list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Silent Light on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Silent_Light/331038/default.aspx Title: Silent Light
Year: 2007
Director: Carlos Reygadas
Plot: A man of faith succumbs to a temptation he cannot resist in this drama written and directed by Carlos Reygadas. Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) and Esther (Miriam Toews) have been married for years, and live with their children in a Mennonite community Mexico. While Johan and Esther are both taciturn by nature, a moral dilemma is tearing Johan apart -- he's been having an affair with another woman in their circle, Marianne (Maria Pankratz), and feels he may be falling in love with her. While the tenants of his faith strictly forbid adultery, his need to be with Marianne seems stronger than the dictates of his moral compass, and while he's confessed his sins to Esther and his close friend Zacarias (Jacobo Klassen), subjecting himself to the shame of truth hasn't buffered his desires. Even worse, after Johan his father about his lust for Marianne, he's told that he may have fallen under the sway of Satan. Luz Silenciosa (aka Silent Light) received its world premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 1
Number of Lists: 1
Number of blog posts: 17
Number of discussion threads: 1
SpoutRating: 4
]]>Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:09:06 GMTSilent Light2007Carlos ReygadasA man of faith succumbs to a temptation he cannot resist in this drama written and directed by Carlos Reygadas. Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) and Esther (Miriam Toews) have been married for years, and live with their children in a Mennonite community Mexico. While Johan and Esther are both taciturn by nature, a moral dilemma is tearing Johan apart -- he's been having an affair with another woman in their circle, Marianne (Maria Pankratz), and feels he may be falling in love with her. While the tenants of his faith strictly forbid adultery, his need to be with Marianne seems stronger than the dictates of his moral compass, and while he's confessed his sins to Esther and his close friend Zacarias (Jacobo Klassen), subjecting himself to the shame of truth hasn't buffered his desires. Even worse, after Johan his father about his lust for Marianne, he's told that he may have fallen under the sway of Satan. Luz Silenciosa (aka Silent Light) received its world premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide1Slightly Tagged (1-5)11714http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s331038.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Silent_Light/331038/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/tommacy/archive/2009/1/21/39753.aspx Post By: tommacy
Post To: tommacy Blog
Post Date: 1/21/2009 1:09:06 PM
Body: I saw my first new release of 2009 today. Originally released at Cannes in 2007, I have been hearing about “Silent Light” for almost two years before getting a chance to see it (and I live in New York.) It’s always daunting going in to a film with so much acclaim. I don’t mean “Slumdog Millionaire” acclaim, I can prepare myself for that. I’m talking serious cinephile cred. “Silent Light” was on both Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott’s top 10 for 2008 (I don’t know how they fit it in that year if it came out in ‘07). It also appeared on the top 10 of the renowned J. Hoberman from the Village Voice. That is a must-see if I ever heard one. The past 2 Januarys have yielded the previous year’s Palme dO’r winner. After the slew of quality films cramed at the end of the calender year to quality for the Oscars it serves as a nice palate cleanser before the doldrums of January (Film Forum repertory time!). Both films, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in ‘08 and “The Wind That Shakes the Barely” in ‘07 had the similar acclaim and anticipation (”4 Months” was on A. O.’s top 10 of ‘07) and both delivered in spades. Check them out if you haven’t. So here was “Silent Light”, not a winner of the Palme (that honor went to “The Class” which will be released at the end of the month) but it was named as the “Jury Prize” winner (I don’t know what that specifically means but it’s Cannes so I’m sure it’s some form of illustrious.) Having never seen a trailer or read a plot synopsis for “Silent Light” I was going in cold. All I knew was what I recalled from a NY times podcast why back from Cannes in 2007 when Manohla and A.O. described the first shot of the film, a sunrise, as a breath of fresh air that gladly slowed the pace of the bustling festival. So there’s a sunrise, that’s all I had. Well, it was some sunrise. Holy crap. The opening of this film is a genuine “wow” moment that will be hard to top this year on the basis of asthetic alone. It’s good few minutes long, beginning with a black startlit sky and panning down on a faint horizon that appears at first to be a slight discoloration amongst the blackness. That morphs to a discernable dark blue which then continues through an entire box of crayola crayon colors as the sky, trees, grass and enitre world are illuminated. Nothing short of breathtaking. I should mention that this film is directed by Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas, only his 4th feature. The slowing of time, forcing the viewer to focus on some of life’s everyday happenings is applied throughout. The story centers around a farmer, Johan (Cornelio Wall), a devoted husband father to his wife and large family yet deeply in love with another woman whom, he says, even compared to his wife when they first met, would have been the better choice. Ouch. It takes about half and hour for even this much information to reach the viewer. I could recount most of the plot for this 136 minute film in about 10 sentences. But do not let that deter you. The magic of Silent Light is it’s ability to make you lean in an appreciate not just the beauty of a landscape but also the beauty of a father shampooing his daughter’s hair. Reygadas gives equal attention to all aspects of his world whether it is a father and son heart-to-heart or milking cows. Every shot of this film could have 5 seconds chopped off it, every one! You would not lose any information regarding the narrative. But that extra hour, or whatever all those extra 5 seconds add up to, is where the meat is. The environment, and more importantly, the atmosphere is the driving force of this film. Played apparently by non-actors, the performances carry a stiffness that feels appropriate for characters who are not adept at expressing themselves. I will admit though, their restrained communications coupled with the pacing was at times frustrating. I’m not used to working this hard while watching a film. I am used to being told what’s happening, not shown. And on that coin I will say, this film will not be for everyone. The previous “prize winner’s” I mentioned earlier are film’s of action. The goals are clear, as are the motivations of the characters. “Silent Light” is not a film of action, well, not a lot of action, it is a film of stoicism. That said, if you stick with it you will not be disappointed, as I was most certainly not. An investment in “Silent Light” will be paid off in the end, and it ends, as spectacularly as it begins.
