The latest installment of the vaunted PBS series Independent Lens is No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos. The documentary about the legendary Hungarian cinematographers debuts this week around the country. Check your local listings for time and channel.
Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond met at film school in Budapest in the 1950s. When Soviet tanks rumbled into the city to crush the reform movement in 1956, the two friends took to the streets to document the horrors of the crackdown. They understood the importance of the footage they had, and volunteered to smuggle it out of their repressed country.
The two filmmakers eventually settled in Hollywood, where they did all sorts of odd jobs before getting opportunities to work on low-budget horror and biker films. Over the next 40 years, they created some of the most indelible images in the history of film. Kovacs got his break when he was tapped to be the Director of Photography for the seminal film Easy Rider in 1969. He went on to be the cinematographer on some of the greatest films of the 1970s, including Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, Hal Ashby’s Shampoo, and Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York. In the 1980s, he worked on films like Ghostbusters and Say Anything.
At the same time, Zsigmond was creating his own masterpieces, the first of which was his work on Robert Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller. He went on work with Steven Spielberg on Sugarland Express, and most notably Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for which he won the Academy Award. His credits also include Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, and Heaven’s Gate. He received his fourth Academy Award nomination for his work on The Black Dahlia in 2006, and he is currently at work on his third film with Woody Allen. (more…)
Gary Hustwit is best known (to me, anyway) as the filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary about Wilco, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, and his film about synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, simply called Moog. He also got my attention by managing to make a very interesting film about, of all things, a font. That was Helvetica, and it was the first in Hustwit’s planned trilogy about design. Now he has returned with the second entry in his trilogy, Objectified. The new film will premiere November 24 on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series. Check your local listings for time and channel in your area.
Most people don’t think much about design. We touch and use hundreds of items in a day without giving a second thought about who made them, or why they look and feel as they do. Fortunately, there are people who give a lot of thought to design, and those people are the subjects of Hustwit’s film. Through in-depth conversations with people like Paola Antonelli, the design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Chris Bangle of the BMW Group in Munich, Bill Moggridge co-founder IDEO (who designed what may have been the first laptop computer, which he demonstrates), and Jonathan Ive at Apple, Hustwit gets to the heart of creative design and thinking. (more…)
Beginning this Sunday night, AMC will be asking you to invest six hours of your television viewing time, over the course of three nights, in their remake of the iconic ’60s British drama, The Prisoner.
A man named Michael wakes up in a strange place known to its inhabitants as The Village. He has memories of his past life in New York City, but no idea of how he got to The Village. Everyone there has a number instead of a name, and our hero, played by Jim Caviezel, is referred to as 6. At first glance, The Village appears to be a bright cheerful place, with a few idiosyncrasies. The only television program seems to be a soap opera called The Wonkers, and the only food available comes in the form of wraps filled with various ingredients.
The man in charge of all of this is called 2, and he is played by the wonderful Ian McKellen. 2 appears to be some sort of benevolent monarch, but he is, in fact, a paranoid, scheming dictator, who employs “undercovers” to spy on the populace, and keeps his wife in a drug-induced dream state much of the time. The citizens who present the most danger for 2 are the “dreamers,” because they know that, despite 2’s insistence to the contrary, there is another world beyond The Village. 6 knows there is an outside world. He sees it in his dreams. He remembers living in it. He fights a running battle with 2 to retain his identity, proclaiming loudly that he is not a number. (more…)
The Airmen and the Headhunters is the most recent entry in the PBS series Secrets of the Dead, which has been running for nine years on the network. The documentary tells the little-known story of U.S. airmen who bailed out of their stricken aircraft over Japanese-occupied Borneo in 1944. On the island, they encountered Dayak tribesmen, also known as the “wild men of Borneo,” who kept them hidden from the Japanese until they could be rescued in 1945. These tribes were best known for hunting the heads of their enemies.
In the 1930s, Christian missionaries came to Borneo, and were successful in converting many of the island’s tribal people. When the Japanese occupied the island at the start of WW II, they murdered the missionaries and their families, which caused a great deal of anger among the indigenous people of Borneo. That’s why they were only too willing to assist the airmen when they arrived on the island.
