Film For Everyone
Chris Kaltenbach also presents the annual 3-D movie selection at the Maryland Film Festival
Looking for an insider perspective on this 2012 Academy Awards weekend?
Long-time Baltimore Sun film writer Chris Kaltenbach will be blogging from Hollywood on the Spirits, Razzies, and Oscars – keeping us all up-to-date on the important events of this 2012 Oscars weekend!
Check out Chris Kaltenbach‘s up-to-the-minute coverage of this weekend’s awards ceremonies on David Zurawik’s Z on TV Blog.
We’re in that rough patch for moviegoing- post-Oscar, pre-Memorial Day, (pre-MFF !!!), but there are some amazing movies to see. THE WHITE RIBBON, a recent Best Foreign Film nominee, and nominee for Best Cinematography, is a visually stunning study of the unacknowledged realities that are often part of small town life. The fictional German baronial village portrayed in the movie, set just before WWI, seems to be nothing if not stable. From the mysterious opening shot, you can feel the ground shifting under the children and adults in this tiny community, disrupting its Germanic discipline. And, of course, the children will populate the Third Reich. From Austrian Michael Haneke.
THE PROPHET, also fresh off its Best Foreign Film nomination, amazingly finds new ground to explore in the prison/gang/underworld genre. Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard takes us inside one prison outside Paris where civilization divides starkly between gangs, Corsicans or Muslims. We watch a new prisoner who speaks both Arabic and French try to learn the ropes before they entangle him. I liked last year’s much-praised GOMORRAH, but think this is better.
And, don’t miss ALICE in 3D (Melina got to see the Imax presentation; I saw it in Digital 3D at White Marsh), or the terrific article about David Simon and company in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine. He’s in New Orleans, alas, shooting a new HBO series, TREME.
-Jed Dietz, MFF Director
Sragow, one of the best film writers in the country, explores one of the documentary short nominees, MUSIC BY PRUDENCE, produced and co-edited by MICA’s Patrick Wright. Patrick’s been such a great partner with us on the film series’ we’ve done at MICA, often including special sessions in the classroom with the students and visiting filmmakers. He’s put together a pretty great film program for MICA students. I haven’t seen his finished film, but early scenes I saw were unbelievable, and it’s been fun watching the project grow. MICA has been supportive from the beginning. I don’t know any of the other nominees, but I hope this one wins.
No news flash: Jeff Bridges is going to win the Oscar for Best Actor. It will act as a Lifetime Achievement Award and, on that basis, is richly deserved. If you want to see him deliver a really fresh performance of a man struggling with self-destructive impulses, rent AMERICAN HEART. Bridges plays a reluctant father to Edward Furlong (discovered by Jim Cameron for TERMINATOR), and he’s just great.
May 8, 7:00pm
JOHN WATERS TO HOST 11TH MFF PICK!
French romantic films set in Paris are legendary; filmmakers from a variety of cultures have worked hard to emulate the specific energy of young people exploring their sexuality that French filmmakers seem to capture so easily. Director/screenwriter Christophe Honoré steps firmly into the middle of this tradition, and then twists and turns, and then throws a couple of punches. Honore’s world includes threesomes, bi-sexuality, and startling new ways to deal with grief.
Built around twelve songs by Alex Beaupain, Love Songs is the anti-Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Salon film critic Andrew O’Hehir describes it as a “blend of François Truffaut’s wistful Parisian sentimentalism and Pedro Almodóvar’s acrid polysexual comedy.”
Love Songs screened in competition at Cannes 2007, was nominated for numerous awards, including four Cesars (French Oscars), but the film never played on more than 6 screens in this country. The remarkable cast includes Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of actors Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni.
— Jed Dietz, Director, Maryland Film Festival
Maryland Film Festival Blog 
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