Movie news on your iPhone today!
Advertisement
Coverage of what is truly interesting in the film world

TOP STORY:

Oscar Anti-Climax: The Meteoric Downfall of Roberto Benigni

Kevin Kelly
By Kevin Kelly posted 1 year ago
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • Reddit
  • Ma.gnolia
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Facebook
  • StumbleUpon

Roberto Benigni looks for his career

This is the first in what will be a series of posts examining the artistic life cycles of Oscar winners who failed to find continued mainstream success after taking home the statuette. If you have suggestions for stars or filmmakers that you’d like to see profiled, let us know in the comments.

Roberto Benigni swang from general obscurity in the United States to media darling following his Academy Award for Life Is Beautiful. But what’s happened to him since? He was only the second filmmaker since Sir Laurence Olivier to direct himself in an Oscar-winning performance. That’s a long way to go for someone who had only been seen here in Blake Edwards’ terrible Son of the Pink Panther and as a sex-obsessed cabbie in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. While we love the underdog success story, we also love the fall from grace, and we’re in search of the crater that Benigni must have left somewhere.

…Read more

The Death of Michelangelo Antonioni

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • Reddit
  • Ma.gnolia
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Facebook
  • StumbleUpon

You know that old chestnut about deaths coming in threes? Yesterday, Defamer assumed that Ingmar Bergman’s death was part of a triptych that also included Tom Snyder and actor Michel Serrault. But with this morning’s news of the death of Italian maverick Michelangelo Antonioni, you’ve got to wonder if there’s another 90-ish European art house master who’s about to go.

Yesterday I organized a round-up of Bergman obits, which as an afternoon activity was time consuming but not exactly rigorous — everyone has something to say about Bergman, so I just sat back and collated. But Antonioni was, to my mind, a different kind of artist, far more polarizing and uneven, one that I don’t think I could passively pay tribute to. I don’t love everything he made, but films like Blow-up, Red Desert and Zabriskie Point were crucial to my personal film education. Let me stew on this for a few hours, and then I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, you’ll find the famous final scene from Zabriskie above. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it later today.