The Crippled Corner

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Tarsem Singh ("Immortals," "The Cell") has been hired to direct the action-thriller meets light sci-fi tale "The Panopticon" at Good Universe.

Craig Rosenberg ("After the Sunset") penned the script which follows a seemingly ordinary man who receives a mysterious package containing a pre-recorded message from himself.

The message warns that the world is about to end and only he can save it. He must race against the clock to learn the truth before time runs out for mankind.

Andrew Lazar ("Get Smart") will produce.

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Hugh Grant has scored a supporting role in Guy Ritchie's action spy thriller "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." at Warner Bros. Pictures.

The film is an adaptation of the classic 1960s spy TV series and follows special agents Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer), who work for the mysterious United Network Command for Law Enforcement (U.N.C.L.E.).

Grant will play the head of British Naval Intelligence in the film which also stars Alicia Vikander as the female lead.

Ritchie is directing and co-wrote the script with Lionel Wigram, both will produce alongside John Davis. Shooting is slated to begin in September.

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Morao sam da sačekam da se postignu optimalni uslovi za gledanje BYZANTIUMa Neila Jordana. Ovaj reditelj zaslužuje da mu se priđe sa punom pažnjom, a poslednjih dana, klima je činila da se sve, pa i gledanje filmova, odvija otežano.

BYZANTIUM je Jordanov povratak na temu vampira, kojom se u okvirima vrhunskog mejnstrima bavio u filmu INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, i svojevrsni eho tog ostvarenja postoji i ovde - vampiri su prikazani drugačije od kanona ali i dalje imaju izvesnu romantičnu crtu i sasvim prirodno se vežu za epohu, kao za vremenski marker koji pokazuje njihovu starost. Otud je sve ono što je flešbek na korene vampirizma u porodici klasicistički tretirano na polju imaginacije i egzekucije, dok je moderni deo svojevrsni brajtonski NEAR DARK, osmišljena reaktuelizacija priče o vampirima sa elementima socijalne drame koju Jordan rado i vrlo vešto koristi.

U izvesnom smislu, BYZANTIUM je produžetak filma ONDINE u kome je natprirodni momenat zapravo nesporan i unekoliko unapređen u odnosu na kanonski prikaz vampira, pre svega u pogledu same tehnike načinjanja žrtve i procesa inicijacije. Najveći problem filma zapravo ostaje to što Jordan uporedo background glavnih junakinja i njihovu životnu priču u sadašnjici, gde ta struktura sama po sebi ne bi bila toliko sporna da prethodno nije već spoilovana u svakom prepričavanju premise filma. Ovako, BYZANTIUM ostavlja utisak kao da pola filma gledamo jednu priču čiji nam je ishod nepoznat i drugu čiji nam je ishod poznat, čemu svakako doprinose i pogrešne najave i to što nam je krajnji horizont prošlosti junakinja lak za anticipaciju.

Međutim, Jordan je previše dobar reditelj da bi takav nedostatak ozbiljnije narušio utisak filma pošto čak i onda kada je pripovedački manjkav, vizuelno je zanimljiv, a u okvirima vampirske priče drmatičarka Moira Buffini unosi dosta svežih detalja, kako u pogledu same mitologije tako i želja koje imaju vampiri. Jordan sve vreme drži priču zatomljenom, iako ima ripper sekvenci ne kliza u senzacionalizam i zadržava sve na intimistčkom nivou, sa fokusom na karaktere i njihove tenzije.

U trenutku kada je svet zasićen raznoraznim pogledima na vampire, kada su oni komodifkovani za razne uzraste i eksplatisani sa razne načine, Jordanov film ima šta da ponudi, i u odnosu na filmove mnogih njegovih vršnjaka deluje vrlo vitalno i dostojanstveno. Otud je marginalna pozicija koju je BYZANTIUM imao u distribuciji nepravedna jer reč je o solidnom i zanimljivom filmu. Međutim, pošto su ovo vampiri koji nisu tretirani dovoljno adolescentski, a opet film nije dovoljno provokativan za sezonu nagrada, našao se na ničijoj zemlji za koju u distribuciji nema previše razumevanja.

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HONG KONG – "Snowpiercer" dominated the South Korean box office charts for the second successive weekend — justifying CJ Entertainment's considerable gamble on the English-language debut of Korean director Bong Joon-ho.

