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  Easy Rider

  by Sancar

  Laszlo Kovacs, a Hungarian cinematographer who fell in love with the American landscape on a cross-country bus ride and then used light, shadow and imagination to give visual shape to seminal films like ?Easy Rider,? died on Sunday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 74.
  
  Adrees Latif/Reuters, 2002
  
  Laszlo Kovacs
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  Columbia Pictures
  
  In films like ?Easy Rider? (1969), Laszlo Kovacs blended a love of landscape with an innovative filming style.
  
  His death was announced by the International Cinematographers Guild. James Chressanthis, a cinematographer who is preparing a documentary on Mr. Kovacs and his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, said that the cause was not known but that Mr. Kovacs had earlier had cancer.
  
  Mr. Kovacs came along in the 1960s when the old studio system was sputtering and a new independent cinema was rising. Filmmakers emerged from film schools and work on B movies to challenge traditional themes and techniques and create what has been called ?the new Hollywood,? or ?the American new wave.?
  
  Production moved from the studios to the streets, and the new breed used small crews, lightweight equipment and innovative means of coping with low budgets. Improvisation was both artistic goal and hard necessity. In ?Easy Rider? (1969), Mr. Kovacs used a 1968 Chevrolet convertible as his camera car, making the platform for his camera from a piece of plywood on the trunk held in place by a sandbag.
  
  In that movie, he wanted to portray something hopeful after the fiery demise of the character played by Peter Fonda. A rising helicopter delivered a panoramic view of the horizon, but only after Mr. Kovacs balanced a camera on one skid and counterweights on the other to keep the helicopter from tipping over.
  
  In ?Five Easy Pieces? (1970), Mr. Kovacs memorably matched the color of Susan Anspach?s blue eyes and the sky. In another scene, he shot Ms. Anspach and then let his camera drift elsewhere; she scurried behind the camera and he arrived back at her face, giving the illusion that the shot had gone all the way around the room.
  
  His tricks included using flashing lights and other techniques to create the impression of psychedelic hallucinations. His goal was to let the environment make statements about the characters. He intended for the foggy islands of the Pacific Northwest to explain the tight little family in ?Five Easy Pieces.?
  
  Most of his major works are clustered at the start of the 1970s, including ?That Cold Day in the Park? (1969), Robert Altman?s third feature as a director, and ?The King of Marvin Gardens? (1972), which, like ?Five Easy Pieces,? was directed by Bob Rafelson. He did six pictures with the director Peter Bogdanovich, including ?Targets? (1968), ?What?s Up, Doc?? (1972) and ?Paper Moon? (1973).
  
  His range grew wider, with credits including Martin Scorsese?s movies ?New York, New York? (1977) and ?The Last Waltz? (1978) and Hal Ashby?s ?Shampoo? (1975). Other movies included ?Ghost Busters? (1984) and ?My Best Friend?s Wedding? (1997).
  
  Mr. Kovacs was born on May 14, 1933, in Cece, a farming village about 60 miles west of Budapest. During the Nazi occupation, he distributed flyers for the propaganda movies shown each week in a school auditorium. His pay was a free seat, and he was fascinated by the flickering images.
  
  In 1945, he was accepted into the Academy of Drama and Film Art in Budapest, where students watched Western films surreptitiously. He was swept off his feet by ?Citizen Kane,? saying it ?changed my visual vocabulary.?
  
  In the uprising against the Communist regime in 1956, he and Mr. Zsigmond shot 30,000 feet of film at great risk to themselves. They escaped with the film, and some of it eventually became part of a documentary a few years later.
  
  They both bounced among odd jobs. Around 1957, Mr. Kovacs, who had arrived in the United States speaking no English, moved from New Jersey to Seattle, taking the memorable bus ride that found echoes later in ?Easy Rider.? In 1959, he took another bus to Los Angeles, where he reunited with Mr. Zsigmond.
  
  Mr. Kovacs did movies like ?The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill? (1966), often working with the B movie producer Roger Corman. After he shot eight biker movies in one year, Dennis Hopper asked him to do another. Mr. Kovacs?s reluctance to repeat himself vanished after Mr. Hopper acted out the script. ?Easy Rider,? with a budget of $340,000, was a sensation at Cannes and made $60 million.
  
  Mr. Kovacs is survived by his wife, Audrey, and his daughters Julianna and Nadia.
  
  He prided himself on spontaneity. He and the other crew members had no preconceived idea where they would shoot the classic scene in ?Five Easy Pieces? in which Jack Nicholson orders a chicken salad sandwich without the chicken salad just to get the toast he wants.
  
