I draw your attention to Steve Garden’s survey of the 11 Best Unreleased Films from this year’s Film Festival at Lumiére. This year I made the mistake of using the Festival as a bulk preview option for forthcoming releases and missed almost all Steve’s list. Next year I will approach things differently.
How many of the IMDb top 250 have you seen? I rated 72%. Have a go yourself, go on you know you want to.
[Link from Kottke]Roger Ebert writing about writing (and speaking) at his blog:
The novel [McCarthy’s Suttree] is written entirely with that attention. You haven’t even started it until you’ve started it the second time. After weeks of depression, hopelessness and regret, realizing the operation had failed and I would probably not speak again, after murky medications and no interest in movies, television, books or even the morning paper, it was the bleak, sad Suttree that started me to life again. Spare me happy books that will cheer me up. I was fighting it out with Suttree. I didn’t want a condo in Florida. I wanted a fucking basket of coal.
Is it me or is Ebert writing better than ever?
Update: Posted before I’d read all the comments. Read those too.
Heartfelt congratulations to Sunny Amey who, at last night’s Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards, was presented with “The Mayor’s Award for Significant Contribution to Theatre”.
Often on these occasions people will say, “without this person I wouldn’t be here” but in Sunny’s case I believe it to be literally true. When my parents got married in 1966, Sunny (and Ralph McAllister) organised the event, cooked the kai (meatballs and pavlova) and the reception was hosted at Sunny’s flat in London. Therefore, she’s always been a presence in my life (although I didn’t actually meet her until 1993 when I started working for Downstage the first time and she was on the Board).
I’m very happy that I’ve got to know her since, and that Downstage (where she was the first woman Director back in 1970) is where I have landed.
From the Oklahoma Gazette:
Standing in line to vote, I met an elderly black woman who had her eyes on the prize. She said, “Rosa Parks sat down so that Martin Luther King Jr. could walk. Martin walked so that Obama could run. Obama ran so that our children could fly.”
I hadn’t heard that quote before and it brought a tear to my eye.
[via AmericaBlog]