Released on Aug 1, the film passed the 6 million admissions mark in the small hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning and finished the weekend with a cumulative ticket sales total of 6.445 million. According to KOBIS box office data that is a gross of $41.05 million (KRW46.32 billion) in ten days.

Earlier last week the film became the quickest on record to pass the 4 million ticket sales mark in South Korea. It was second quickest to 6 million behind last year's "The Thieves."

"Snowpiercer" accounted for 44% of the total weekend B.O., ahead of another local title, Lotte Entertainment's "The Terror Live" which claimed 29% of the weekend total. Released a day earlier than "Snowpiercer," on July 31, "The Terror Live" has an 11 day cume of $24.5 million (KRW27.48 billion).

The strong performance of the two Korean titles kept Fox's "Epic" as the highest grossing Hollywood title, in third place with $2.459m from the weekend. Fox also had DreamWorks Animation's "Turbo" in fifth place with $1.08 million from the weekend, and $10.5 million from ten days. While that represented a steep 61% tumble from its opening weekend, it was still this weekend's second ranked Hollywood title in South Korea.

Fourth place on Saturday and Sunday was taken by paid previews of another Korean film "The Flu" which releases on Aug 14, though the 2005 Japanese animation "Detective Conan: Strategy Above The Depths" claimed the number four slot over the full Friday to Sunday period.

With "Smurfs 2" also in seventh place, the top ten included four animated features.

The stellar performance of "Snowpiercer" in home theaters does much to justify CJ Entertainment's faith in Bong and his long cherished passion project. But it was far from a no-brainer.

When a key element of the financing fell apart just weeks ahead of shooting, the company was faced with the choice of postponing production (and trying to reassemble the multinational cast at a later date), or significantly increasing its investment in the picture.

Costing over $40 million, largely financed by the Korean major, "Snowpiercer" is the biggest budget Korean-made movie of all time – but it was made in English, rather than in Korean. While that may have increased its sales potential in international markets (CJ's international sales department reports 167 territories licensed,) it was feared that the movie might struggle at home.

CJ addressed that with a long teaser campaign featuring dark, brooding images and by emphasizing the Korean hit-making heritage of Bong, who previously delivered "Mother" and "The Host," still Korea's all time top performing film.

It remains to be seen whether the Korean B.O. success of "Snowpiercer" has an influence on U.S. distributor The Weinstein Company. Numerous unconfirmed reports have emerged suggesting that Weinstein Co. is seeking to cut 20 minutes from "Snowpiercer" in order to make it more comprehensible to Middle America. That is a strategy previously employed by the company for the release of several Asian titles, albeit ones presented in Asian languages.

Possibly influencing Weinstein Co.'s thinking is how the film should be positioned for an Oscar run. As an English-language production, "Snowpiercer" has already been ruled ineligible by the Korean Film Council, which is now examining a shortlist of nine candidates for Korea's foreign-language candidacy. However, if the film receives a U.S. release in time, it can still be a contender in most major awards categories.

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Pogledao sam THE GREAT GATSBY Baza Luhrmanna, novu ekranizaciju klasičnog romana F. Scott Fitzgeralda koju je Luhrmann propustio kroz šake u svom maniru. Iako Luhrmannove filmove ne cenim previše, oni uvek zaslužuju određenu pažnju a ponekad i poštovanje, THE GREAT GATSBY je film koji se zaustavlja na poštovanju, reč je svakako o velikom logističkom poduhvatu i pokušaju da se intimistička priča silom pretvori u spektakl u čemu Luhrmann formalno uspeva. Sve ostalo je manje-više ponavljanje njegovih postupaka i u tom pogledu THE GREAT GATSBY je šarena laža koja zapravo ne funkcioniše na suštinskom nivou koji nosi roman, a to je pre svega priča o američkom društvu, usponu, promeni klasnih okolnosti koje se prelamaju kroz emotivni život i sl. GATSBY zapravo ne nudi pravu emociju osim sporadičnoig divljenja za spektakl, bogatu podelu i Leov magnetizam. Sve ostale emocije su ugušene pod pritiskom Luhrmannove nesigurnosti koja se ogleda u agresivnom montažnom postupku, kojim komada dramske scene ne dopuštajući ionako flah postavljenim dramskim situacijama da se nekako razviju.