]]>Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:09:06 GMTtommacytommacy Blog1/21/2009 1:09:06 PM I saw my first new release of 2009 today. Originally released at Cannes in 2007, I have been hearing about “Silent Light” for almost two years before getting a chance to see it (and I live in New York.) It’s always daunting going in to a film with so much acclaim. I don’t mean “Slumdog Millionaire” acclaim, I can prepare myself for that. I’m talking serious cinephile cred. “Silent Light” was on both Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott’s top 10 for 2008 (I don’t know how they fit it in that year if it came out in ‘07). It also appeared on the top 10 of the renowned J. Hoberman from the Village Voice. That is a must-see if I ever heard one. The past 2 Januarys have yielded the previous year’s Palme dO’r winner. After the slew of quality films cramed at the end of the calender year to quality for the Oscars it serves as a nice palate cleanser before the doldrums of January (Film Forum repertory time!). Both films, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in ‘08 and “The Wind That Shakes the Barely” in ‘07 had the similar acclaim and anticipation (”4 Months” was on A. O.’s top 10 of ‘07) and both delivered in spades. Check them out if you haven’t. So here was “Silent Light”, not a winner of the Palme (that honor went to “The Class” which will be released at the end of the month) but it was named as the “Jury Prize” winner (I don’t know what that specifically means but it’s Cannes so I’m sure it’s some form of illustrious.) Having never seen a trailer or read a plot synopsis for “Silent Light” I was going in cold. All I knew was what I recalled from a NY times podcast why back from Cannes in 2007 when Manohla and A.O. described the first shot of the film, a sunrise, as a breath of fresh air that gladly slowed the pace of the bustling festival. So there’s a sunrise, that’s all I had. Well, it was some sunrise. Holy crap. The opening of this film is a genuine “wow” moment that will be hard to top this year on the basis of asthetic alone. It’s good few minutes long, beginning with a black startlit sky and panning down on a faint horizon that appears at first to be a slight discoloration amongst the blackness. That morphs to a discernable dark blue which then continues through an entire box of crayola crayon colors as the sky, trees, grass and enitre world are illuminated. Nothing short of breathtaking. I should mention that this film is directed by Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas, only his 4th feature. The slowing of time, forcing the viewer to focus on some of life’s everyday happenings is applied throughout. The story centers around a farmer, Johan (Cornelio Wall), a devoted husband father to his wife and large family yet deeply in love with another woman whom, he says, even compared to his wife when they first met, would have been the better choice. Ouch. It takes about half and hour for even this much information to reach the viewer. I could recount most of the plot for this 136 minute film in about 10 sentences. But do not let that deter you. The magic of Silent Light is it’s ability to make you lean in an appreciate not just the beauty of a landscape but also the beauty of a father shampooing his daughter’s hair. Reygadas gives equal attention to all aspects of his world whether it is a father and son heart-to-heart or milking cows. Every shot of this film could have 5 seconds chopped off it, every one! You would not lose any information regarding the narrative. But that extra hour, or whatever all those extra 5 seconds add up to, is where the meat is. The environment, and more importantly, the atmosphere is the driving force of this film. Played apparently by non-actors, the performances carry a stiffness that feels appropriate for characters who are not adept at expressing themselves. I will admit though, their restrained communications coupled with the pacing was at times frustrating. I’m not used to working this hard while watching a film. I am used to being told what’s happening, not shown. And on that coin I will say, this film will not be for everyone. The previous “prize winner’s” I mentioned earlier are film’s of action. The goals are clear, as are the motivations of the characters. “Silent Light” is not a film of action, well, not a lot of action, it is a film of stoicism. That said, if you stick with it you will not be disappointed, as I was most certainly not. An investment in “Silent Light” will be paid off in the end, and it ends, as spectacularly as it begins. http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/1/6/39150.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 1/6/2009 2:01:31 PM
Body: “Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf. Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light – which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch. That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see. That wasn’t intended as a pun, but maybe it should be taken as one: though Light’s path to US distribution has been both thorny and worth noting, it’s also a relatively painless thing to put into plain language. The experience of actually watching Silent Light is not summarized so easily. At its basest level, Silent Light is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can’t, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it.  Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing (2001 is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements. This is what I can say, in the plainest language in which I can say it. Silent Light stars Cornelio Wall Fehr (a non-actor in as fully-realized a performance as I’ve seen) as Johan, an early middle aged husband, father and farmer who takes a local woman named Marianne (Maria Pankratz) as his mistress. Maybe “mistress” is the wrong word, because it implies secrecy, and the excruciating twist to Silent Light’s love triangle is the compulsion of this religiously devout but maritally unfaithful man to constantly confess. Johan not only reveals his feelings and his indiscretions to his best friend Zacharias (who thinks it’s a blessing that Johan has found his “natural woman”) and his father (who thinks the same is a curse), but to his long-suffering wife, Esther (played by Miriam Toews, a Canadian novelist acting for the first time). For much of Silent Light, Esther resigns herself to living with a man who not only betrays her, but betrays the knowledge that he betrays her –– not just with words, but with distant, dreamy gazes mid-prayer and private crying jags –– leaving her essentially helpless to watch as he drifts back and forth between teary agony, oblivious bliss, and contrite confession. And then one day, Esther spectacularly cracks, with