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Illustrations by Chantall Veerman.Every few years, a projection screen is installed in a clearing near the Greek village of Lyssarea, in Arcadia. Hundreds of red beanbags and pillows dot the field, with benches at the rear and a 16mm film projector atop its wooden stand. As the sun sets over the craggy Peloponnese, the projector whirs to life and spectators settle in for open-air cinema. Crickets chirp. Dogs bark. The temperature falls. Moths prepare for an epic frenzy.Without any opening credits, a flash of light floods the screen and then cuts to black. This is the Temenos. Long sections of black film leader advance and then strobe with clear leader, until sustained illumination bathes the audience. Dark again, the projection surface dissolves into the sky as our eyes readjust from the brightness. Finally, an image appears on the screen: the torqued body of a naked man glistening in warm light,...

The Cannes Film Festival officially kicks off today with the latest from Quentin Dupieux, but Francis Ford Coppola has decided to truly begin the festivities with a bang. After a brief, enticing tease earlier this month, he’s now debuted the epic first trailer for Megalopolis, chock full of jaw-dropping images that has us counting down the hours until Thursday’s world premiere. “Our new film Megalopolis is the best work I’ve ever had the privilege to preside over,” notes Coppola with the trailer.

Along with French distribution from Le Pacte, the film was also picked up by Constantin Film for Germany and all German-speaking territories, including Switzerland and Austria; Eagle Pictures for Italy; Tripictures for Spain; and Entertainment Film Distributors Limited for the U.K., per Deadline. A U.S. deal has yet to be announced, but here’s hoping it comes during the festival.

“My first goal...

I’ve predicted Megalopolis, anticipated as it is, will have a clear dividing point: the cultural commentariat hoping to see “another film by the director of The Godfather” and those who appreciate “something that looks and sounds like a Star Wars prequel.” I am very firmly in the latter, was duly excited by the first image, and can only be pleased with the time-stopping debut teaser, arriving today via Le Pacte.

It comes with a sad addenedum. Coppola, sharing the teaser on Instagram, noted:

Megalopolis has always been a film dedicated to my dear wife Eleanor. I really had hoped to celebrate her birthday together this May 4th. But sadly that was not to be, so let me share with everyone a gift on her behalf.

As Coppola recently told Vanity Fair, “I wouldn’t have been able to make it without standing as I do on the shoulders of G.B. Shaw,...

Now that Francis Ford Coppola has unveiled his long-in-the-works epic Megalopolis to buyers and the industry, we’re just a few weeks away from its official premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. As he hopefully secures U.S. distribution soon, the first look has finally arrived.

Featuring Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel towering above the metropolis, the first image comes courtesy from Vanity Fair, who also share a few new quotes from Coppola himself. “My first goal always is to make a film with all my heart, so I began to realize it would be about love and loyalty in every aspect of human life,” said the director. “Megalopolis echoed these sentiments, in which love was expressed in almost crystalline complexity, our planet in danger and our human family almost in an act of suicide, until becoming a very optimistic film that has faith in the human being to possess...

For crime fiction fans, a new Don Winslow novel is usually a time of joy, but the arrival of the writer’s latest crime opus, City in Ruins, is bittersweet. Winslow, 70, says this is his last book, and he’s going to focus on his online political activism — and the immediate threat of Donald Trump. His viral videos attacking the Republican candidate garner millions of views online, and he plans to keep the campaign going until November and beyond. His vendetta against Trump becoming his day job.

If Winslow really...

Luc Besson's "The Fifth Element" might be the daffiest Hollywood sci-fi flick ever made (at least until Besson made the even daffier "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" 20 years later). The film had movie-star insurance in Bruce Willis, and the trailers promised a surfeit of futuristic eye candy, but what exactly was this zany-looking movie about?

The film may be visually cluttered, but its premise is fairly simple. Every 5,000 years, a force of tremendous evil emerges out of space and tries to destroy Earth. Fortunately, an alien race known as the Mondoshawns and a clandestine religious order are in possession of the only weapon that can repel this evil. This weapon consists of four stones which represent the five classical elements of earth, wind, fire, water, and Philip Bailey. Actually, the fifth element is a humanoid named Leelo, and, as embodied by Milla Jovovich, she is a lethal warrior,...

