bundle of contradictions. Everyone knows that it was a groundbreaking film of its day, the first to incorporate a new kind of violence and moral complexity into the mainstream. But screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman borrowed these elements directly from French New Wave films like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959) and Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960). In fact, Truffaut was the first director approached for the project. Despite this, Bonnie and Clyde somehow transcends time. More than just a moldy relic of the 1960s, it has aged much better and is far more watchable today than, say, Easy Rider (1969) or even The Graduate (1967).
LaBute Will Write a Redo of 'The Woman Next Door'
Filed under: Drama », Romance », Deals », New Line », Scripts », Remakes and Sequels »
He's been gone for over 20 years, but now François Truffaut's work is once again heading to the big screen. Well, sort of. Variety reports that New Line is remaking his 1981 film, The Woman Next Door (La Femme d'a cote). Neil LaBute, the pen behind In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty, and The Wicker Man, will handle adapting the film, while Oscar-winner Taylor Hackford (Against All Odds, Ray) has signed on to direct. This will be the first time LaBute writes a feature for someone else. Now of course, he won't begin writing until the WGA strike is over, but Variety says he couldn't resist the offer, which came after Hackford and wife Helen Mirren saw LaBute's play, Wrecks.I understand being allured by great projects, but it seems like making big writing deals while you're striking is really defeating the purpose. I wonder if he'll start writing it now, but only "officially" start later. Anyway, LaBute says: "This is a lesser-known Truffaut film about ex-lovers, long separated, who suddenly find themselves living next door to each other. Each is married. Neither tells their spouse they know each other, and it's a collision course into disaster as they rekindle a volatile relationship, with great passion and suspense. ...Taylor said if he was ever going to remake a movie, this was the one he could do something with." That's not surprising, considering the possibilities with the urges of temptation and rekindling of lust. The original starred Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant as the trysters, but who would you cast in a modern-day, English version?
Get Ready For the Mother of All DVD Box Sets
Filed under: Classics », Foreign Language », New Releases », Distribution », Newsstand », Home Entertainment », Cinematical Indie »
Everyone has a different opinion regarding the greatest films in history. Since half the fun is in the arguing, pity the poor cinephile who thinks they've got it all figured out. A new DVD box set from Criterion and Janus may not claim to have finally compiled the greatest films ever, but they've gotten off to a pretty good start.Janus was a distribution company founded in 1956 by Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey. They had been showing foreign films in their Massachusetts theater for a few years before becoming the premiere distributors of foreign films in the US. Janus has teamed with their sister company Criterion to create Essential Art House: 50 Years Of Janus Film. This whopper of a collection is now available and includes films from directors like Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel and Akira Kurosawa -- you can read about Criterion's remastered Seven Samurai here. In total, this box set contains 50 different films, numerous extras, and a 240-page book with an introduction written by Martin Scorsese. Most of these films have been available through Criterion for years, but not in one collection.
All of this film history doesn't come cheap though, the set has a retail price of $850. If that seems a little excessive, don't worry; Criterion is also planning on releasing individual discs from the series as well.
[via CNN Entertainment]
Truffestival, New Delhi
Filed under: Classics », Foreign Language », Fandom », Other Festivals », Cinematical Indie »
In case anyone is headed to India this weekend, New Delhi's South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce Auditorium (whew) will be hosting a Truffaut festival from Sept. 3-7, hosted by the French Embassy, the Alliance Francaise of Madras, and the Madras Film Society.
They will be showing the full Antoine Doinel cycle, Two English Girls, The Last Metro (for which he reunited with former love, muse and current head-juror over at the Venice Film Fest this year, Catherine Deneuve after 8 years of little-to-no contact), and The Woman Next Door (starring his wife, final muse and mother of his child, Fanny Ardant -- the movie itself, meanwhile, concerns Truffaut's resurgence of feelings after reuniting with Deneuve in Metro). Both Metro and Women feature Gerard Depardieu, by the way, and both have earned the distinction of a place on my DVD rack.
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