tragic consequences. It’s clear that Johan is in two kinds of love, and both are very real. His relationship with Esther is, as far as we see, chaste, but sweetly domestic. When he looks at her it’s with a mix of the contentment (one player in this triangle will call it “peace”) that comes from a shared life built one day at a time over years, and a clear longing to spare his wife from the pain that he knows his mixed feelings have brought her. That respect, that will to protection, cannot keep Johan from Marianne, and a relationship that plays out under the tropes of teenage love: endless kissing, urgent sex, permanent angst. But despite encouragement from his male confidantes to choose one woman or the other — and thereby cast these feelings that Johan himself can’t comprehend as the work of either angels or devils — Johan does nothing at all. He seems to prefer the agony of purgatory, the time-stopping defense of indecision. Early in the film, Johan literally stops a clock so that he can be alone with his emotional trauma and paralysis. The clock stays stopped until Johan’s inner turmoil and its external consequences are divinely resolved. If it’s impossible to overlook how closely Silent Light borrows, at least narratively, from Carl Dreyer’s Ordet, it’s equally impossible to ignore Reygadas’ masterful artistic choices with which he sets the familiar narrative cogs into motion. Reygadas’ stylistic MO on this film seems to be a boiling down of the vast into the microscopic.  The much-vaunted opening shot, in which a deep night sky gives way to early morning light set to a thunderous symphony of ambient and animal noises that could be called Everything In Nature, All Happening At Once, condenses approximately six hours of the Earth’s rotation into six minutes of film. For every moment that Reygadas inflates (Johan’s never-ending, lens-flare spotted first on-screen kiss with Marianne), he also conflates (in a single cut, we move from warm summer to icy winter, skipping over unknown months and narrative detail). For every scene that feels drawn out to the speed of dream time, with every vague gesture almost registering on the level of the subconscious, every now and then there’ll be a moment of incredible precision, such as when Johan very simply explains to Zacharias that thinking about the hurt that reverberates from his affair makes him feel as though his “guts have been filled with lead.” Two and a half hours of inordinate beauty are thus, with six brutal words, knocked down to earth, via language we can all relate to. Ultimately, the words that serve as rhe most compelling evidence as to why you should see this “fucking Mennonite movie,” come from the fucking Mennonite movie’s own script. When Johan confesses to Zacharias that he’s gone back to Marianne even after swearing he’d quit her, Zacharias tries to convince his friend that maybe things aren’t so bad, that maybe Johan’s feelings are “based in something sacred…even if we don’t understand it.” Soon after, Johan temporarily gives himself over to the giddy high of his obsession with Marianne: he dances into his pick-up truck, and literally drives circles around his friend in glee, before speeding off to one of the most romantically rendered adulterous kisses in recent movie memory. In these brief moments, Johan is liberated to not understand what’s happening to him or inside him or to the people around him, while Reygadas telegraphs that experience directly to the viewer. Silent Light is a film dedicated to making the incomphresensible tangible, visible, even half-knowable. And that’s why you should go see a movie that’s in fucking Mennonite. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:01:31 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog1/6/2009 2:01:31 PM“Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf. Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light – which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch. That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see. That wasn’t intended as a pun, but maybe it should be taken as one: though Light’s path to US distribution has been both thorny and worth noting, it’s also a relatively painless thing to put into plain language. The experience of actually watching Silent Light is not summarized so easily. At its basest level, Silent Light is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can’t, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it.  Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing (2001 is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements. This is what I can say, in the plainest language in which I can say it. Silent Light stars Cornelio Wall Fehr (a non-actor in as fully-realized a performance as I’ve seen) as Johan, an early middle aged husband, father and farmer who takes a local woman named Marianne (Maria Pankratz) as his mistress. Maybe “mistress” is the wrong word, because it implies secrecy, and the excruciating twist to Silent Light’s love triangle is the compulsion of this religiously devout but maritally unfaithful man to constantly confess. Johan not only reveals his feelings and his indiscretions to his best friend Zacharias (who thinks it’s a blessing that Johan has found his “natural woman”) and his father (who thinks the same is a curse), but to his long-suffering wife, Esther (played by Miriam Toews, a Canadian novelist acting for the first time). For much of Silent Light, Esther resigns herself to living with a man who not only betrays her, but betrays the knowledge that he betrays her –– not just with words, but with distant, dreamy gazes mid-prayer and private crying jags –– leaving her essentially helpless to watch as he drifts back and forth between teary agony, oblivious bliss, and contrite confession. And then one day, Esther spectacularly cracks, with tragic consequences. It’s clear that Johan is in two kinds of love, and both are very real. His relationship with Esther is, as far as we see, chaste, but sweetly domestic. When he looks at her it’s with a mix of the contentment (one player in this triangle will call it “peace”) that comes from a shared life built one day at a time over years, and a clear longing to spare his wife from the pain that he knows his mixed feelings have brought her. That respect, that will to protection, cannot keep Johan from Marianne, and a relationship that plays out under the tropes of teenage love: endless kissing, urgent sex, permanent angst. But despite encouragement from his male confidantes to choose one woman or the other — and thereby cast these feelings that Johan himself can’t comprehend as the work of either angels or devils — Johan does nothing at all. He seems to prefer the agony of purgatory, the time-stopping defense of indecision. Early in the film, Johan literally stops a clock so that he can be alone with his emotional trauma and paralysis. The clock stays stopped until Johan’s inner turmoil and its external consequences are divinely resolved. If it’s impossible to overlook how closely Silent Light borrows, at least narratively, from Carl Dreyer’s Ordet, it’s equally impossible to ignore Reygadas’ masterful artistic choices with which he sets the familiar narrative cogs into motion. Reygadas’ stylistic MO on this film seems to be a boiling down of the vast into the microscopic.  