Ako je na polju alternative sličan retro postupak odavno gajio Guy Maddin, Luhrmann je imao otvoren prostor u domenu mejnstrima sve dok se nije pojavio Michel Hazanavicius koji ga je matirao u nekoliko poteza, između ostalog lagano uzevši i "oskara". Zato Luhrmannov film deluje kao prilično bajat, mada i dalje šaren pokušaj da se vrati u igru, ali rezultat nije ništa više od pokušpaja da se lektira prilagodi mladima, da se kroz uvođenje pojedinih savremenih detalja na nivou muzike, odnosno prenaglašavanje retro-ikonografije dočara šta je GATSBY značio u svoje vreme i o čemu je govorio. I zbilja, ko ima dete koje ne može da shvati da se neko u sceni zabavlja uz džez, može da pogleda ovaj film i kada čuje will.i.am pretpostavljam da će razumeti da je reč o zabavi.

Dakle, THE GREAT GATSBY je film čiji su mnogi rediteljski postupci n nivou tretmana celine stari skoro 14-20 godina, i u tom smislu ovo se može smatrati muzejskim primerkom hip filma. U tom pogledu Jay-Zjeva umešanost je njemu samo donela korist jer Jigga ovim filmom stiče reputaciju nespornog klasika svoje epohe, ali samim tim gubi na značaju sada na terenu. No, čini mi se da je kulturni kapital stečen ovim filmom mnogo vredniji sa Jiggu i da je on najveći dobitnik u ovom filmu.

Drugi najveći dobitnik je svakako Leo koji je sada zacementirao status najveće zvezde savremenog Holivuda, ne samo time što je zasenio sve ostale zvezde koje je u ovom filmu izređao Baz već i po tome što je formirao opus sačinjen od klasike, što na polju autora sa kojima radio što u domenu materijala. Iako Will Smith garantuje više novca na blagajnama, Leo garantuje osmišljen i ambiciozan film bez populističkih trikova, i uprkos svojim nedostacima, GATSBY jeste takav film. Reč je definitivno o hazarderskom produkcentskom potezu koji se doduše isplatio na blagajnama.

THE GREAT GATSBY je film koji je u mnogim tehničkim aspektima impresivan, i donosi niz maštovitih rešenja plus Leovu uzbuidljivu ulogu. Nažalost, kao celina ne nosi apsolutno nikakvu emociju, niti nudi prostor za intelektualno promišljanje. S druge strane, moguće je da velikom delu publike koja je osuđena na aktuelne blokbastere štošta iz ovog filma može delovati avangardno i inspirativno. Zato je u načelu jako teško biti aktivno protiv ovakvog filma u ovako čudnoj sezoni.

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Stari Kadar brine o starim kadrovima

http://novinenovosadske.rs/siva-sila/

[Meho Krljic]

Actually napravio si mnogo dobrih poenti ovde i dokačio teme o kojima Crveni krst i njihova mreža HumanaS (a koja se bavi aktivnim starenjem) priča već godinama. Rispekt.

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Hvala. Stvarno je situacija u medijima postala neukusna. Morao sam da reagujem.

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Pogledao sam LOVELACE Roba Epsteina i Jeffrey Friedmana, igrani film dvojice poznatih gej aktivista i dokumentarista koji su snimili i nekoliko zanimljivih radova na temu istorije Holivuda kao što je recimo kapitalni CELLULOID CLOSET. LOVELACE je međutim prilično slab film i to pre svega zato što ne uspeva da obuhvati osnovni problem njene životne priče, a to je period iskupljenja kada je potpuno preokrenula svoj stav prema pornografiji. Linda Lovelace je rodonačelnik tog "Linda fenomena" koji je masovan i postoji niz primera porno zvezda koje su se ponašale pokajnički posle izlaska iz porno industrije.

Epstein i Friedman nisu mnogo talentovani za igranu formu ali jesu inteligentni i svesni su da je ključ Lindine priče u tome. Međutim oni nisu u stanju da proniknu u formu kojom bi to prikazali. Otud oni snimaju film u kome može da se snađe samo neko ko je upoznat sa njenom biografijom. Mnoge činjenice plasiraju kroz dijalog (recimo, fakti o detetu datom na usvajanje), u priči o osobi za koju se sumnjalo da laže, a neke stvari prikazuju kroz radnju iako spadaju među nepotvrđene Lindine priče.

