August 7th, 2008
According to a report in Variety, AMC is developing a TV series based on the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola movie THE CONVERSATION. To quoth the article…
“The TV project will be set in the early 1970s — emulating the time period of the original thriller — and center on electronic surveillance expert Harry Caul, played in the film by Gene Hackman.”
If you’ve never seen the movie THE CONVERSATION, you’re missing out. It’s one of the best films of the 1970s, easily ranking right up there with Coppola’s more well-known films of that era, THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART 2. Hack gives one of his best performances as Harry, a withdrawn expert in audio surveillance. The cast also includes the late John Cazale (who played Fredo in the GODFATHER films), a young Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and Cindy Williams, a few years before she became a TV star on LAVERNE & SHIRLEY.
The movie also co-stars a woman named Phoebe Alexander, an actress with very few film credits but whom I actually knew briefly as a kid. She taught a bit of theater to my church’s youth group, and we worked on a never-staged play. If I had known she’d worked with Coppola and Hackman, I would’ve asked her about it, but back in the late 1970s, I was just some dumb kid who’d never heard of THE CONVERSATION. Too bad.
August 7th, 2008
Over at his Website on Cinema, David Bordwell offers the best definition of a cinephile I’ve ever seen:
 ”The real crux, I think, is this. The cinephile loves the idea of film.
That means loving not only its accomplishments but its potential, its promise and prospects. It’s as if individual films, delectable and overpowering as they can be, are but glimpses of something far grander. That distant horizon, impossible to describe fully, is Cinema, and it is this art form, or medium, that is the ultimate object of devotion. In the darkening auditorium there ignites the hope of another view of that mysterious realm. The pious will call Cinema a holy place, the secular will see it as the treasure-house of an artform still capable of great things. The promised land of cinema, as experimentalists of the 1920s called it: that, mystical as it sounds, is my sense of what the cinephile yearns for.
This separates the cinephile from the lover of novels or classical music. They love their art, I suspect, because of its great accomplishments. Who with literary or musical taste would embrace the subpar novel or the apprentice toccata? But cinephiles will watch damn near anything looking for a moment’s worth of magic.”
Maybe you have to be a real cinephile to even care what the word means, much less debate the definition, but that description — especially that last line — fits me to the proverbial T. I’ve watched loads of movies I knew in advance would be pretty awful, hoping — usually against hope — that some scene, moment or frame would redeem it. It almost never happens, but when it does, it’s worth all the otherwise wasted hours. Here, for example, is a quick write-up I did about an otherwise snoozer of a movie called SH! THE OCTOPUS! — that nevertheless has one single mind-blowing scene.
How about you? Any examples of this sort of obsessive cinephilia you’d care to fess up to?