  ?Approaching the freeway, we saw a little rise, and there was the cafe,? he said in an interview with American Cinematographer magazine in 2005. ?I think we shot that scene in two hours, and then we moved on.?

  lutar1

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 39 days ago
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  Yes

  by Sancar

  It's not just any illicit affair, this passionate liaison between an Irish American married woman (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese surgeon (Simon Abkarian), who are both living in London. In Sally Potter's "Yes," their relationship becomes the jagged interface between two clashing worlds, cultures, genders and personalities in the post-9/11 universe.

  lutar1

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 40 days ago
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  The Man Who Cried

  by Sancar

  A nutty fairy tale about a displaced Jewish girl who must find her place in a hostile and often surreal world. 1927, rural Russia: Little Fegele (Claudia Lander-Duke) adores her father (Oleg Yankovskiy), a cantor, and is bereft when he leaves their small town to find his fortune in America. Soon after, Fegele's grandmother hears rumors of an impending pogrom and tries to send the child to join her father. Instead, Fegele winds up alone in England, where her name is changed to Suzie. Taken in by a foster family, the withdrawn child scarcely speaks but communicates through her lovely singing voice. Years pass, and the adult Suzie (Christina Ricci) still burns with the desire to find her father in America, to which end she joins a traveling cabaret troupe. That takes her to Paris, where she meets flamboyant Russian showgirl Lola (Cate Blanchett), also an expatriate. The worldly Lola, who cultivates a flighty image but lives by the practical motto "Never look back; always go forward," takes Suzie under her wing, finding her a job at the opera and sharing tips for getting ahead. Lola sets her sights on the opera's self-centered Italian star, Dante (John Turturro), while Suzie falls for a Romany horse trainer named Cesar (Johnny Depp). Suzie feels a deep kinship with the perpetually homeless gypsies, but when Paris falls to the Nazis she's forced again to flee. It's astonishing to watch English filmmaker Sally Potter suggest lavish production values with impoverished means. Her WWII saga, which suggests the German occupation of Paris with little more than the amplified sound of marching feet, and the destruction of a luxury liner with an explosion in the ship's swimming pool, stands in stark contrast to the absurdly over-budgeted spectacle of PEARL HARBOR, which opened in the US on the same day.

  lutar1

  Hey, you should really see this!
  
  Re-watched by strong advice of ANA. Music is fascinating.

  posted 40 days ago
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  Orlando

  by Sancar

  Notes on the Adaptation of the Book Orlando by Sally Potter
  
  My task with the adaptation of Virginia Woolf?s book for the screen was to find a way of remaining true to the spirit of the book and to Virginia Woolf?s intentions, whilst being ruthless with changing the book in any way necessary to make it work cinematically.
  
  It would have been a disservice to Virginia Woolf to remain slavish to the letter of the book, for just as she was always a writer who engaged with writing and the form of the novel, similarly the film needed to engage with the energy of cinema. And although the book was already a distillation of 400 years of English history (albeit an imagined view of that history, told with a liberal amount of poetic license), the film needed to distill even further.
  
  The most immediate changes were structural. The storyline was simplified?any events which did not significantly further Orlando?s story were dropped.
  
  The narrative also needed to be driven. Whereas the novel could withstand abstraction and arbitrariness (such as Orlando?s change of sex) cinema is more pragmatic. There had to be reasons?however flimsy?to propel us along a journey based itself on a kind of suspension of disbelief.
  
  Thus Queen Elizabeth bestows Orlando?s long life upon him ("Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old . . .") whereas in the book it remains unexplained. And Orlando?s change of sex in the film is the result of his having reached a crisis point?a crisis of masculine identity. On the battlefield he looks death and destruction in the face and faces the challenge of kill or be killed. It is Orlando?s unwillingness to conform to what is expected of him as a man that leads?within the logic of the film?to his change of sex. Later, of course, as a woman, Orlando finds that she cannot conform to what is expected of her as a female either, and makes a series of choices which leave her, unlike in the book, without marriage or property?and with a daughter, not a son.
  
  These latter changes seemed to me entirely consistent with Virginia Woolf?s views in her other works on the condition of women?s lives (especially A Room of One?s Own) and crisply logical within the framework set up in the earlier part of the story.
  
  Orlando is at its heart a story of loss?the loss of time as it passes?a meditation on the impermanence of love, power, and politics. I simply carried that logic through to include Orlando?s loss of property and status in the 20th century. Whilst the loss of property in the story is a symptom of the second class status of women, there is also an aspect which is worthy of celebration: the loss of privilege and status based on an outdated English class system.
  
  Orlando was of course originally written as a spoof biography of Vita Sackville-West. Where the book holds most tightly to apparent biographical facts it occasionally loses its power as a story (such as Orlando?s "keeping" the house at the end of the book?which was a way for Virginia Woolf to restore the lost Knole to Vita Sackville-West).
  
  I tried to restore Orlando on film to a view more consistently detached and bitingly ironic in its view of the English class system and the colonial attitudes arising from it.
  
  At the same time I needed to ensure that Orlando was a loveable character. The clue was to highlight Orlando?s essential innocence. He happens to have been born into a class, a place and time, and is shaped by it?but as the essential human being remains; the patterns of behaviour and attitude are transformed.
  
  Other obvious changes from the book include dialogue (and poems) which have been invented from sometimes slender clues on the page?and Orlando?s words and looks to the camera which were intended as an equivalent both of Virginia Woolf?s direct addresses to her readers and to try to convert Virginia Woolf?s literary wit into cinematic humor at which people could laugh out loud.
  
