Maximilian Schell movie director (photo: Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell) (See previous post: “Maximilian Schell Dies: Best Actor Oscar Winner for ‘Judgment at Nuremberg.’”) Maximilian Schell’s first film as a director was the 1970 (dubbed) German-language release First Love / Erste Liebe, adapted from Igor Turgenev’s novella, and starring Englishman John Moulder-Brown, Frenchwoman Dominique Sanda, and Schell in this tale about a doomed love affair in Czarist Russia. Italian Valentina Cortese and British Marius Goring provided support. Directed by a former Best Actor Oscar winner, First Love, a movie that could just as easily have been dubbed into Swedish or Swahili (or English), ended up nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. Three years later, nominated in that same category was Schell’s second feature film as a director, The Pedestrian / Der Fußgänger, in which a car accident forces a German businessman to delve deep into his past.
- 2/2/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
From Beijing to Berlin, a roundup of some of the events that have been wowing the crowds around the world this year
Kabul, Afghanistan
Afghanistan's first female rapper, musicians from nine countries, and the premiere of Oscar-shortlisted drama Buzkashi Boys drew hundreds to Sound Central, an international music festival held in a city more used to hosting military or aid conferences. For the mostly young crowd, it was a rare chance to let their hair down: there is little entertainment here beyond picnics, visits to friends or video games and films watched at home.
Sri Lankan band Paranoid Earthling brought music from another country that has endured years of bitter civil war. A day with only female performers gave hundreds of women, often barred from mingling with men, a chance to enjoy the music and art. And Buzkashi Boys, shot in Afghanistan with an all-Afghan cast, premiered to an enthusiastic...
Kabul, Afghanistan
Afghanistan's first female rapper, musicians from nine countries, and the premiere of Oscar-shortlisted drama Buzkashi Boys drew hundreds to Sound Central, an international music festival held in a city more used to hosting military or aid conferences. For the mostly young crowd, it was a rare chance to let their hair down: there is little entertainment here beyond picnics, visits to friends or video games and films watched at home.
Sri Lankan band Paranoid Earthling brought music from another country that has endured years of bitter civil war. A day with only female performers gave hundreds of women, often barred from mingling with men, a chance to enjoy the music and art. And Buzkashi Boys, shot in Afghanistan with an all-Afghan cast, premiered to an enthusiastic...
- 12/6/2012
- by Emma Graham-Harrison, Jason Farago, Tania Branigan, David Smith, Tom Kington, Kate Connolly
- The Guardian - Film News
Sacha Baron Cohen's film joins Team America and The Producers in depicting despots as one-dimensional buffoons. But why are we obsessed with satirising tyrants – and is it right to find them funny?
Ever since His Excellency Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen, self-styled beloved oppressor and chief ophthalmologist of the People's Republic of Wadiya, inadvertently spilled Kim Jong-il's ashes over Ryan Seacrest's tux outside the Oscars, the world has had to deal with some pretty awkward questions.
What is it with our obsession with satirising dictators? Was Aristotle correct when he suggested that the right genre for dramatising bad men is comedy not tragedy, or should it be beneath us to find power-crazed nutjobs funny? Why can't Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays Aladeen (slogan: "Death To The West!") in the upcoming movie The Dictator, find some tougher targets? If it was wrong of the Sun to mock Roy Hodgson for his inability to pronounce rs,...
Ever since His Excellency Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen, self-styled beloved oppressor and chief ophthalmologist of the People's Republic of Wadiya, inadvertently spilled Kim Jong-il's ashes over Ryan Seacrest's tux outside the Oscars, the world has had to deal with some pretty awkward questions.
What is it with our obsession with satirising dictators? Was Aristotle correct when he suggested that the right genre for dramatising bad men is comedy not tragedy, or should it be beneath us to find power-crazed nutjobs funny? Why can't Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays Aladeen (slogan: "Death To The West!") in the upcoming movie The Dictator, find some tougher targets? If it was wrong of the Sun to mock Roy Hodgson for his inability to pronounce rs,...
- 5/15/2012
- by Stuart Jeffries
- The Guardian - Film News
Ludwig II… Stripp’d
0. The Challenge of Escapism
Like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), we live our lives obsessed by thoughts of escape. Escape from our jobs, escape from our relationships, escape from our friends and escape from a life dominated by work, travel and a raging torrent of TV dinners and talent shows that carries us all the way to our graves. Capitalism is the greatest prison of all because its walls are built not of bricks and mortar but of dreams and aspiration. The marketplace is saturated with opportunities to escape the mundane drudgery of our lives: Get a better job! Move to the country! Get plastic surgery! Get a better boyfriend! Get a better body! Dress like Cheryl Cole! We work impossible hours at impossible jobs in the hope that someday we might find a way of being another person in another place.
We want out.
0. The Challenge of Escapism
Like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), we live our lives obsessed by thoughts of escape. Escape from our jobs, escape from our relationships, escape from our friends and escape from a life dominated by work, travel and a raging torrent of TV dinners and talent shows that carries us all the way to our graves. Capitalism is the greatest prison of all because its walls are built not of bricks and mortar but of dreams and aspiration. The marketplace is saturated with opportunities to escape the mundane drudgery of our lives: Get a better job! Move to the country! Get plastic surgery! Get a better boyfriend! Get a better body! Dress like Cheryl Cole! We work impossible hours at impossible jobs in the hope that someday we might find a way of being another person in another place.
We want out.
- 10/1/2011
- by Jonathan McCalmont
- Boomtron
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