debor009

Taking a quick break from doing my taxes (ugh) to give a hearty thumbs up to Ceyda Torun's charming and heartwarming documentary Kedi , which is now making the rounds of art house theaters nationwide. For centuries Istanbul has harbored thousands of street cats. They are fed and cared for by the people of the city - and look remarkably healthy! - and yet they belong to no one. The film profiles the cats of Istanbul and the people whose lives are touched and sometimes changed by them. It is a magical film. Well worth seeing. You can read a review here and an article on how the film was made here . Really, I loved it. Go see this film!

In my free time, I love to read books about filmmaking, especially autobiographies of great directors. Recently, while reading Frank Capra 's  The Name Above the Title , I came across this gem on what distinguishes great directors from the pack. It could have been written yesterday (just add "CGI" to paragraph 3). Here is what he said: "This is the artistry of the film director: convince actors that they are real flesh and blood human beings living a story. Once actors are themselves convinced, then, hopefully, they will convince audiences....Does a star, paying his hotel bill, pay it to a bit actress or to a real cashier? A bit actress, perhaps hired for one day, will be just a bit actress to herself and to audiences. But let the director give her an identity--an only daughter worried about her mother in the hospital, a wife anxious about her husband losing his job, or a woman in love going to a party that night with the man of her life--and that bit actress become...

About 3,500 films are made each year, not all of them great obviously. Is it my imagination or were more great movies really made back in the 1930s and 1940s, during Hollywood's Golden Age?  Certainly they had a system down for identifying plots that appealed to the public and maybe that made all the difference. I just finished Thomas Schatz’ book The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era ,  which was a fascinating read.  Schatz says that in any given year in the early 1930s, MGM staff readers alone filed reports on more than 1,000 novels and original scripts, 500 short stories, 1,500 plays, and 1,300 works in foreign languages...all in the pursuit of stories the studio could turn into hit movies.  One assumes a similar output was seen at all of the other major studios as well. At MGM they followed “The Ten Commandments for Studio Readers” laid down by head of production Irving Thalberg , and most of it sounds like good advice for struggling f...

I've been thinking about some of the great women's films lately. Films like Two Women , which won an Oscar for Sophia Loren ; The Women , Clare Booth Luce's tour de force comedy, which has been made three times, and others (it's a short list unfortunately.) One that's often overlooked is MGM's 1951 Westward the Women , starring French actress Denise Darcel as a prostitute trying to turn her life around and Robert Taylor as the man charged with bringing a wagon train of women from Chicago to California's Sacramento Valley to marry lonely ranch hands. I don't know why the film wasn't a hit. Maybe it was the poster art that has Darcel in an off-the-shoulder blouse - a la Jane Russell in The Outlaw (and that she doesn't actually wear in the film) - that makes it look like a standard-issue oater. Maybe later viewers linked it with Here Come the Brides , a rather awful TV series that ran for three seasons from 1968 to 1970, about a shipload of marr...