Podela filma na dva dela, u formi svojevrsne rašomonijade gde prva polovina nudi glamuroznu priču o putu jedne stidljive devojke (koja je doduše već stigla da ima jedno vanbračno dete) do statusa zvezde a druga nudi preklapanje sa prvim delom prikazujući "mračnu" stranu, ali nudeći i neke nove detalje, pokazuje da su Epstein i Friedman svesni složenosti priče u koju su se upleli, ali ovim rešenjem ne uspevaju da to razreše. Svakako da ovaj koncept sa dve strane medalje deluje dobro na papiru, ali u realizaciji, naročito ovako zbrzanoj ostaje više interesantan nego efektan. No, u svakom slučaju, sam pokušaj je hvale vredan i pokazuje da su Epstein i Friedman ozbiljni ljudi.

Uloga Linde Lovelace je jako dugo bila predmet čežnje među mladim glumicama koje su u njoj videle materijal za oskara. I zbilja, u dobrom filmu na tu temu, neka mlada glumica je lako mogla da osvoji barem nominaciju. Nažalost,. LOVELACE nije dobar film tako da će trud Amande Seyfried ostati nenagrađen, a u sklopu neispunjenih očekivanja od kojih vrvi film, ona čini sve što može. Ipak, Amanda Seyfried nije dovoljno harizmatična da digne film uprkos svemu, no da je sve oko nje bilo bolje, sigurno bi ovaj doprinos bio cenjeniji.

Lik Chucka Traynora je slabo razvijen. On je prikazan kao magnetični luzer koji je zaveo mladu, naivnu devojku, koristio je da finansira svoje poroke, ali u njemu je moralo biti još nečega čim je potom isto uradio i sa Marilyn Chambers. Film ga prikazuje kao sitnog prevaranta koji se povlači pred ljudima koje vidi kao jače od sebe, i samim tim bi trebalo da bude intrigantnije kako je uspeo da "administrira" dve najveće porno zvezde svog doba. Cronenberg ga recimo opisuje kada govori o snimanju filma RABID, on se često javlja u raznim pričama, ali LOVELACE ga prikazuje krajnje simplifikovano, ne nudi nam mogućnost da vidimo čime je on zapravo držao te žene u pokornosti čak i kada se pored njih pojave još iskusniji tipovi poput Hugh Hefnera.

Sa trajanjem od sat i po čini se da je u nekom trenutku došlo i do toga da se naprosto "odustane" od ambicioznije forme i napravi efikasna melodrama, i da je ambicija koju su Epstein i Friedman verovatno zatomljena. Isto tako, reklo bi se da je barem za sada ova zanimljiva tema potrošena. Uprkos tome što je referisaona mnoge istorijske ličnosti BOOGIE NIGHTS ipak nije bio istinita priča, i za sada se još nije pojavio igrani film koji će sve to obuhvatiti. Naslovi kao što su WONDERLAND ili LOVELACE nude samo mlake fragmente jedne mnogo šire priče. Otud BOOGIE NIGHTS ostaje i dalje najvažniji film na tu temu.

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Pogledao sam SILENCIO EN LA NIEVE Gerarda Herrera, ekranizaciju romana Ignacio del Vallea koji je zapravo whodunit smešten u Divsion Azul 1943. godine kada je bitka za Staljingrad izgubljena a Španci se suočavaju sa neizvesnošću i serijom misterioznih ubistava u svojim redovima. Division Azul je zanimljiva tema koja do sada nije mnogo prikazivana na filmu i Herrero prikazuje ovaj milje slično kako su prikazani frankisti u savremenom španskom filmu, dakle kao represivan, surov, antikomunistički režim, sa ljudskim likom, korupcijom i bezbednom egzistencijom za one koji mu se ne opiru. Međutim, Division Azul ipak nije uobičajena falangistička jedinica, i Herrero u tom pogledu malo izvrdava da prikaže širu sliku. Svodeći priču samo na unutaršpanski konflikt i prikazujući Ruse i Nemce dosta često ali distancirano, jedne kao rulju žrtava druge kao rulju dželata, jedini pravi junaci ovog filma su Španci i samim tim su abolirani od istorijskih činjenica njihovog tadašnjeg istorijskog trenutka.

Uostalom vrlo brzo, i ideološka prizma zločina koji se u ovom filmu istražuje na kraju biva vezana za španski građanski rat a ne za rat na strani sila Osovine. Herrero dakle propušta da ponudi gledaocu istorijski kontekst najangažovanije Frankove formacije u Drugom svetskom ratu.

