f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

I’ve championed AFI FEST the previous two years since Artistic Director Rose Kuo came on board and pushed the festival into becoming Los Angeles’ best survey of world cinema. And I’ve been even more excited this year due to the programming involvement of Robert Koehler, a bona fide cinephile, critic, and festival hound (and [...]

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The Wall Street Journal published an article this weekend–“LACMA and the Cinéastes”–that provides a good account of the efforts of my colleagues and I during our previous five-week campaign to convince the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to reverse its decision to end its 41-year-old film program this October. At the moment, films [...]

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Lake Tahoe
This is the first year in five that I’m not attending the Toronto International Film Festival–the falling US dollar, rising fuel costs, and necessary baby duties have conspired to keep me here in Los Angeles this year, which means I’m missing at least a dozen friends (most of them listed at right) but avidly [...]

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Patient Filmjourney.org readers will be happy to know that my series of life changing events over the past 11 months–including getting married, having a fussy, colicky (but adorable!) child, moving across town, etc–seem to be leveling off and I expect to resume blogging with more regularity shortly.  But if any of my subsequent posts are convoluted [...]

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The Los Angeles Film Festival ended yesterday, and I managed to catch a handful of films despite my beleaguered schedule the past few weeks, which I hope is settling down. Look for some posts the next few days summarizing my viewing, including my two favorite LAFF films, Philippe Ramos’ Captain Ahab and Lance Hammer’s [...]

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I’m always proud of the resources Trond Trondsen and I provide at Robert-Bresson.com, and our latest project–years in the making–is an exclusive online Bresson Bibliography that uses Jane Sloan’s 1983 out-of-print bibliography and Shmuel Ben-Gad’s recent bibliographies as a starting point.
As we note on the page: “Users who want to correct or extend the bibliography, [...]

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After five years running, Filmjourney.org is undergoing a complete transfer from Weblogger to WordPress, so expect a lot of design changes over the next few days. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know!

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In a couple of days, I’ll be headed to New York City to attend this year’s Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, who selected me as one of a dozen participating journalists, and they’ve just updated their website with the final schedule, list of participants, etc.
With the demise of so many newspaper and magazine [...]

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Longtime readers of Filmjourney.org may have noticed a decisive lag in posts of late, and the reason is quite simple: my first child, Alexandra Anne Cummings, entered the world two weeks ago, and has been pretty greedy with my time. But we’re settling into a life pattern and the blogging here should resume with [...]

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The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)
“Now that rampaging dinosaurs, epic catastrophes, and superheroes have become ubiquitous in movies, animation seems as commonplace as news footage. But animation is as old photography itself; it predates ‘motion pictures’ through a variety of Victorian contraptions. And its practitioners were often the most solitary and obsessive filmmakers–visionaries [...]

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