The much-vaunted opening shot, in which a deep night sky gives way to early morning light set to a thunderous symphony of ambient and animal noises that could be called Everything In Nature, All Happening At Once, condenses approximately six hours of the Earth’s rotation into six minutes of film. For every moment that Reygadas inflates (Johan’s never-ending, lens-flare spotted first on-screen kiss with Marianne), he also conflates (in a single cut, we move from warm summer to icy winter, skipping over unknown months and narrative detail). For every scene that feels drawn out to the speed of dream time, with every vague gesture almost registering on the level of the subconscious, every now and then there’ll be a moment of incredible precision, such as when Johan very simply explains to Zacharias that thinking about the hurt that reverberates from his affair makes him feel as though his “guts have been filled with lead.” Two and a half hours of inordinate beauty are thus, with six brutal words, knocked down to earth, via language we can all relate to. Ultimately, the words that serve as rhe most compelling evidence as to why you should see this “fucking Mennonite movie,” come from the fucking Mennonite movie’s own script. When Johan confesses to Zacharias that he’s gone back to Marianne even after swearing he’d quit her, Zacharias tries to convince his friend that maybe things aren’t so bad, that maybe Johan’s feelings are “based in something sacred…even if we don’t understand it.” Soon after, Johan temporarily gives himself over to the giddy high of his obsession with Marianne: he dances into his pick-up truck, and literally drives circles around his friend in glee, before speeding off to one of the most romantically rendered adulterous kisses in recent movie memory. In these brief moments, Johan is liberated to not understand what’s happening to him or inside him or to the people around him, while Reygadas telegraphs that experience directly to the viewer. Silent Light is a film dedicated to making the incomphresensible tangible, visible, even half-knowable. And that’s why you should go see a movie that’s in fucking Mennonite. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/6/39149.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/6/2009 2:01:04 PM
Body: “Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf. Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light – which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch. That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see. That wasn’t intended as a pun, but maybe it should be taken as one: though Light’s path to US distribution has been both thorny and worth noting, it’s also a relatively painless thing to put into plain language. The experience of actually watching Silent Light is not summarized so easily. At its basest level, Silent Light is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can’t, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it.  Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing (2001 is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements. This is what I can say, in the plainest language in which I can say it. Silent Light stars Cornelio Wall Fehr (a non-actor in as fully-realized a performance as I’ve seen) as Johan, an early middle aged husband, father and farmer who takes a local woman named Marianne (Maria Pankratz) as his mistress. Maybe “mistress” is the wrong word, because it implies secrecy, and the excruciating twist to Silent Light’s love triangle is the compulsion of this religiously devout but maritally unfaithful man to constantly confess. Johan not only reveals his feelings and his indiscretions to his best friend Zacharias (who thinks it’s a blessing that Johan has found his “natural woman”) and his father (who thinks the same is a curse), but to his long-suffering wife, Esther (played by Miriam Toews, a Canadian novelist acting for the first time). For much of Silent Light, Esther resigns herself to living with a man who not only betrays her, but betrays the knowledge that he betrays her –– not just with words, but with distant, dreamy gazes mid-prayer and private crying jags –– leaving her essentially helpless to watch as he drifts back and forth between teary agony, oblivious bliss, and contrite confession. And then one day, Esther spectacularly cracks, with tragic consequences. It’s clear that Johan is in two kinds of love, and both are very real. His relationship with Esther is, as far as we see, chaste, but sweetly domestic. When he looks at her it’s with a mix of the contentment (one player in this triangle will call it “peace”) that comes from a shared life built one day at a time over years, and a clear longing to spare his wife from the pain that he knows his mixed feelings have brought her. That respect, that will to protection, cannot keep Johan from Marianne, and a relationship that plays out under the tropes of teenage love: endless kissing, urgent sex, permanent angst. But despite encouragement from his male confidantes to choose one woman or the other — and thereby cast these feelings that Johan himself can’t comprehend as the work of either angels or devils — Johan does nothing at all. He seems to prefer the agony of purgatory, the time-stopping defense of indecision. Early in the film, Johan literally stops a clock so that he can be alone with his emotional trauma and paralysis. The clock stays stopped until Johan’s inner turmoil and its external consequences are divinely resolved. If it’s impossible to overlook how closely Silent Light borrows, at least narratively, from Carl Dreyer’s Ordet, it’s equally impossible to ignore Reygadas’ masterful artistic choices with which he sets the familiar narrative cogs into motion. Reygadas’ stylistic MO on this film seems to be a boiling down of the vast into the microscopic.  