The Drama League today announced the nominations for the 2023 Drama League Awards. Honoring achievements on and Off-Broadway, the nominations were announced this morning by Roger Bart (“Back to the Future: The Musical”) and Justin Guarini (“Once Upon A One More Time”) at the New York Library for the Performing Arts. Winners will be revealed at the 89th Annual Drama League Awards ceremony at the Ziegfeld Ballroom on Friday, May 19, 2023.

“I don’t think I’ve experienced a theater season in New York ever like this one,” noted Artistic Director Gabriel Stelian-Shanks. “There’s been a range, a breadth, an expansion of possibility that has been truly astonishing to witness. Theater makers have inspired not only with their creativity, but also with their drive and determination to serve audiences with vision and talent. These nominees reflect the promise and greatness inherent in the work of theater folk, and I can’t help but be deeply proud.

“I’m something different.” So says Ghostface to Gale Weathers in the new trailer for Scream VI, reinforcing the “New York. New rules.” tagline. And while that may be true, there’s certainly no shortage of references to the past. The trailer reveals Ghostface’s macabre shine featuring wardrobe and props from both past killers and their victims.

Here are all the Scream VI Easter Eggs we spotted in the new trailer…

Steve’s varsity jacket – Ghostface’s first victim in the original Scream is Casey’s boyfriend, Steve. His Woodsboro High School varsity jacket is on a mannequin along with the duct tape that was used to bound him and, it appears, the actual chair he was murdered in.

Stu’s robe – I know a lot of fans want to see Stu return, but all signs point to him being dead. The Hugh Hefner-esque red robe that he...

Greek tragedy echos through the modern-day Korean #MeToo movement in Ougie Pak’s Clytaemnestra. Made on the fly at an acting workshop in Greece, the film follows an actress as she struggles with the text of Agamemnon and against her domineering director, exploring power dynamics and the artistic process. Though very slight indeed, the film plays a bit like a more on-the-nose version of one of Hong Sang-soo’s sequentially shot explorations of sexist microaggressions and meta-cinematic reflexivity.

Hye Bin (Haru Kim) arrives in Athens with her hard-shell wheelie suitcase to begin rehearsals with a director played by Jongman Kim, an actor who in fact invited Pak to come to Greece and make a movie out of a two-week acting workshop he was leading there. Flying out with just a cinematographer and a production coordinator, and shooting on a Canon C100 “since it was the free camera available to us...

Jacques Rivette's Out 1, Noli Me Tangere (1971) is showing on Mubi in the United States.There’s a lot of confusion about what improvisation in movies consists of—when it is or isn’t used, and sometimes what it means when it is used. Those who think that the dialogue in Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind is improvised don’t realize that the screenplay by Welles and Oja Kodar with that dialogue was published years ago, long before the film’s posthumous completion. It’s worth adding, however, that the film’s mise en scène was improvised by Welles on a daily basis. Similarly, those misled by director Robert Altman’s dreamy pans and seemingly random zooms in The Long Goodbye into concluding that the actors must be inventing their own lines are ignoring the careful work done by screenwriter Leigh Brackett, not to mention Raymond Chandler.

I. The Rattigan Version

After his first dramatic success, The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan conceived a double bill of one-act plays in 1946. Producers dismissed the project, even Rattigan’s collaborator Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont. Actor John Gielgud agreed. “They’ve seen me in so much first rate stuff,” Gielgud asked Rattigan; “Do you really think they will like me in anything second rate?” Rattigan insisted he wasn’t “content writing a play to please an audience today, but to write a play that will be remembered in fifty years’ time.”

Ultimately, Rattigan paired a brooding character study, The Browning Version, with a light farce, Harlequinade. Entitled Playbill, the show was finally produced by Stephen Mitchell in September 1948, starring Eric Portman, and became a runaway hit. While Harlequinade faded into a footnote, the first half proved an instant classic. Harold Hobson wrote that “Mr. Portman’s playing and Mr. Rattigan’s writing...

Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes) Sony Pictures Classics Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. Data-based on Rotten Tomatoes. Grade: A- Director: Damiàn Szifrón Screenwriter: Damiàn Szifrón Cast: Ricardo Darín, Oscar Martínez, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Èrica, Rivas, Rita Cortese, Julieta Zylberberg, Darío Grandinetti Screened at: Sony, NYC, 10/21/14 Opens: February 20, 2015 Ever since the playwright Aeschylus entertained us by dramatizing the legend of Agamemnon—who gets his comeuppance from his wife Clytemnestra because of his affair with Cassandra—audiences have loved stories of revenge. But the Greek tragedians were humorless. Not so Damian Szifrón, who delights us with six stories, one more darkly comic than the other. The Argentine writer-director’s “Wild Tales” is of [ Read More ]

The post Wild Tales Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

It was another year full of great classical music. Here are my favorites from 2014, new releases only, no reissues.

1. Magnificat/Philip Cave The Tudors at Prayer (Linn) This superbly programmed and performed album contains eight Latin sacred choral works (specifically motets, mostly votive antiphons and psalm motets) by John Taverner (c.1490-1545), Thomas Tallis (c.1505-1585), William Mundy (c.1529-1591), Robert White (c.1538-1574), and William Byrd (c.1540-1621). Active during the period of greatest religious upheaval in English history, they kept writing richly layered polyphony despite changing fashions (though the later composers listed would also provide chordal English-language anthems as needed). The mightiest work here, Mundy's Vox Patris caelestis, leads off the program. The text, speaking as it does of "flowering vines" and their "heavenly ambrosial scent," practically begs for an elaborate polyphonic setting, and Mundy provided one that is among the most exquisite works of the 16th century.

For decades, stars great, small and dubious have swanned down the Oscars’ regal rug — crimson being the color of royalty for millennia. But what of its origins? Turns out the red one has a backstory as rich and multifarious as a Selznick epic. Photos: 7 Stunning Watches to Hit the Red Carpet on Time 458 B.C. In Aeschylus’ tentpole tragedy, Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War to find that his wife, Clytemnestra, has laid a path of dark red tapestries, supposedly in his honor. He fears that treading on them will be perceived as an act of hubris,

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Editing is older than motion pictures. The ordering and pacing of dialogues, scenes, entrances and exits to build conflict and resolution have long defined Western theater, from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung [Der Ring Des Nibelungen]. It was the insertion of first-person thoughts into dialogue and plot that modernized 18th- and 19th-century novels and clever sequencing of mechanically animated magic lantern glass slides that thrilled Victorian audiences to popular epics like Ben-Hur.

Cbldf has joined forces with the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression to write a letter in defense of Alan Moore’s Neocomicon (Avatar Press), which has recently been challenged in the Greenville, South Carolina, public library system. Objections to Neonomicon were raised by a patron after her teenage daughter checked out the book, which contains adult themes. The book was correctly shelved in the adult section of the library, and the teenager possessed a library card that allowed access to the adult section.

Cbldf joined Ncac and Abffe in sending the following letter to the Library Board of Trustees at the Greenville County Public Library:

Dear Board Members,

On behalf of the National Coalition Against Censorship, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund we strongly urge you to keep Alan Moore’s Neonomicon in the Greenville Public Library.

One thing I like to imagine is what it would be like if the Greek writers of yore found themselves penning TV shows for a modern, internet-savvy audience. During religious holidays and stuff, Greeks would sit through a trilogy of tragedies for a whole entire day, heroes getting maimed and stuffed into bathtubs, jealous girlfriends poisoning future fiances until they fell over dead, mothers stabbing sons, sons sleeping with mothers, gods smiting people willy-nilly just for giggles. I think of Aeschylus checking his @replies on Twitter, waiting for the internet to praise him for the brilliance of Oresteia only to be bombarded with angry, threatening tweets about, "Cassandra was my favorite, you loathsome cockroach!"

Stories work backwards a lot of times these days, TV writers starting with an ending that will make fans happy and backing into it from point C to point B to point A. But it hasn't always been like that.

