Tsui Hark, one -time master of the golden age of Hong Kong Martial arts films is back! Detective Dee is a rollicking high fantasy glittering with baroque art direction, a stew of jaw dropping fight scenes, pulp detective trophies and outlandish wire -fu. Tsu was responsible for “Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain” “A Chinese Ghost Story” (1987), “Swordsman “(1990) and the “Once Upon a Time in China” trilogy.The handover of Hong Kong to China spelled the end of Honk Kong fantasy Wu Xia films. Directors like John Woo, Ringo Lam, Ronnie Yu and Tsui Hark went to the US,…
Author: Robin Menken
Robin Menken
Robin Menken Robin Menken lives in Los Angeles. She was the Artistic Director of the Second City Workshops, taught at UC Berkeley, USC, Barcelona\'s Ateneu and the Esalin Institute. She was Roberto Rossellini\'s assistant, and worked with Yevgeny Vevteshenku, Glauber Rocha and Eugene Ionesco. She sold numerous screenplays and wrote the OBIE winning The FTA SHow (touring with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and Ben Vereen.) She was a programming consultant and Special Events co-ordinator for numerous film festivals, including the SF, Rio, Havana and N.Y Film Festivals. Her first news outlet was the historic East Village Other.
Actress Vera Farmiga emerged from the Indie film scene (as Patricia Clarkson did a decade earlier) as one of our most cherished actresses, adept in both character and lead roles. She is characteristically marvelous in her roles as Corrine, but it is her directorial debut that is the real news. With the grace that marks her performances she breathes life into a cast of characters, making us forget that the film pursues a certain polemical question.Farmiga’s taken on a lot of issues: Faith versus doubt, the security of doctrine vs., individual spiritual growth, and even the place erotic desire plays…
Please indulge this reviewer as I write about Ennio Marchetto’s remarkable modern Quick Change show “The Living Paper Cartoon” which is delighting audiences for a mere seven performances at Pasadena’s jewel like “Pasadena Playhouse.” There are four remaining performances of this extremely goofy cabaret act. I urge you to see this.It’s a show driven by a series of pre-industrial stage tricks that puts Hollywood’s current crop of CG driven Special Effects to shame, reminding them and us what an inventive use of simple effects can do to tell a story.The rubber-bodied, giddily clownish 51-year-old Ennio parodies a cavalcade of pop…
Three of the films that highlight the 2011 Latin American Showcase, “Women on the Verge”, study the oft painful responsibilities of familial love.There must be something in the water- Argentina has exporting a crop of powerful, subjective film makers: Lucrecia Martel, who first grabbed international attention in 2001 with “La Cienega” (The Swamp (2001), followed by “The Holy Girl” and “The Headless Woman” emerged with a visual style that peeped at her characters from atypical intimate vantage points. A trick she uses in common with Claire Denis that is developing into part of the lexicon of a generation of female…
On August 21, Los Angeles Filmforum and LA 3D Club are delighted to welcome avant-garde stereoscopic filmmaker Ken Jacobs back to Los Angeles. Excerpts from Jacobs’s 3D work will be shown and projected in both anaglyph or 3D without spectacles. Selections will include excerpts from “New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903”(1975), “Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise”(2005), “Anaglyph Tom”(2008) and more recent experimental work with “Elbow Dance, Space Flaws” and “From Berkeley to San Francisco” (2010). The 3D screening will be punctuated with discussions and Q&A sessions between Jacobs, Filmforum’s Adam Hyman and film historian Ray Zone.Ken’s wife and collaborator Flo Jacobs will…
Writer, director, producer Jeff Prosserman’s “Chasing Madoff”, based on Harry Markopolis’s true financial thriller “No One Would Listen”, is a tense documentary of the dangerous, frustrating life of whistleblower Harry Markopolis, who spent over a decade trying to convince the SCC and members of the financial community and press that Bernard Madoff (then serving as Chairman of Nasdaq) was running the world’s largest Ponzi scheme. Like “Inside Job” and “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer” “Chasing Madoff” performs an autopsy on the unconscionable Financial Services industry that has lead the world to the brink of financial collapse.Prosserman’s…
The 2011 Feel Good Film Festival (FGFF) announced their hosts for the upcoming family-friendly film festival to take place at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood August 12-14. Valente Rodriguez, currently starring on TV Land’s “Happily Divorced”will help launch the weekend-long film festival as the Opening Night Gala host. Rizwan Manji, from NBC’s “Outsourced”will be the Master of Ceremonies for the FGFF Closing Night Awards ceremony. The three-day event features films aimed at both adult and family audiences that highlight positive themes, happy endings, laughter, and capture the beauty of the world. Valente Rodriguez will serve as the host for Opening Night presentation…
From August 12 – 18 at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, CA., Outsider Pictures presents the Second Annual Latin American Film Showcase: “Women on the Verge”, a series of five films sampling the latest outstanding work from one of the most exciting frontiers of contemporary world cinema: Latin America. Produced, written, directed or edited by up-and-coming and established Latin American female filmmakers, these films celebrate and embrace traditional Latino sensibilities and values while also exploring the realities of the human condition and the conflict created when these cannot be reconciled. At the core of each of these five…
Adapted from Camilo Castelo Branco’s eponymous nineteenth-century Portuguese novel, it has the grace and leisurely pace of 18th and 19th century literature and the visual momentousness of paintings of the same period.Ruiz’s fluid camera’s circular moves recall Ophuls or Renoir. Often time we watch tableau like sequences that seem to be quotes of unknown classical paintings. Characters posed in a tight doorway, behind them in deep focus are garden vistas, or sections of a ballroom, all suffused with a strange narrative tension. Sometimes the camera moves latterly, tracking from room to room and back, each time someone else is in…
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ summer screening series, “Summer of Silents: Photoplay Award Winners of the Silent Era” is drawing to a close.”The series kicked off on Monday, June 13, with a big-screen presentation of “Humoresque” (1920) with live musical accompaniment. On June 20th the Academy presented Henry King’s “Tol’able David” (1921) with the Harold Lloyd short “Never Weaken” (1921).Frank Borzage’s 1927 “7th Heaven”, starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. The film won three Oscars: “Best Actress in a Leading Role” -Janet Gaynor, “Best Director, Dramatic Picture”-Frank Borzageand “Best Writing, Adaptation”-Benjamin Glazer. Harry Oliver was nominated for…