The much-vaunted opening shot, in which a deep night sky gives way to early morning light set to a thunderous symphony of ambient and animal noises that could be called Everything In Nature, All Happening At Once, condenses approximately six hours of the Earth’s rotation into six minutes of film. For every moment that Reygadas inflates (Johan’s never-ending, lens-flare spotted first on-screen kiss with Marianne), he also conflates (in a single cut, we move from warm summer to icy winter, skipping over unknown months and narrative detail). For every scene that feels drawn out to the speed of dream time, with every vague gesture almost registering on the level of the subconscious, every now and then there’ll be a moment of incredible precision, such as when Johan very simply explains to Zacharias that thinking about the hurt that reverberates from his affair makes him feel as though his “guts have been filled with lead.” Two and a half hours of inordinate beauty are thus, with six brutal words, knocked down to earth, via language we can all relate to. Ultimately, the words that serve as rhe most compelling evidence as to why you should see this “fucking Mennonite movie,” come from the fucking Mennonite movie’s own script. When Johan confesses to Zacharias that he’s gone back to Marianne even after swearing he’d quit her, Zacharias tries to convince his friend that maybe things aren’t so bad, that maybe Johan’s feelings are “based in something sacred…even if we don’t understand it.” Soon after, Johan temporarily gives himself over to the giddy high of his obsession with Marianne: he dances into his pick-up truck, and literally drives circles around his friend in glee, before speeding off to one of the most romantically rendered adulterous kisses in recent movie memory. In these brief moments, Johan is liberated to not understand what’s happening to him or inside him or to the people around him, while Reygadas telegraphs that experience directly to the viewer. Silent Light is a film dedicated to making the incomphresensible tangible, visible, even half-knowable. And that’s why you should go see a movie that’s in fucking Mennonite. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:01:04 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/6/2009 2:01:04 PM“Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf. Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light – which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch. That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see. That wasn’t intended as a pun, but maybe it should be taken as one: though Light’s path to US distribution has been both thorny and worth noting, it’s also a relatively painless thing to put into plain language. The experience of actually watching Silent Light is not summarized so easily. At its basest level, Silent Light is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can’t, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it.  Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing (2001 is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements. This is what I can say, in the plainest language in which I can say it. Silent Light stars Cornelio Wall Fehr (a non-actor in as fully-realized a performance as I’ve seen) as Johan, an early middle aged husband, father and farmer who takes a local woman named Marianne (Maria Pankratz) as his mistress. Maybe “mistress” is the wrong word, because it implies secrecy, and the excruciating twist to Silent Light’s love triangle is the compulsion of this religiously devout but maritally unfaithful man to constantly confess. Johan not only reveals his feelings and his indiscretions to his best friend Zacharias (who thinks it’s a blessing that Johan has found his “natural woman”) and his father (who thinks the same is a curse), but to his long-suffering wife, Esther (played by Miriam Toews, a Canadian novelist acting for the first time). For much of Silent Light, Esther resigns herself to living with a man who not only betrays her, but betrays the knowledge that he betrays her –– not just with words, but with distant, dreamy gazes mid-prayer and private crying jags –– leaving her essentially helpless to watch as he drifts back and forth between teary agony, oblivious bliss, and contrite confession. And then one day, Esther spectacularly cracks, with tragic consequences. It’s clear that Johan is in two kinds of love, and both are very real. His relationship with Esther is, as far as we see, chaste, but sweetly domestic. When he looks at her it’s with a mix of the contentment (one player in this triangle will call it “peace”) that comes from a shared life built one day at a time over years, and a clear longing to spare his wife from the pain that he knows his mixed feelings have brought her. That respect, that will to protection, cannot keep Johan from Marianne, and a relationship that plays out under the tropes of teenage love: endless kissing, urgent sex, permanent angst. But despite encouragement from his male confidantes to choose one woman or the other — and thereby cast these feelings that Johan himself can’t comprehend as the work of either angels or devils — Johan does nothing at all. He seems to prefer the agony of purgatory, the time-stopping defense of indecision. Early in the film, Johan literally stops a clock so that he can be alone with his emotional trauma and paralysis. The clock stays stopped until Johan’s inner turmoil and its external consequences are divinely resolved. If it’s impossible to overlook how closely Silent Light borrows, at least narratively, from Carl Dreyer’s Ordet, it’s equally impossible to ignore Reygadas’ masterful artistic choices with which he sets the familiar narrative cogs into motion. Reygadas’ stylistic MO on this film seems to be a boiling down of the vast into the microscopic.  The much-vaunted opening shot, in which a deep night sky gives way to early morning light set to a thunderous symphony of ambient and animal noises that could be called Everything In Nature, All Happening At Once, condenses approximately six hours of the Earth’s rotation into six minutes of film. For every moment that Reygadas inflates (Johan’s never-ending, lens-flare spotted first on-screen kiss with Marianne), he also conflates (in a single cut, we move from warm summer to icy winter, skipping over unknown months and narrative detail). For every scene that feels drawn out to the speed of dream time, with every vague gesture almost registering on the level of the subconscious, every now and then there’ll be a moment of incredible precision, such as when Johan very simply explains to Zacharias that thinking about the hurt that reverberates from his affair makes him feel as though his “guts have been filled with lead.” Two and a half hours of inordinate beauty are thus, with six brutal words, knocked down to earth, via language we can all relate to. Ultimately, the words that serve as rhe most compelling evidence as to why you should see this “fucking Mennonite movie,” come from the fucking Mennonite movie’s own script. When Johan confesses to Zacharias that he’s gone back to Marianne even after swearing he’d quit her, Zacharias tries to convince his friend that maybe things aren’t so bad, that maybe Johan’s feelings are “based in something sacred…even if we don’t understand it.” Soon after, Johan temporarily gives himself over to the giddy high of his obsession with Marianne: he dances into his pick-up truck, and literally drives circles around his friend in glee, before speeding off to one of the most romantically rendered adulterous kisses in recent movie memory. In these brief moments, Johan is liberated to not understand what’s happening to him or inside him or to the people around him, while Reygadas telegraphs that experience directly to the viewer. Silent Light is a film dedicated to making the incomphresensible tangible, visible, even half-knowable. And that’s why you should go see a movie that’s in fucking Mennonite. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/12/2/37849.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 12/2/2008 2:01:49 PM