No, sam film je vrlo atmosferičan i da nema nekih digresija radilo bi se o vrlo zanimljivom ratnom whodunitu, snimljenom na surovim postsovjetskim lokacijama. Viškovi koji su vezani za romantičnu vezanost glavnog junaka i lokalne seljanke lakog morala su ne samo nepotrebni za priču već i prilično neubedljivi. Scenografija i fizička produkcija su prilično solidni i ambiciozni tako da rekonstrukcija rata deluje vrlo pristojno i u skladu sa zahtevima priče. Jedino smetaju CGI avioni u jednoj sekvenci.

Herrero je imao priliku da školski prikaže širu priču kroz jedan kriminalistički slučaj, ali to je samo delimično uradio. Ipak, jedinstvena vizura čini da ovaj film ipak zavredi pažnju ljubitelja krimića i ratnog filma.

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Renny Harlin on The Dyatlov Pass Incident: 'There are only guesses'

Finnish director Renny Harlin, the maker of Die Hard 2 and The Long Kiss Goodnight, has now decided to tackle one of the eeriest mysteries in Russian history. Here he explains why

   
    John Patterson   
    The Guardian, Monday 12 August 2013 19.00 BST   
   
The Dyatlov Pass Incident
'It's such a weird story, one of those unsolved mysteries of our time' ... Renny Harlin's film The Dyatlov Pass Incident, which is based on real – and very much unexplained – events

'Oh, you'll have fun with Renny," says his assistant as I'm ushered into his office in Venice, Los Angeles, three blocks from where Orson Welles filmed the opening sequence of Touch of Evil. "He's been doing his homework on you."

   
My mind fills with horrifying possibilities, recalling how Don Simpson would have a journalist's credit rating, divorce papers, and even criminal record to hand for an interview. But Finland's most successful director simply appears before me with a grin and says: "Hello, John, I very much enjoyed your – " and he quotes something I wrote a month back. "I laughed all day!" he adds.

Renny Harlin, a lean, ginger-haired man of medium height with a wind-burned, tough-guy sort of face, is currently in post-production on two projects. Having readied The Dyatlov Pass Incident for release this month, the 54-year-old is now about to edit his big-budget project Hercules 3D, due in 2014. "Hercules is an origins story. It starts with the young Hercules – how he becomes a man and comes to terms with being a demigod. I'm involved enough to be one of the writers."

The Dyatlov Pass Incident, meanwhile, is about an eerie happening in the Urals in 1959, when nine experienced Russian skiers died of inexplicable causes. They got lost in a blizzard and were found dead days later: some naked or barefoot, others with crushed skulls or broken bones, one with his tongue cut out – though not a single body showed signs of trauma or struggle. The movie deploys found footage, or recreations thereof, in the style of The Blair Witch Project.

"It's such a weird story, one of those unsolved mysteries of our time, but it's not like some 'Flying saucers spotted over the mountains' story. There are crime-scene photographs, reports, maps, drawings – if you go on the web, you can pretty much track down every available piece of information. In Soviet times, obviously, it was hard to find anything out. Even when things happened in Russia, like plane crashes, you'd hear stories of people waiting for their relatives at the airport, and they just never showed up. No plane, no bodies. And Chernobyl – they could hardly bear to admit it. But even after all that, scientists have tried, very intelligently and seriously, to establish or guess what actually happened to these skiers. But there are only guesses, no theory that makes sense."

Hercules has the biggest budget Harlin's been handed since 1995's disastrous Cutthroat Island. Ranked one of the biggest box-office flops of all time, the film was said to have stopped Harlin's career dead. But it didn't (and anyway, thanks to the perilous economic state of his backers, the romcom action film opened without advertising). Harlin's next two movies were his best: The Long Kiss Goodnight, starring Geena Davis as a schoolteacher waking up to the fact she was once a skilled assassin; and Deep Blue Sea, his hit about brain-boosted sharks.

