In Contention

Tag: Sunset Boulevard

  • AFI FEST: ‘Eraserhead’ ready for its close-up

    This year’s AFI Fest (“presented by AUDI,” as the literature keeps reminding us to call it) has felt something like a non-event so far this year.  I can’t put my finger on why, other than the usual sense of been there, done that as it pertains to films seeing their North American premieres.

    I’ve skipped a number of Galas and parties already.  What can possibly be gleaned over a few hors d’oeuvres and some white wine?  I’d like to attend Friday’s premiere of “Black Swan” and give it another look, but I expect to be in a car on the way to some seclusion with my fiancee this weekend as we quietly celebrate our birthdays (hers Friday, mine Monday) away from our separate frays in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

    But when I picked up my credentials Saturday over at the Roosevelt Hotel, I offered a quick glance at the schedule and decided to watch something for me (which, clearly by these words, has become “for work,” but it didn’t feel that way at the time, and that’s a welcome departure this time of year).

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  • Lynch picks Bergman, Kubrick, Tati, Hitchcock and Wilder for AFI Fest sidebar

    In case you didn’t know, director David Lynch was tapped as this year’s Guest Artistic Director at AFI Fest.  Part of his duties: to choose a special sidebar program at the festival.  Here’s the news, from the press release:

    AFI FEST 2010 presented by Audi announced today the five feature films selected by its first-ever Guest Artistic Director, David Lynch, for his special sidebar program at the festival. As part of the program, the festival will screen Lynch’s first feature film, ERASERHEAD, which was made while Lynch was a Fellow at AFI’s Center For Advanced Film Studies, now known as the AFI Conservatory. Lynch graduated from AFI in 1970.

    Lynch’s selections are: HOUR OF THE WOLF (DIR Ingmar Bergman), LOLITA (DIR Stanley Kubrick), MON ONCLE (DIR Jacques Tati), REAR WINDOW (DIR Alfred Hitchcock) and SUNSET BLVD (DIR Billy Wilder).

    “I picked these particular films because they are the ones that have inspired me most. I think each is a masterpiece,” said Lynch. “If people have already seen them, they are certainly worth being seen again. And if people haven’t seen them, here is an opportunity to see what I consider cinema at its best.”

    [Photo: Nerve]

  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “London Boulevard” by Ken Bruen

    When Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan (“The Departed”) brings Irish crime writer Ken Bruen’s 2001 novel “London Boulevard” to screen in his directorial debut, he won’t be adapting the text so much as returning it to its natural source.

    A short, sharp, deliciously black-hearted thriller that reads not unlike a readymade screenplay in its brisk, dialogue-dominated prose, Bruen’s novel makes its debt to Hollywood clear not only in its construction (brief, propulsive chapters of only a couple pages’ length resemble individual cinematic scenes) and its assorted winking namechecks of bygone films and stars, but in its very conception.

    The title – not a location (locals will know that there is no London Boulevard in the British capital) but a metaphor of sorts – is our first clue to what Bruen is up to: the novel is itself an adaptation, and Billy Wilder’s gothic Hollywood noir “Sunset Boulevard” is the source material.

    The novel’s allusions to the 1950 classic aren’t exactly subtle. Where Wilder’s film gave us Joseph C. Gillis, a destitute L.A. screenwriter who seeks shelter in the mansion of faded movie goddess Norma Desmond to escape the repo man, “London Boulevard” crosses the Channel, jumps a half-century forward, and replaces Gillis with Mitchell, a middle-aged ex-con who dodges the ghosts of his past (and his own compulsive criminal urges) by shacking up in the plush Holland Park pad of Lillian Palmer, a washed-up theater diva plotting her triumphant West End return.

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