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…)
The Thing (1982). From the very opening, with the desolate shots of the Antarctic and the Norwegian helicopter pilot trying desperately to kill a dog running in the snow, we can tell we’re in for a different ride than the 1951 Howard Hawks original 
We have now reached the last of a three part series concerning the three taboos of cinema. Thus far we have discussed the use of profanity and violence, leaving us left with only one subject to discuss, and the most mystifying topic of them all.
In 1998, Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi” was first performed in New York City. It wasn’t hard to predict that portraying Jesus as a promiscuous homosexual living in Corpus Christi, Texas would inspire vehement condemnation from religious groups – and it most certainly did, as “Christians” spewed death threats against the members of the Manhattan Theater Group that first produced the play, and when the play opened in London in 1999 a British Muslim group issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the playwright.
Being an obsessive music hoarder has its drawbacks. The questions of, “How often do I really listen to ______ ?” and all those albums that you really mean to get around to listening to, you’re just never really “in the right mood.” Or those albums that you think you hate then decide you like on a re-listen before you put them in the “sell to record store” or “delete” pile. Then there’s the organizing of one’s library. Any modern music aficionado is often dealing with three to four formats: digital, ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=72f5f887-13b8-4165-b323-ab21e41a3833)
After watching the first 10 minutes, the most surprising thing about Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary about the Rolling Stones, is that it ever happened. Shot in grainy black and white, the “behind the scenes” beginning captures miscommunication after miscommunication, compromise after compromise. If it’s not the set design (which Stones front man Mick Jagger claims is what Scorsese wanted, only for Scorsese to claim it’s what Jagger wanted), it’s the lighting (“We can’t burn Mick Jagger!” Scorsese exclaims to his stage director), or moving cameras (Jagger doesn’t want them to distract the audience, but Scorsese politely says, “It would be good to have a camera that moves,” as though he were an athlete saying it would be nice if he could use his arm). Through this Scorsese does his best to keep any frustration or confusion beneath the surface, covering it with nervous laughter and shrugs.