  Finally, the ending of the film needed to be brought into the present in order to remain true to Virginia Woolf?s use of real-time at the end of the novel (where the story finishes just as she puts down her pen to finish the book). Coming up to the present day meant acknowledging some key events of the 20th century--the two world wars, the electronic revolution?the contraction of space through time reinvented by speed. But the film ends somewhere between heaven and earth in a place of ecstatic communion with the present moment.

  lutar1

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 40 days ago
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  Insomnia

  by Sancar

  Insomnia is the remake of the equally-named 1997 norwegian thriller:
  Veteran police officer Will Dormer (played by Al Pacino) is sent from the city to a small Alaska town to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. While chasing a suspect (Robin Williams) through the fog, Dormer accidently kills his partner. Instead of admitting his guilt, Dormer is given an unexpected alibi. But despite this he is looked after by the local idealistic detective Ellie Bur (Hilary Swank) while he himself has to find the murderer (Robin Williams). But the murderer knows of Dormer's guilt and starts to blackmail him and forces the detective into a cat-and-mouse game.

  lutar1

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 42 days ago
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  Following

  by Sancar

  An unemployed writer (Jeremy Theobald) randomly pics people in the streets of London and follows them as a source for inspiration. But when he breaks the rules he has set for himself and starts to follow people over a longer period of time, things begin to go wrong. He teams up with the burglar Cobb (Alex Haw) and breaks into the apartment of a mysterious blonde (Lucy Russell), of whom he is fascinated. But slowly he finds out that things may be different than they appear.

  lutar1

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 42 days ago
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  Map of the Human Heart

  by Sancar

  When a 1920s biplane carrying British explorer Walter Russell lands near Eskimos in the arctic, Russell befriends young Avik, a Euro-Eskimo boy suffering from tuberculosis. He flies Avik to a Catholic hospital in Montreal where the boy meets Albertine, a kindred-soul and playmate, also of mixed parentage. Under the strict tutelage and watchful eye of Sister Baeauville, the two forge a friendship that evolves into puppy love. Although they share everything, young Albertine, a half Native-American half French-Canadian child learns racial self-hatred from Sister Baeauville who tells her she "doesn't have to be a savage." After ten years of separation the lovers meet again. Albertine is a beautiful WAAF photo analyst now betrothed to Walter. Handsome Avik is an English fighter pilot. Their love is rekindled, but will they ever be reunited?

  lutar1

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 43 days ago
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  La Vie en Rose (La Mome)

  by Dana

  Extremely touching movie, Marion Cotillard fully deserved the Oscar, she was so great, interpreting Edith Piaf. The cruel and real life a a best singer, the atmosphere of the old Paris through the life and the drama of a single woman. Excellent!

  Dahnah

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 48 days ago
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  The Oxford Murders

  by Dana

  Dahnah

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 57 days ago
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  My Blueberry Nights

  by Sancar

  Jeremy (Jude Law) runs a cafe in New York City. Elizabeth (Norah Jones) finds out from him that her boyfriend has dined in the cafe with another woman. Elizabeth is angry and leaves him; she gives her keys to Jeremy, in case her ex-boyfriend comes to collect them. Elizabeth returns to the cafe several times, and she and Jeremy become close.
  
  Elizabeth (going by the name of Lizzie) travels by bus to Memphis, Tennessee. She takes two jobs, in a cafe and in a bar, to save money to buy a car. She sends postcards to Jeremy without revealing where she lives or works. Jeremy tries to find out by calling all the restaurants in the area, but fails.
  
  One night at the bar she encounters local policeman Arnie (David Strathairn) grieving about the fact that his wife Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz) has left him. He confides in her that he has tried to quit drinking many times. After drunkenly threatening Sue Lynne with his gun, he crashes his car into a post and dies. Lizzie comforts Sue Lynne, and the next day Sue Lynne leaves town, giving Lizzie a large tip to put towards her car.
  
  Elizabeth (now going by the name Beth) gets another waitress job, this time in a casino. It is here we are introduced to Leslie (Natalie Portman), a poker player. Beth lends Leslie her savings for gambling after Leslie promises to either win the game, or give Beth her car. Leslie ends up giving Beth her car, saying she lost the game. Beth agrees to give Leslie a ride to Las Vegas, where her father lives, so he can lend her the money to start gambling again. She gets a call, answered by Beth, from the hospital to inform her that her father is dying. Leslie does not believe it, she thinks it is a trick to make her visit him. They go to the hospital anyway, and at Leslie's request Beth goes inside alone to check. Beth finds out Leslie's father had died the night before. Leslie wants to keep the car because it was really her fathers, and confesses that she has lied about losing the game. She pays Elizabeth the money she had originally promised, and Beth buys a car.
  
  Elizabeth returns to New York to find her ex-boyfriend's apartment for rent. She crosses the street to the cafe, and discovers Jeremy has been waiting for her, and has a space reserved for her at the counter. They talk, and it is discovered that they actually have feelings for each other.
  
  Director of IMPOSSIBLE LOVE STORIES. Touching souls FREE, but no physical intercourse PLS.
  
  P.S for Lady BOND : Cassandra Wilson, Norah Jones, Ry Cooder are some of my favorites.

  lutar1

  Hey, you should really see this!

  posted 60 days ago

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