By 1945, the tide of the war had turned in the Allies’ favor, and they were re-taking many of the territories that they had lost to the Japanese. The recapture of Borneo, a former British and Dutch colony, was high on their list of priorities. Toward that end, the British sent an eccentric anthropologist named Tom Harrisson to organize a guerilla war to coincide with the coming invasion of the island. Harrisson was only too happy to allow the natives to bring back the practice of headhunting which had been banned at the turn of the century, and the Dayaks were thrilled to resume the practice. Also employing poison blow darts, the Dayaks struck fear into the hearts of the Japanese. (more…)
On November 9, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, PBS in New York (check your local listings for date and time in your area) will air the 60-minute documentary How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin. The film is co-produced by WNET.ORG and London’s Blakeway Productions.
You’ve probably seen that very raw two-minute clip of the Beatles playing “Some Other Guy” at the Cavern in Liverpool in 1962. That clip was shot by a filmmaker by the name of Leslie Woodhead. Twenty-five years later, while Woodhead was making films in Russia, he first became aware of the major impact that Beatlemania had in the Soviet Union. Now Woodhead has made a film that explores the lasting power of the Beatles in the former communist bloc.
The Beatles and their music were banned in the Soviet Union, but that did little to deter the fans of the Liverpool band. In the ’60s, there was a flourishing black market in Beatles music, which was recorded onto x-ray film, creating flexi-discs that were called “ribs” because you could often see the image of someone’s bone structure on the discs. After purchase, the music on these discs was transferred to tape recorders, giving it a longer shelf life. Tribute bands were formed. In St. Petersburg, Kolya Vasin built a “Temple of Peace and Love” to John Lennon. All of this was illegal and carried a high degree of risk. (more…)
When my grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe, it was to Newark, N.J. that they came. My parents were born and raised in the Newark. For most of my life, I have lived within five miles of the city limits, as I do today. I fly from the city’s airport, take trains from the Amtrak station downtown, attend concerts in its music halls, eat in its restaurants, and watch sporting events in its arena and stadium. I cheer Newark’s triumphs, and despair in the seemingly endless cycle of violence that grips the city.
It was, therefore, with great interest that I watched Marc Levin and Mark Benjamin’s five-part documentary series “Brick City,” which begins its run on the Sundance Channel tonight. The Executive Producer of the series is the Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker.
The city got its nickname, Brick City, from the number of beautiful old brick structures that remain there, but Newark’s young activist mayor, Cory Booker, suspects that the nickname may have more to do with the toughness of the people who reside there. Although Booker is the central figure in the drama, which takes us from late spring of 2008 to the early fall, the series follows other residents of Newark as they struggle to make their city a safer place to live.
Police Director Garry McCarthy is the point man in the war on crime. His fight is not only with gangs and drugs, but also with the deeply ingrained internal politics of the Newark Police Department. Ras Baraka is the principal of the city’s Central High School, and Todd Warren its Vice-Principal. Central is about to occupy a new building after a ten-year, 100 million dollar construction project that has been rife with delays and cost overruns. Perhaps the most dramatic story in Brick City is the latter-day Romeo and Juliet saga of Jayda, a member of the Bloods, and her boyfriend Creep, who is Crip. It is the intertwining of these lives, and others, that gives Brick City its indelible drama. (more…)
I was beginning to hate you, 2009 fall television season, what with your moderately entertaining musicals and comedy scourges who were supposed to go away, but with the series premiere of Community (NBC, debuts tonight at 9:30; moves to 8:00 on October 8), you’ve finally given me something I can enjoy. The schedule still has plenty of sitcom debuts left to air, but if any of them are funnier than Community, I’ll be pleasantly shocked.
The setup is pretty brilliant for a sitcom, and here it is: Jeff, an unctuous lawyer (Joel McHale), is disbarred when it’s discovered that he lied about his degree (Colombia, not Columbia), and in order to work his way back into the legal profession, he heads to community college — and immediately sets about trying to get test answers out of a professor (John Oliver) who happens to be one of his former clients. He also takes an immediate liking to a no-nonsense blonde named Britta (Gillian Jacobs, whose physical resemblance to Elisabeth Shue quickly turns into a running gag), going so far as to pretend to set up a Spanish study club so he can be alone with her. (more…)
There’s a killer on the loose in Melrose Place! Beware! The ’90s hit soap is back, this time on the CW, which seems to be mining the previous decade for new programming (or is it reprogramming?). While I wait for some exec at the CW to remake Fox’s series, Wolf, I’m stuck with the new Melrose Place, an update of the sex and sleaze-filled show that gave us Josie Bissett, Courtney Thorne Smith and that dude who’s Elizabeth Shue’s brother. A new group of twentysomethings have moved into the place, but there’s still the same intrigue and drama we’ve come to expect. As is custom in fantasyland, every neighbor knows one another and they form a tight knot family, for now. Soon enough I’m sure the characters will be swapping beds and blackmailing one another. We can only hope.