Body: The nominations for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards are out, and there are a lot of causes for excitement. IndieWIRE has the full list; here are a few of the many reasons to celebrate: Silent Light, which still hasn’t officially been released in the US (although a run at NY’s Film Forum is pending), was nominated for best Foreign Film, alongside Cannes winners Hunger, Gomorrah and The Class, and the upcoming IFC release The Secret of the Grain. Three big nominations for Medicine for Melancholy: director Barry Jenkins and producer Justin Barber were nominated for Best First Feature, Jenkins was named alongside Nina Paley and Lynn Shelton as contenders for the Acura Someone to Watch Award, and James Laxton earned a nomination for Melancholy’s distinctive cinematography. Sean Baker competes against himself for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for under $500,000; Prince of Broadway and Take Out were nominated alongside The Signal, Turn the River, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss. SpoutBlog favorites The Order of Myths, Encounters at the End of the World, The Betrayal and Man on WireUp the Yangtze join in the Best Documentary category; Myths director Margaret Brown was also nominated for the Lacost Truer Than Fiction prize, which goes to an upcoming nonfiction filmmaker. On the bigger film front, Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler and Vicky Cristina Barcelona were amongst the most nominated films; Woody Allen will compete in the Screenplay category against fellow Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman. The full list of nominees can be found here. The Spirits will be handed out, as per tradition, the night before the Oscars in Santa Monica. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:01:49 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog12/2/2008 2:01:49 PMThe nominations for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards are out, and there are a lot of causes for excitement. IndieWIRE has the full list; here are a few of the many reasons to celebrate: Silent Light, which still hasn’t officially been released in the US (although a run at NY’s Film Forum is pending), was nominated for best Foreign Film, alongside Cannes winners Hunger, Gomorrah and The Class, and the upcoming IFC release The Secret of the Grain. Three big nominations for Medicine for Melancholy: director Barry Jenkins and producer Justin Barber were nominated for Best First Feature, Jenkins was named alongside Nina Paley and Lynn Shelton as contenders for the Acura Someone to Watch Award, and James Laxton earned a nomination for Melancholy’s distinctive cinematography. Sean Baker competes against himself for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for under $500,000; Prince of Broadway and Take Out were nominated alongside The Signal, Turn the River, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss. SpoutBlog favorites The Order of Myths, Encounters at the End of the World, The Betrayal and Man on WireUp the Yangtze join in the Best Documentary category; Myths director Margaret Brown was also nominated for the Lacost Truer Than Fiction prize, which goes to an upcoming nonfiction filmmaker. On the bigger film front, Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler and Vicky Cristina Barcelona were amongst the most nominated films; Woody Allen will compete in the Screenplay category against fellow Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman. The full list of nominees can be found here. The Spirits will be handed out, as per tradition, the night before the Oscars in Santa Monica. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/12/2/37848.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 12/2/2008 2:01:34 PM
Body: The nominations for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards are out, and there are a lot of causes for excitement. IndieWIRE has the full list; here are a few of the many reasons to celebrate: Silent Light, which still hasn’t officially been released in the US (although a run at NY’s Film Forum is pending), was nominated for best Foreign Film, alongside Cannes winners Hunger, Gomorrah and The Class, and the upcoming IFC release The Secret of the Grain. Three big nominations for Medicine for Melancholy: director Barry Jenkins and producer Justin Barber were nominated for Best First Feature, Jenkins was named alongside Nina Paley and Lynn Shelton as contenders for the Acura Someone to Watch Award, and James Laxton earned a nomination for Melancholy’s distinctive cinematography. Sean Baker competes against himself for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for under $500,000; Prince of Broadway and Take Out were nominated alongside The Signal, Turn the River, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss. SpoutBlog favorites The Order of Myths, Encounters at the End of the World, The Betrayal and Man on WireUp the Yangtze join in the Best Documentary category; Myths director Margaret Brown was also nominated for the Lacost Truer Than Fiction prize, which goes to an upcoming nonfiction filmmaker. On the bigger film front, Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler and Vicky Cristina Barcelona were amongst the most nominated films; Woody Allen will compete in the Screenplay category against fellow Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman. The full list of nominees can be found here. The Spirits will be handed out, as per tradition, the night before the Oscars in Santa Monica. