A look back at Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989)

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) – written as well as produced by the filmmaker, and starring Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, and Lee himself – is one of the greatest films of all time, according to Far Out Magazine. Regardless, the racially charged release was only nominated in two categories at that year’s Academy Awards (Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay), winning neither. Some critics said the movie could “incite black audiences to riot,” to which Lee responded, “I don’t remember people saying people were going to come out of theatres killing people after they watched Arnold Schwarzenegger films.”

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This drama is the quintessential film noir, according to “The New York Times”

Between the programming on Turner Classic Movies, the Columbia Noir series currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, film noir has found itself part of the contemporary critical conversation again, according to The New York Times. It is difficult, if not impossible, to define noir, if for no other reason than that it transcends genre, but critic Ben Kenigsberg says Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), which is streaming on Criterion’s Columbia Noir series, is a “place for getting a handle on what noir is.” Kenigsberg writes, “It has elements of murder mystery, melodrama and Hollywood insider scoop.”

A piano crashing to the ground 120 years ago this month inspires a Laurel and Hardy movie

James Parrott’s The Music Box (1932), a half-hour Laurel and Hardy short, premiered April 16, 1932, according to The Post-Standard. In the slapstick duo’s masterpiece, Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel play a couple of bumbling furniture movers who deliver a player-piano to a wealthy man’s house (Professor Theodore von Schwartzenhoffen, M.D., A.D., D.D.S., F.L.D., F-F-F-and-F (Billy Gilbert)). The film earned Stan and Ollie their first Academy Award, and it debuted almost thirty-two years to the day when a pair of Syracuse deliverymen brought down a chimney with the weight of their pulleys while delivering a piano on April 22, 1900.

The regressive narrative of the male auteur and the female muse

With the passing of Anna Karina earlier this month, her inevitable immortalization as Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic muse ignores her other screen credits, her music, her theatre, her filmmaking, her writing, and that she often elevated Godard’s work, according to The Guardian. François Truffaut once said of Catherine Deneuve, “I wouldn’t compare her to a flower or a bouquet, since there is a certain neutrality in her that leads me to compare her to the vase in which all the flowers are placed,” which summarizes the dynamic between auteurs and muses.  As female filmmakers like Joanna Hogg collaborate with men like Tom Hiddleston, one cannot help but wonder if the male muse will be the next filmic trend, or if female authorship will be more egalitarian.

The silent film that encouraged Jews to celebrate Christmas

 

 

Moving Picture World reports that rabbis who attended the Manhattan premiere of the film in the days leading up to Christmas 1913 approved of its narrative, but not the title. (Image Courtesy: The Forward).

Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber’s The Jew’s Christmas (1913), a half-hourlong, three-reel picture written by Weber, is the first American film with a rabbi as a character, but represents its Jewish cast as intolerant of Christians and in need of assimilation, according to The Forward. Smalley himself plays Rabbi Isaac, but husband-and-wife filmmaking team Smalley and Weber were both Gentiles, and Carl Laemmle, the president of Universal Pictures at the time who greenlit the production, was Jewish. Weber would go on to become the first woman to direct a feature-length movie, The Merchant of Venice (1914), in the United States.

With more women directing, BBC heralds new golden age of cinema

French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop’s feature debut, Atlantics (2019), made her the first black female director to compete for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. (Image Courtesy: BBC).

When BBC Culture polled the greatest films directed by women, only nine of the top twenty-five were released before 1990, and a fifth of the top one hundred are dated 1999, 2008, 2014, or 2017, which seems to be symptomatic of a new filmmaking golden age, according to BBC News. Australian critic and Hollywood-based presenter Alicia Malone says the rise of independent film in the 1990s democratized moviemaking, as newer, smaller studios allocated more risk-averse budgets and high-definition consumer video cameras to previously unheard of artists. Tricia Tuttle, the artistic director of the BFI London Film Festival, says it’s still too soon to know whether we’re in a golden age or not, but with four out of the five female nominees for the Best Director Academy Award being nominated after 1990, change is here.

“Cahiers du Cinéma” lists David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017) as greatest film of the decade

Cahiers du Cinéma, the oldest French-language film magazine in the world as well as one of the most prestigious movie publications in any tongue, has named David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) as the greatest film of the 2010s, according to IndieWire. Lynch is the only American filmmaker to appear on their end-of-the-decade top-ten list, but it has ignited a debate over whether Twin Peaks: The Return, which was written as a single feature script, should be counted as film or television, since it aired on Showtime over eighteen episodes. André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca founded Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951, and writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut would go on to mold the French New Wave, with Éric Rohmer serving as editor in 1957.

Museum exhibit in Washington, D.C., explores history of black filmmaking through movie posters

Arthur Dreifuss’s Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941), named after a major thoroughfare in Harlem, was a gangster picture inspired by Othello, and one of the many “race films” marketed to black audiences between 1916 and 1956. (Image Courtesy: DCist).

Since November 22, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has been hosting the exhibit Now Showing, which will be featured at the Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts gallery until November 2020, according to DCist. It is made up of more than forty movie posters and lobby cards from the Larry Richard Collection, a cache of more than seven hundred posters the museum acquired in 2013, and an app will play film clips and curator interviews for museum visitors in a classic theater setting. Curator Rhea Combs says posters from before the 1980s were works of art.

Palm Springs International Film Festival: Antonio Banderas to earn International Star Award

Antonio Banderas will be honored with the thirty-first annual Palm Springs International Film Festival’s International Star Award, Actor, for his performance in Pedro Almódovar’s Pain and Glory (2019), at the Palm Springs Convention Center Film Awards Gala, according to Deadline. Jennifer Lopez (Spotlight Award), Joaquin Phoenix (Chairman’s Award), Martin Scorsese (Sonny Bono Visionary Award), Charlize Theron (International Star Award, Actress), and Renée Zellweger (Desert Palm Achievement Award, Actress), will also be recognized January 2. Past recipients of the International Star Award include Javier Barden, Nicole Kidman, Helen Mirren, Gary Oldman, as well as Saoirse Ronan, and the festival will run from January 2 to January 13, 2020.

US Justice Department strikes down landmark “Paramount Decree” after seventy years

As part of his review of legacy antitrust decisions (up next is a 1941 music royalties decree) since his appointment in 2017, Makan Delrahim, the chief of the United States Department of Justice’s antitrust division, struck down the Paramount Decree, according to the Financial Times. The 1948 competition case began as a 1938 price-fixing and monopolization lawsuit against eight Hollywood film companies; the outcome regulated the divestiture between distribution and theater ownership, as well as the practice of studios dictating minimum ticket prices. Delrahim told an American Bar Association antitrust conference in Washington online streaming services have changed exhibition over the last eighty years, but the Independent Cinema Alliance says this move will hurt smaller theater chains.