You know, I was once twenty and living in the Los Angeles area and I wonder where these apartment complexes exist that twentysomethings get along so wonderfully that they meet up in the courtyard when someone dies or someone gets engaged. Then again, I lived on Moorpark Place, so maybe the vibe is different in Hollywood than in the Valley. Still, this is the land of make believe, so the fantasy of a group of people becoming family in a Melrose apartment complex is passed off as reality.
The new version of Melrose Place, which the CW airs on Tuesday nights (and online at their infinitely confusing website), is just as sleazy, corny and full of sex as the original. I watched the pilot thinking I’d be getting a healthy does of mindless, guilty entertainment — and, for the most part, I got what I expected. (more…)
Like most hatreds, my feelings for Leno are irrational. I mean, yes, he pretty much empirically sucks, but his brand of humor is so resolutely innocuous that hating him is totally overboard — it’s like hating ice cubes or milk. Leno’s style of entertainment is the kind of thing that you either chuckle at or ignore; if it doesn’t float your boat, you say “I don’t care for it,” not “I hate that motherfucker,” or “this date is over,” which is what I would shout in the ’90s if the girl I was out with told me she was a fan. Watching Leno continually trounce the funnier, more insightful Letterman in the ratings all those years only amplified my black loathing, to the point where I’m pretty sure I squealed like a third-grade girl when I read NBC’s (waaaay premature) announcement that Conan O’Brien would be taking over The Tonight Show this year.
And then, like a hug that turns into a punch in the nuts, the network went and gave Leno their 10 PM slot, five awful nights a week, for the typically creatively named The Jay Leno Show. Because the Popdose TV-critic slot is like the Spinal Tap drummer’s chair, and we don’t have anyone else who can cover the fall debuts, I was left wincing in pain as I picked up the remote and turned away from a very good fourth quarter of Monday Night Football and toward my hammy televised nemesis. (more…)
So this is it, huh? This is what you guys were freaking out about all summer? I admit, I haven’t seen the supposedly wonderful pilot, and picking up a series at its second episode probably isn’t the best idea, but…still, I have to say, I don’t really understand all the fuss about Glee.
A Fox summer sensation, Glee follows the occasionally musical adventures at William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio, centering on the school’s glee club (hence, duh, the title). Led by the school’s Spanish teacher, Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), the club combats all the usual stuff — indifferent school administrators, hostile popular kids, et cetera — while singing and dancing their way through covers of songs like “Can’t Fight This Feeling” and “Gold Digger.” As you might imagine, given the title of the series, there’s an awful lot of perky, quirky humor on display here — but there’s also a strong underlying note of melancholy; not only are the kids in the glee club as dumped on as you might expect (in the first five minutes, club star Rachel [played by Lea Michele] stands up to a cheerleader and gets a pair of blue Slurpees to the face for her comeuppance), but the adults in their lives are also utterly unfulfilled. (more…)
The latest installment of the vaunted PBS series Independent Lens is No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos. The documentary about the legendary Hungarian cinematographers debuts this week around the country. Check your local listings for time and channel.
Beginning this Sunday night, AMC will be asking you to invest six hours of your television viewing time, over the course of three nights, in their remake of the iconic ’60s British drama, The Prisoner.![68741-104[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/68741-1041.jpg "68741-104[1]")
The Airmen and the Headhunters is the most recent entry in the PBS series Secrets of the Dead, which has been running for nine years on the network. The documentary tells the little-known story of U.S. airmen who bailed out of their stricken aircraft over Japanese-occupied Borneo in 1944. On the island, they encountered Dayak tribesmen, also known as the “wild men of Borneo,” who kept them hidden from the Japanese until they could be rescued in 1945. These tribes were best known for hunting the heads of their enemies.
On November 9, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, PBS in New York (check your local listings for date and time in your area) will air the 60-minute documentary How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin. The film is co-produced by WNET.ORG and London’s Blakeway Productions.
![community-nbc-joel-mchale-cast[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/community-nbc-joel-mchale-cast1.jpg "community-nbc-joel-mchale-cast[1]")
![jay-leno[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/jay-leno1.jpg "jay-leno[1]")
I hate Jay Leno so much.![glee-cast[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/glee-cast1.jpg "glee-cast[1]")