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:01:34 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com12/2/2008 2:01:34 PMThe nominations for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards are out, and there are a lot of causes for excitement. IndieWIRE has the full list; here are a few of the many reasons to celebrate: Silent Light, which still hasn’t officially been released in the US (although a run at NY’s Film Forum is pending), was nominated for best Foreign Film, alongside Cannes winners Hunger, Gomorrah and The Class, and the upcoming IFC release The Secret of the Grain. Three big nominations for Medicine for Melancholy: director Barry Jenkins and producer Justin Barber were nominated for Best First Feature, Jenkins was named alongside Nina Paley and Lynn Shelton as contenders for the Acura Someone to Watch Award, and James Laxton earned a nomination for Melancholy’s distinctive cinematography. Sean Baker competes against himself for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for under $500,000; Prince of Broadway and Take Out were nominated alongside The Signal, Turn the River, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss. SpoutBlog favorites The Order of Myths, Encounters at the End of the World, The Betrayal and Man on WireUp the Yangtze join in the Best Documentary category; Myths director Margaret Brown was also nominated for the Lacost Truer Than Fiction prize, which goes to an upcoming nonfiction filmmaker. On the bigger film front, Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler and Vicky Cristina Barcelona were amongst the most nominated films; Woody Allen will compete in the Screenplay category against fellow Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman. The full list of nominees can be found here. The Spirits will be handed out, as per tradition, the night before the Oscars in Santa Monica. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/7/11/32440.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 7/11/2008 2:01:41 PM
Body: I “eeee!”ed too soon. Yet another snag has come up in the distribution future for the film that’s become my most picked scab over the past year, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. Just yesterday, Anthony Kufman passed along news that Palisades Media, the company that purchased the back catalogs of both Tartan Uk and Tartan US, were planning a theatrical release for some time in the vague future. But today. Kaufman says he’s been emailed by Camille Neel of Bac Films International, who own worldwide rights on Reygadas’ film.Though Tartan did release the film in the UK, a report in Screen Daily suggesting that they had purchased US distribution rights to the film was apparently erroneous––whether they wanted to or not is unclear, but the distributor apparently never closed a deal before shutting down. Kaufman quotes Neel, italics mine: “The film is still available today for the US and of course, if we have strong interests, we are still looking for distribution [for] all rights in the US.” Paging all distributors with notoriously strong interests!!! Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:01:41 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog7/11/2008 2:01:41 PMI “eeee!”ed too soon. Yet another snag has come up in the distribution future for the film that’s become my most picked scab over the past year, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. Just yesterday, Anthony Kufman passed along news that Palisades Media, the company that purchased the back catalogs of both Tartan Uk and Tartan US, were planning a theatrical release for some time in the vague future. But today. Kaufman says he’s been emailed by Camille Neel of Bac Films International, who own worldwide rights on Reygadas’ film.Though Tartan did release the film in the UK, a report in Screen Daily suggesting that they had purchased US distribution rights to the film was apparently erroneous––whether they wanted to or not is unclear, but the distributor apparently never closed a deal before shutting down. Kaufman quotes Neel, italics mine: “The film is still available today for the US and of course, if we have strong interests, we are still looking for distribution [for] all rights in the US.” Paging all distributors with notoriously strong interests!!! Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/7/11/32439.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 7/11/2008 2:01:31 PM
Body: I “eeee!”ed too soon. Yet another snag has come up in the distribution future for the film that’s become my most picked scab over the past year, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. Just yesterday, Anthony Kufman passed along news that Palisades Media, the company that purchased the back catalogs of both Tartan Uk and Tartan US, were planning a theatrical release for some time in the vague future. But today. Kaufman says he’s been emailed by Camille Neel of Bac Films International, who own worldwide rights on Reygadas’ film.Though Tartan did release the film in the UK, a report in Screen Daily suggesting that they had purchased US distribution rights to the film was apparently erroneous––whether they wanted to or not is unclear, but the distributor apparently never closed a deal before shutting down. Kaufman quotes Neel, italics mine: “The film is still available today for the US and of course, if we have strong interests, we are still looking for distribution [for] all rights in the US.” Paging all distributors with notoriously strong interests!!! Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:01:31 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com7/11/2008 2:01:31 PMI “eeee!”ed too soon. Yet another snag has come up in the distribution future for the film that’s become my most picked scab over the past year, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. Just yesterday, Anthony Kufman passed along news that Palisades Media, the company that purchased the back catalogs of both Tartan Uk and Tartan US, were planning a theatrical release for some time in the vague future. But today. Kaufman says he’s been emailed by Camille Neel of Bac Films International, who own worldwide rights on Reygadas’ film.Though Tartan did release the film in the UK, a report in Screen Daily suggesting that they had purchased US distribution rights to the film was apparently erroneous––whether they wanted to or not is unclear, but the distributor apparently never closed a deal before shutting down. Kaufman quotes Neel, italics mine: “The film is still available today for the US and of course, if we have strong interests, we are still looking for distribution [for] all rights in the US.” Paging all distributors with notoriously strong interests!!! Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/7/10/32396.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 7/10/2008 12:01:19 PM