The only truly honest moment in Alex Gibney's documentary comes after nearly two hours when Eliot Spitzer finally says that no matter who set up the investigations against him, he's the one who made the mistake. If only Spitzer had started out with this kind of bravado, owning up and admitting, "Look, I fucked a grown woman for money. Wall Street's fucking all of you in the ass and taking your money. Who's worse?" from the very get-go, he might have come off with more panache. As it stands, what seems like a flashy magazine rebuttal and an attempt to regain our good graces bodes about as well for Eliot Spitzer as for the other financial fat cats who are simultaneously skewered in Gibney's documentary. Spitzer's still playing politician, and it makes him come off shady and sketchy. As for Gibney, in what seems like a struggle to remain objective and informative,...

Werner Herzog has teamed up with David Lynch to make a film about a disturbed actor who kills his own mother with a sword. Jeremy Kay sits in on the final day of filming

Werner Herzog's output has swung perilously close to mainstream of late. His 2006 Vietnam war action film Rescue Dawn was mostly well-received, while his Bad Lieutenant was released last month to widespread admiration. Has the famously idiosyncratic German director gone straight? Not a chance. His latest movie, which screens at the Edinburgh international film festival this week, sees him back on the fringes of artistic expression.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done has baffled many Us critics, but bewitched others, who have declared it a nightmarish gem. Based loosely on the true story of Mark Yavorsky, a San Diego actor who in 1979 killed his mother using a sword from a production of The Oresteia...

I am writing this review not to make a full review, but rather to show what things (in my opinion) should be in a proper review of this film. Until anything like that happens (universally these film critics seem to be fairly unprofessional in what they are doing) I want to point out what critics really should be talking about. (Warning! This “review” contains spoilers!)

Let’s talk about the story. This is what Cameron gets mostly picked on. In short: this is a story about a looser called Jake Sully. Not a looser in the American Idol sense, but a looser big time. A little bit like Oedipus. What speaks for his favour is the fact that he is clever like Oedipus (Oidipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx, Jake was cunning enough to fly the big dragon, which helped both these men gain perhaps not so wise respect...

Historically, English adaptations of Aeschylus' "Agamemnon" have rendered its ancient Greek poetry into proven English poetic forms. The results have been often good and occasionally brilliant. Yet the original Greek meters provide clues as to how a section of a play was performed (sung, spoken or spoken to musical accompaniment). This has prompted Alexander Harrington, a director known for his mastery of oratorical theater, to attempt something radical: approximating Aeschylus' actual, original poetic meters in a new translation. This intrepid idea has resulted in a script of surprisingly clear stage speech and unusual poetic quality. It will debut November 12 to 29, 2009 in La MaMa's large Annex Theater, performed by The Eleventh Hour Theatre Company.

Historically, English adaptations of Aeschylus' "Agamemnon" have rendered its ancient Greek poetry into proven English poetic forms. The results have been often good and occasionally brilliant. Yet the original Greek meters provide clues as to how a section of a play was performed (sung, spoken or spoken to musical accompaniment). This has prompted Alexander Harrington, a director known for his mastery of oratorical theater, to attempt something radical: approximating Aeschylus' actual, original poetic meters in a new translation. This intrepid idea has resulted in a script of surprisingly clear stage speech and unusual poetic quality. It will debut November 12 to 29, 2009 in La MaMa's large Annex Theater, performed by The Eleventh Hour Theatre Company.

Historically, English adaptations of Aeschylus' "Agamemnon" have rendered its ancient Greek poetry into proven English poetic forms. The results have been often good and occasionally brilliant. Yet the original Greek meters provide clues as to how a section of a play was performed (sung, spoken or spoken to musical accompaniment). This has prompted Alexander Harrington, a director known for his mastery of oratorical theater, to attempt something radical: approximating Aeschylus' actual, original poetic meters in a new translation. This intrepid idea has resulted in a script of surprisingly clear stage speech and unusual poetic quality. It will debut November 12 to 29, 2009 in La MaMa's large Annex Theater, performed by The Eleventh Hour Theatre Company.