Entries associated with the tag "Dave Kehr":

Lola is a woman of no talent or substance, a woman whose sex appeal and brash pursuit of her own self-interest made possible a rapid ascent and precipitous fall, literalized here in a climb up the dizzying heights of the circus tent and a climactic dive to the ground, without the aid of a safety net. —Chris Wisniewski

At the Music Box this week is a beautifully restored version of Max Ophuls's 1955 masterpiece Lola Montes. Do not miss it. I'm tempted to go back and see it again every single night despite the inertness of Martine Carol's Lola, but think I may just settle for rewatching Ophuls's equally amazing The Earrings of Madame de . . .  

Frank Borzage's masterful romance History Is Made at Night (1937) screens this evening (Wed 8/27) at 8 PM at University of Chicago Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th Street. Jean Arthur stars as an American socialite trying to escape her unhappy marriage, and Charles Boyer is the dashing Parisian headwaiter who comes to her aid. There are also choice supporting performances by Leo Carillo (oddly shorn of his sombrero) as Boyer's loyal pal, a fatuous French chef, and Colin Clive (oddly shorn of Boris Karloff) as Arthur's husband, a sour and controlling businessman.

Dave Kehr describes the film better than I can, noting that "Borzage uses every resource of mise-en-scene—lighting, camera movement, depth of focus, and cutting—to create a separate enchanted environment for his characters." Yet the moment that moved me the most comes when that enchanted environment widens to include everyone else. Trapped on a sinking ocean liner, Boyer insists that Arthur leave him behind and board one of the lifeboats. As the women and children are all herded onto the boats and the men stay behind, Borzage cuts from the lovers to an assortment of other passengers in their heartbreak, as wives are torn from their husbands, children from their parents. Love, as the song goes, is all around.

Doc Films, the University of Chicago's venerable film society, kicks off its winter 2008 schedule tonight at 7 with Samuel Fuller's incomparable Pickup on South Street (1953), the first in a Monday-night series on the Hollywood maverick. Tuesday nights will be split between Jacques Demy and Jacques Tati, beginning tomorrow with Lola (1961). Wednesdays belong to Pedro Almodovar, whose All About My Mother (1999) will be screened this week. Doc offers two movies on Thursday nights; this term the early shows will focus on film noir (starting with Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place), the late shows on classic sexploitation (Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls).

The most tantalizing series may be the Sunday-night retrospective of silent films by Ernst Lubitsch, with live piano accompaniment by Daniel Sefik. It begins with Lady Windermere's Fan (1/13) and continues with such titles as The Oyster Princess (1/20), Madame DuBarry (2/3), One Arabian Night (2/10), Rosita (2/17), The Marriage Circle (2/24), and The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (3/9).

Mark your calendars for two special events: On Monday, February 25, the symposium "Rediscovering American Cinema" will feature U. of C. professor Tom Gunning, New York Times DVD columnist (and Reader/Doc Films alum) Dave Kehr, and Mike Mashon of the Library of Congress as well as a screening of Cecil B. De Mille's The Golden Bed (1925). Beginning Friday, February 8, Doc and the Japan Foundation Midwest will present a free weekend series of five recent dramas that focus on "the changing scenery of Japan."

Now who can give me a lift to Hyde Park?

Check out the June 26 post on Dave Kehr's blog for an important piece of news and a staggering statistic.

The important piece of news is the launch of the Turner Classic Movies database, TCMDB, a potential alternative to the often less-than-reliable Internet Movie Database. (Sitting on a panel in Austin with Monte Hellman several years ago, I heard him recount writing to the IMDB to inform them that some of his film credits on the site were incorrect, only to be informed by them that because he wasn't a qualified film scholar they couldn't make the required corrections.)

As Dave points out, the TCMDB "has as its core the unsurpassable AFI Catalog of American Feature Films, previously accessible only with a $50 AFI membership (or through certain libraries). For those who don’t know it, the AFI Catalog is a towering work of scholarship that covers the period 1893 to 1971 in exquisite detail, with full credits, reliable plot summaries and significant side notes." I can only concur with Dave. Indeed, there are times when I think that the only two irrefutably towering achievements of the American Film Institute are David Lynch's Eraserhead, produced on its west-coast premises, and this reference work.

The staggering statistic, gleaned from TCMDB's home page, is this: "Of the 144,366 titles listed in the database, only 5,257 are available on home video. That’s 3.64 percent."

To attempt to contextualize the meaning of this, consider Sturgeon's Law, credited to the great science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, that "90 percent of everything is crud." If this applies to movies, and it surely does, then that leaves us 6.36 percent of unavailable movies that aren't crud. So we still have a ways to go.

If you've got a film buff on your gift list, check out the roundup of the year's best DVD releases by the Reader's esteemed former critic Dave Kehr in the New York Times. The weekly video beat at the Times has been a good assignment for Kehr; his columns are exceptional for their crisp judgments and their grasp of cinema technology and DVD aesthetics.

Among the packages Kehr chose are the two-disc set of Warren Beatty's Reds, Peter Lorre in the Mr. Moto Collection, F.W. Murnau's Phantom, the recovered Rudolph Valentino feature Beyond the Rocks, the John Wayne-John Ford Collection (with Stagecoach, The Searchers, Fort Apache, and They Were Expendable) and Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales (including Suzanne's Career, My Night at Maud's, Claire's Knee, and Chloe in the Afternoon).