Body: Today is my 28th birthday (cue self-reflexive old maid joke). I wasn’t even going to mention it here, but Anthony Kaufman has written a blog post with a promise that, if it ends up coming true, would be a pretty fantastic present, for you and me: I’d get to see Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light get a theatrical release, and you’d get a reprieve from me bitching about it. Here’s what’s going on: yesterday, news broke that Palisades Media had acquired the left-behind library of recently-shuttered distributor art film Tartan. The Variety story on the matter was fairly vague, and didn’t say much regarding the films that had been sitting on Tartan’s shelf awaiting a theatrical release, including Light, Princesses, You the Living, etc. Kaufman exchanged emails with Palisades about the future of Light, and ‘was told it would “absolutely receive a theatrical screening now,’ with, of course, one caveat: ‘but everything is still TBD.’” So, you know. Don’t get your hopes up or anything, but … eeee! Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:01:19 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog7/10/2008 12:01:19 PMToday is my 28th birthday (cue self-reflexive old maid joke). I wasn’t even going to mention it here, but Anthony Kaufman has written a blog post with a promise that, if it ends up coming true, would be a pretty fantastic present, for you and me: I’d get to see Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light get a theatrical release, and you’d get a reprieve from me bitching about it. Here’s what’s going on: yesterday, news broke that Palisades Media had acquired the left-behind library of recently-shuttered distributor art film Tartan. The Variety story on the matter was fairly vague, and didn’t say much regarding the films that had been sitting on Tartan’s shelf awaiting a theatrical release, including Light, Princesses, You the Living, etc. Kaufman exchanged emails with Palisades about the future of Light, and ‘was told it would “absolutely receive a theatrical screening now,’ with, of course, one caveat: ‘but everything is still TBD.’” So, you know. Don’t get your hopes up or anything, but … eeee! Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/7/10/32395.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 7/10/2008 12:01:08 PM
Body: Today is my 28th birthday (cue self-reflexive old maid joke). I wasn’t even going to mention it here, but Anthony Kaufman has written a blog post with a promise that, if it ends up coming true, would be a pretty fantastic present, for you and me: I’d get to see Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light get a theatrical release, and you’d get a reprieve from me bitching about it. Here’s what’s going on: yesterday, news broke that Palisades Media had acquired the left-behind library of recently-shuttered distributor art film Tartan. The Variety story on the matter was fairly vague, and didn’t say much regarding the films that had been sitting on Tartan’s shelf awaiting a theatrical release, including Light, Princesses, You the Living, etc. Kaufman exchanged emails with Palisades about the future of Light, and ‘was told it would “absolutely receive a theatrical screening now,’ with, of course, one caveat: ‘but everything is still TBD.’” So, you know. Don’t get your hopes up or anything, but … eeee! Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:01:08 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com7/10/2008 12:01:08 PMToday is my 28th birthday (cue self-reflexive old maid joke). I wasn’t even going to mention it here, but Anthony Kaufman has written a blog post with a promise that, if it ends up coming true, would be a pretty fantastic present, for you and me: I’d get to see Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light get a theatrical release, and you’d get a reprieve from me bitching about it. Here’s what’s going on: yesterday, news broke that Palisades Media had acquired the left-behind library of recently-shuttered distributor art film Tartan. The Variety story on the matter was fairly vague, and didn’t say much regarding the films that had been sitting on Tartan’s shelf awaiting a theatrical release, including Light, Princesses, You the Living, etc. Kaufman exchanged emails with Palisades about the future of Light, and ‘was told it would “absolutely receive a theatrical screening now,’ with, of course, one caveat: ‘but everything is still TBD.’” So, you know. Don’t get your hopes up or anything, but … eeee! Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/3/27/26643.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 3/27/2008 10:00:43 AM
Body: Ellen Burstyn and James Cromwell have been hired to play Barbara Bush Sr and George H.W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush drama, which is currently being called W. All along, the trades have been saying that the goal is to get this sucker distributed around the time of the November elections; today’s Variety story implies that since it’s almost April and they’re still casting the thing, a pre-Inauguration Day release might be more realistic. Peter Chernin of News Corp/Fox and Robert Iger of Disney/ABC, who helped negotiate deals with the DGA and WGA, are now expected to mediate talks between SAG/AFTRA and the studios, in an effort to head off an actors strike. My beloved Silent Light won five Mexican Academy Awards on Tuesday night, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » karina
]]>Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:00:43 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog3/27/2008 10:00:43 AM Ellen Burstyn and James Cromwell have been hired to play Barbara Bush Sr and George H.W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush drama, which is currently being called W. All along, the trades have been saying that the goal is to get this sucker distributed around the time of the November elections; today’s Variety story implies that since it’s almost April and they’re still casting the thing, a pre-Inauguration Day release might be more realistic. Peter Chernin of News Corp/Fox and Robert Iger of Disney/ABC, who helped negotiate deals with the DGA and WGA, are now expected to mediate talks between SAG/AFTRA and the studios, in an effort to head off an actors strike. My beloved Silent Light won five Mexican Academy Awards on Tuesday night, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » karina http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/lust/MemberTagFilms.aspxlust
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]]>Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:02:59 GMT1621419Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/mennonite/MemberTagFilms.aspxmennonite
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]]>Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:03:57 GMT911Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/religiousprinciples/MemberTagFilms.aspxreligiousprinciples
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