Netflix makes it difficult to perform a genre search such as for “French films.” Monsieur Pas de Merde recommends that you BOOKMARK THIS LINK. Give it a try!
Category: Movies
Review: ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’ revisits an outlandish film and its troubled minds
Peter Sellers (left), Peter Medak and Spike Milligan on the set of “Ghost in the Noonday Sun,”
The Hungarian-born filmmaker Peter Medak survived Nazi occupation during World War II and communism under the Soviet umbrella. But Peter Sellers was a force of nature all his own.
By many accounts, the British comic genius severely damaged Medak’s career when in 1973 he enticed the director to make a pirate comedy concocted by friend and cohort Spike Milligan, then decided on the second day of filming he didn’t want to be a part of it. That was the beginning of a nightmarish shoot that would end with the disastrous “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” being shelved and the blame heaped on Medak, who was one of the hottest directors in the world going into the shoot, but afterward wouldn’t make another film for five years.
But Medak’s new documentary “The Ghost of Peter Sellers,” while intending to set the record straight, isn’t a hit piece on Sellers, but a nuanced portrait of a troubled, often self-destructive talent. And it is an introspective piece from a filmmaker who still, nearly a half-century later, lives with the guilt and psychological wounds from the experience that need addressing. Continue reading “Review: ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’ revisits an outlandish film and its troubled minds”
French screen legend Michel Piccoli, who starred in ‘Belle de jour’, dies at 94
Michel Piccoli, one of the most original and versatile French actors of the last half century, has died aged 94, his family said Monday.
He died “in the arms of his wife Ludivine and his children Inord and Missia after a stroke”, the family told AFP.
Piccoli starred in a string of classics that redefined world cinema, from Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” to a typically memorable turn opposite Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Mépris” (“Contempt”) in 1963.
A masterful performer with a wickedly malicious edge, he managed to carve out a hugely prolific career as both an art house icon and a kind of French Cary Grant.
Like Grant and other Hollywood all-rounders Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, Piccoli was able to adapt himself to virtually any kind of material without altering his essential everyman screen persona.
With his bald forehead, vast eyebrows and sly grin, he hopped easily from seducer to cop to gangster to pope (2011’s “Habemus Papam” by Nanni Moretti), with a predilection in the 1970s and 1980s for ambiguous and cynical roles.
Actor and activist
Yet despite his omnipresence, with Buñuel alone casting him in six of his films, Piccoli never won a French Oscar – the César – despite being nominated four times including for Louis Malle’s “Milou in May” and Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse” in 1991.
He did, however, win best actor at the Cannes film festival in 1980 for playing a tortured Italian judge in Marco Bellocchio’s “A Leap in the Dark” and the following year shared best actor at Berlin for “Une étrange affaire”.
Piccoli was a life-long left-winger who counted the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre among his friends, but that did not stop him raging against repression in the old Eastern Bloc and supporting the Polish trade union, Solidarity.
One of his best known films outside France was Marco Ferreri’s 1973 “La Grande Bouffe” (Blow-Out), in which a group of male friends shut themselves up in a house with prostitutes and try to eat themselves to death.
“I do not put on an act… I slip away behind my characters. To be an actor, you have to be flexible,” Piccoli said.
Source: French screen legend Michel Piccoli, who starred in ‘Belle de jour’, dies at 94
Curate your own Cannes film festival
A trawl through the history of the Palme d’Or yields streaming gems from Brief Encounter to Blow-Up, The Leopard to The Square
Bring out your tiniest violins: in a normal year I’d be writing this column from the balmy French Riviera, with a glass of rosé at my side, amid the annual Cannes film festival. That, of course, has all been called off. For the first time since the second world war – not counting the time things shut down halfway through amid the May ’68 movement – the festival has admitted no Cannes do.
A year without Cannes leaves the arthouse release schedule a bit disoriented: traditionally, UK distributors pick over the festival’s highlights for the next year and beyond. (At Curzon Home Cinema, for example, you can currently stream Portrait of a Lady on Fire and The Whistlers, both plucked from last year’s Cannes competition.) Through the miracle of streaming, however, you can curate your own festival of past Palmes d’Or to treasure. Continue reading “Curate your own Cannes film festival”
‘The Eddy’ On Netflix Shows The Gritty Jazzy Reality Of Paris
The first two episodes were directed by ‘La La Land’ director Damien Chazelle.
The new mini-series The Eddy has just been released on Netflix. The first two episodes were directed by La La Land director Damien Chazelle. This is no La La Land. The Eddy is certainly not a romance told through musical dancing numbers. It is a series that aspires to be gritty and true to Parisian living, without falling into the stereotypical postcard image of the city of lights.
The Eddy begins in a jazz club. A handheld camera follows a waiter as the house band performs on stage. The camera swirls from one side to the other, framing each band member in some very strange angles until it turns its attention to the audience, and settles on one man in particular, the main character of the series.
Continue reading “‘The Eddy’ On Netflix Shows The Gritty Jazzy Reality Of Paris”
Pas De Merde 