Harlin has made a movie every 18 months or two years ever since – oddities such as Exorcist: The Beginning, straight-to-DVD thrillers like Cleaner, and on-the-quiet mini-hits like The Covenant. Intriguingly, his later-period work echoes much of his early-career output, when he slalomed from exploitation flicks such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, to the Andrew Dice Clay action comedy The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, before landing the second Die Hard movie in 1990. Just give the man a movie, it seems, and he'll make it one way or another, large, middling or small.
'Five Days Of War' press conference, Helsinki, Finland - 21 Dec 2011 'I'm happiest on the set with the crew, the cast, the extras, being the commander' ... Finnish director Renny Harlin. Photograph: Markku Ulander/Rex Features

I apologise for my scant knowledge of Harlin's homeland, but am able to mention Aki Kaurismäki, Finland's dourest, driest and most deadpan screenwriter and director. "Aki! Yes, we know each other well. We were pretty much of the same generation of film students. One morning my doorbell rings at 5am and there's Aki. 'We're shooting and our car broke down,' he says. 'We need yours.' I have this 1963 Volvo. 'That's perfect!' he says. 'We'll bring it back later.' For the scene, the car has to brake really hard about 20 times. My brakes were shot by the end of the day. Aki killed my poor old Volvo! That's Aki."

Kaurismäki, with his minimalist black comedies, was able to function in the restrictive Finnish government film-financing infrastructure of the late 1970s. Harlin not so much. "Because everything was government-financed, it all had to be socially conscious with serious issues: unemployment, divorce, alcoholism – really heavy. And Finnish people just weren't going to see Finnish movies. Aki could break into that – his sensibility could just about be fitted into the system, but I had to break away. I needed foreign financing."

The title of Harlin's first movie hinted at the rebirth to come: 1988's Born American was about three Finns who cross into what was then still Soviet Russia and suffer various tribulations of the blood-soaked variety. It was instantly banned in Finland for "anti-Soviet sentiment", allegedly at the behest of the Soviet ambassador to Finland. "It was the first film banned for political reasons in Finland since the 1930s, and it was news everywhere. I remember the LA Times headline: 'Born in Finland. Banned in Finland.' It was a shock. We thought, 'Wait, isn't Finland an independent country – or is it still a part of Russia?' They made an enormous mistake, but we used it to our advantage in publicity."
1996, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight, Harlin's 1996 thriller about a teacher waking up to her assassin past. Photograph: Allstar

And so he had his Hollywood calling-card. Within five years of arriving, he was directing Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2 and Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger, making money hand over fist for his studios. In the years since, he worked on a biopic about Baron Carl Mannerheim, Finland's most revered 20th-century leader, a contradictory, hedonistic enigma, and perhaps Finland's Churchill, who spent decades in the pre-revolutionary Imperial Russian army before leading Finnish forces against the Soviets in 1919-21, and then again in the second world war, before routing remaining Nazi in Lapland.

"I worked on it for more than 10 years," says Harlin. "We even started it twice – once in Lithuania, once in Hungary. We had over 1,000 costumes made, all props and sets designed and built, all casting done, award-winning makeup designers for the lifelong ageing." Despite all this, the film never came to fruition, something that clearly still saddens him. "My parents were both in the war," he says wistfully. "Every Finnish home had Mannerheim's picture on the wall."

He displaced some of his energy into 2011's 5 Days of August, filmed in Georgia, about the five-day Russian incursion into South Ossetia in 2007. This, for Harlin, was another small and vulnerable place like Finland, hedged in by huge neighbouring empires. "I felt like this Georgia situation offered me a ventilation, a pressure valve from the Mannerheim experience. And I poured all those emotions into it instead." He regrets now not being more familiar with all sides of the conflict, but he wouldn't trade anything for the days he got to boss the Georgian army around. "It was incredible commanding 80 tanks, with thousands of troops surging across the landscape, and all those planes and helicopters. I felt like Sam Peckinpah making Cross of Iron."

I wonder which he prefers: shooting or editing. "I love editing, but I'm happiest on the set with the crew, the cast, the extras, being the commander. Not in a pretentious, Napoleonic way, but because I was always like that since I was a kid – in the sandbox going, 'OK, you guys go there, you guys do that.' And it's a role I love still."

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Pogledao sam CLEAR HISTORY Grega Mottole, televizijski film koji je HBO snimio sa svojom zvezdom Larry Davidom u glavnoj glumačkoj i kreativnoj ulozi. U pogledu estetike, iako u CLEAR HISTORY ima improvizacije, nema tako radikalnih rešenja kao u Davidovoj seriji CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM i CLEAR HISTORY je iznenađujuće arhaična komedija o marketinškom stručnjaku koji je doneo pogrešnu odluku kada se odrekao akcija u firmi koja proizvodi električne automobile. U određenom smislu, larry David pokušava da kanališe Woody Allena, ali je njegova komedija ipak previše high concept u poređenju sa Woodyjevom, a veliki broj gostujućih i kameo glumaca pokazuje da je Davidu bitno da pokaže svoju moć u industriji i autoritet na HBOu što film još više gura ka mejnstrimu.

