The Prague Post
December 1st, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre

Home » Archives » Night & Day

This year at Carlsbad

The Cannes of Bohemia rolls out the red carpets
Cinema Review | Search restaurants | Archives

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 27th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Something old with the new. A retrospective of Wyler-Davis films at KVIFF.
enlarge
42nd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

June 29–July 7
For complete schedule information, check www.kviff.com

The spa-invading Moscow-riche will soon be playing extras as Karlovy Vary plugs in the klieg lights for its 42nd annual film festival, where cineastes can immerse themselves in the world’s wealth of recent films.
There is, as always, something for everyone, including documentaries, films from small countries, retrospectives and a number of premieres. Star-gawkers will also have plenty to ogle, as Renée Zellweger, Hal Hartley, Eli Roth and others trod the red carpets.
The following is a short list of highlights from this year’s festival. As always, some of these films will make it to Prague — though last year’s winning film, the excellent Sherrybaby, took almost a year to get here. But Kino Aero will be premiering a number of films from the festival during the next two weeks. Check with that cinema for schedule information (www.kinoaero.cz).
Euphoria—Russia, 2006. Ivan Vyrypayev, director. Polina Agureyeva, Maksim Ushakov, Mikhail Okunev star. First-time director Vyrypayev’s film about the changes coming to rural Russia has been described as both poetic and imagistic, and has won awards at the Venice and Warsaw film festivals.
Irina Palm—Germany/UK, 2007. Sam Garbarski, director. Marianne Faithfull, Miki Manojlovic, Jenny Agutter and Siobhan Hewlett star. Garbarski’s film about a London grandmother who finds herself having to work as a Soho prostitute to help pay medical expenses for her grandson won awards at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as universal praise for Faithfull’s performance.
Inland Empire—USA, 2006. David Lynch, director. Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux and Harry Dean Stanton star. Lynch follows Mulholland Drive with another clever erosion between waking and dream life. Dern, one of Lynch’s favorite performers, has received the best reviews of her life for her portrayal of an actress working on a film who begins to suspect that the script contains her doom.
Fans of Steve Buscemi (and what person of taste isn’t?) have two films to seek out: First Delirious (USA, 2007), directed by Tom DiCillo (who directed Buscemi in the cult film Living in Oblivion), which stars Buscemi as a conniving paparazzi who first befriends, then turns on, a young homeless man (Michael Pitt from Hedwig and the Angry Inch and The Dreamers). The film also features Elvis Costello and Minnie Driver.
The second film, Interview (USA, 2007), sees Buscemi as the director in this remake of a Dutch film by the famed and tragic Theo van Gogh. The story is of a burned-out journalist who is forced to interview a starlet of straight-to-video horror films. With Tara Elders and Sienna Miller.
There are two retrospectives to look for. The rarer of the two is a look back on three of Japan’s New Wave directors from the 1960s: Nagisa Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda and Yoshishige Yoshida. Oshima, perhaps the best-known in the West, will have two films screened, both from 1960: Naked Youth and The Sun’s Burial. Yoshida, who worked with that most Japanese of film directors, Yasujiro Ozu, also has two representative films from the period: 1962’s An Affair at Akitsu Spa and 1963’s 18 Roughs.
Shinoda, who will be attending the screenings, has three films: 1962’s A Flame at the Pier, plus his two Nouvelle Vague samurai films, the cynical The Assassin from 1964, and 1965’s Samurai Spy.
The other retrospective will give students of Hollywood a chance to see one of the finest director-star pairings from the studio age: William Wyler and Bette Davis. The two made good copy as they collided on the set, but both would later realize that their finest work was with each other.
The three Wyler-Davis films are 1938’s Jezebel, which won Davis her second Oscar, followed by 1940’s The Letter (considered by many critics to be Davis’ finest performance). 1941’s brilliant The Little Foxes is a film that often throws the spanner into the auteur theory. The great cinematographer Gregg Toland took up Foxes immediately after filming Welle’s Citizen Kane, and there’s more than a faint resemblance between the two films stylistically.
Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (27/06/2007):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Provokator
Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.