Monday, March 22, 2010

Best directors?

Paste Magazine has a list of the 50 Best living directors.
It's not a bad list but, as with any lists, they are missing a few good directors - while including a few dubious ones.

Here are twenty missing from the list:

Olivier Assayas
Marco Bellochio
Kathryn Bigelow
Claude Chabrol
Jonathan Demme
Atom Egoyan
Todd Haynes
Aki Kaurismäki
Patrice Leconte
Mike Leigh
Sidney Lumet
Tsai Ming-liang
Roger Mitchell
Manuel de Oliveira
Roman Polanski
Hong Sang-soo
Paul Schrader
Alexander Sukorov
Andrzej Wajda
Frederick Wiseman
Zhang Yimou

Monday, March 15, 2010

Red Desert Blu


One of Antonioni's masterpieces is coming to Criterion on Blu-ray in June!
Great news. Great movie.

Update:
I watched the Blu-ray and, naturally, it looked great. What I found most interesting was my own memory of the film. I watched if for the first time in 1990 at the San Francisco film festival. Then I watched it again in 2000 and now ten years later makes for the third viewing. I had remembered the little cabin by the sea that they all have a party in. But I had forgotten the precision of the individual shots. In my view, this is Antonioni at his artistic peak. Every shot, every edit and every movement of the characters is deliberate and fits into the visual mosaic.