the english patient Tagged Articles at Cinematical

• Paul Scofield (1922-2008) - British actor (pictured) who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons and who was nominated again almost thirty years later for his supporting role in Quiz Show. He also co-stars in Frankenheimer's The Train, Branagh's Henry V, Zeffirelli's Hamlet, Hytner's The Crucible and Michael Winner's Scorpio, and he played the title role in Peter Brook's King Lear. He narrated the documentaries London and Robinson in Space and voiced the part of Akira Kurosawa in the documentary Kurosawa. He died of leukemia March 19, in West Sussex, England. (NY Times)
• Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) - Oscar-nominated screenwriter of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Best known as a science fiction author, he wrote the novel-turned-film 2010, and his novels Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End are also currently being adapted. See Richard's full post for details of his death.
• Hugo Claus (1929-2008) - Belgian filmmaker, novelist and playwright. He wrote the screenplay for the 1958 Oscar nominee Dorp Aaan De Rivier and his directorial work includes the Berlin Film Festival nominee Vrijdag and an adaptation of his play De Verlossing. He died March 19 in Antwerp, Belgium. (BBC)

Just the other day, I was writing about how Anthony Minghella and Richard Curtis' The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency was heading to HBO, rather than the big screen. And today, I'm sad to report that the Oscar-winning director has passed away at the age of 54. The AP (via USA Today) has confirmed his passing through his agent, but no other details are currently available.

After starting in television back in the 1980s, Anthony Minghella made his big-screen debut with Truly Madly Deeply in 1990. It was his next writer/director effort, however, that brought him real fame. In 1996, he brought us the big-screen version of The English Patient, which brought him an Oscar win and a lot of notoriety. This achievement was followed by The Talented Mr. Ripley (another Oscar nod), Cold Mountain, and Breaking and Entering.

These days, he had been busy with the Botswanian detective story, plus a short for New York, I Love You, and The Ninth Life of Louis Drax. He is survived by his wife, Carolyn Choa, and his children, Max Minghella and Hannah Minghella.

He will be deeply missed.

When I watched The English Patient, I recall entering a languid dreamy state ... bored stiff by repressed people and their repression. I can tell you the five minutes it had me riveted for, though -- Willem Dafoe, unwrapping his bandages, explaining that he had found the man who took his thumbs and killed him ... and now he was going to kill the man who told the man who took his thumbs where to find him. I swear to god, during that scene I wanted to cry out: "Uh, could I watch that movie right now? The one with Dafoe and Prochnow running around post-war Africa trying to kill each other? Because I'm not digging the poetry readings and mopiness. ..."

Well, I'm never going to get that movie, but this week's best new trailer made me feel like I was going to get something close to it. I've been looking forward to The Good German for a while now, and now I cannot wait -- this baby looks good, to a degree that almost seems to guarantee some level of heartbreak. I'm hoping that isn't the case, and while I think the trailer's cribbing from The Third Man almost as much as the poster evokes Casablanca, I also think there are far worse movies to follow in the giant footsteps of.

What trailer's got you excited recently?

J.

Sand is an easy metaphor for time, and a pretty obvious one, too, but that doesn't mean a film can't succeed despite milking the metaphor for all its worth. Stories set exclusively in the desert have a lot of sand to work with, after all, and not much else. The House of Sand, which takes place in the area of northern Brazil now known as Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, an area that isn't a desert but has many of the characteristics of one, shows that living amidst sand and more sand can be so monotonous that perhaps counting the grains to pass the time is sometimes all one has.

Of course, no one actually counts sand in the film, but the grains are used to show time passing, whether in such a blatant shot as the close-up of sand trickling down the side of a dune or in more narrative-essential imagery like the shifting appearance of the landscape. Fortunately the film doesn't actually consist of people sitting around waiting for the scenery to change, either. Instead, The House of Sand plays out over the course of almost sixty years, and its progression of time is primarily, and more significantly, marked by man's advancements in science and technology, with their ability to seemingly make the world, and the universe, smaller.