Osnovni problem je u tome što je zaplet zajedno sa likovima previše "tanak" da bi izdržao mejnstrim postupak koji donosi Mottola. Uprkos tome što Mottola ima veliko iskustvo u "modernim" stilovima komedije, uostalom režirao je kultnu seriju COMEBACK koja je na neki način bila uz rame CURBu, u ovom filmu on ne uspeva da ponudi "nov" stil u odnosu na mejnstrim senzibilitet a za te okolnosti David nije pripremio materijal (iako David ima iskustava u mejnstrim filmu, recimo komediju SOUR GRAPES).

Stoga, na pola puta između inovativnosti CURBa i mejnstrima, CLEAR HISTORY nikada ne postaje neprijatan za gledanje, ali svakako nije dovoljno intenzivan ili smešan. Isto važi i za brojne zvezde koje se pojavljuju u filmu. Neki su uradili sjajan posao, kao recimo Michael Keaton koji je odšmirao u najboljem smislu te reči ali su drugi kao Bill Hader potpuno promašili cilj svojim prenaglašenim postupcima a kao vrlo zreo se pokazao uzdržani Danny McBride.

Konačno, ostaje pitanje, u kom kontekstu CLEAR HISTORY bolje funkcioniše, ako se gleda kao film ili kao TV rad i odgovor je paradoksalan, pošto je komedija postigla nove standarde na televiziji, CLEAR HISTORY bolje stoji u poređenju sa filmovima nego sa televizijom.

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Pogledao sam debitantsku režiju Keanu Reevesa MAN OF TAI CHI, film koji je krenuo da bude super ali je na tom putu zaboravio da za početak treba da bude dobar. U ovoj kinesko-američkoj koprodukciji praktično možemo prepoznati vrlo ponizan pokušaj Holivuda da uđe na kinesko tržište tako što će praktično prožeti svoje resurse sa kineskim zahtevima i MAN OF TAI CHI je više kineski nego holivudski film po svojoj priči, strukturi, a možda čak i razmeri na kom se jeziku više govori.

Glavni glumac Tiger Chen je zanimljivo otkriće, reč je o laid back borcu, gotovo pa kung fu hipsteru koji nudi nešto drugačije od dosadašnjih intenzivnih ili pak komičnih zmajeva sa ekrana i Reeves iz njega izvlači dosta. Reeves ga je upoznao radeći MATRIXe sa Yuen Woo Pingom i postao mu je mentor. Borbe je koreografisao Yuen Woo Ping i rekao bih da je ukalkulisao moderne tokove koje je recimo doneo MMA i koreografi kao što je JJ Perry tako da su borbe više bespoštedne nego elegantne kao što je radio ranije, ali ova promena stila je zanmljiva i dobrodošla. Reeves pokušava da isprati razvoj lika kroz promenu stila borbe, i zbilja Chen uspeva da kanališe priču o transformaciji Tai Chi majstora koji polako zapostavlja meditaciju i stavlja akcenat na tuču.

Nažalost, kada se u filmu pojavi Iko Uwais, Reeves mu ne pruža veliku priliku da se dokaže sa Chenom i njihova situacija je više važna u dramaturškom nego u borilačkom pogledu. Finale Reeves čuva za sebe gde za čoveka od 50 godina dosta solidno izlazi na crtu Chenu.

Pisac video igara Michael Cooney nudi neke zanimljive ideje u scenariju zli se one više izgovore nego što se zapravo vide no činjenica da su bar izgovorene pokazuje da se o svemu razmišljalo. Zanimljivo je da se Reeves opredelio za film o zabranjenom borilačkom turniru a ne za nekakvu pretencioznu priču iz epohe i da je čvrsto smestio svoj kung fu film u domen exploitationa a ne u neki psudo-wuxia kontekst kakav bi se očekivao. Sve to je takođe za pohvalu jer pokazuje da je Reeves definitivno postao insajder u ovom žanru.

Ono što ne valja je sama postavka njegovog lika. Kao u masi DTV filmova, i Reeves svoj lik glavnog negativca, svemoćnog organizatora turnira tretira kao u suštini izdvojen, pasivan entitet koji nikada zapravo ne uđe u ozbiljan konflikt sve do samog kraja, što dovodi do utiska da uprkos obilju fizičkih konfrontacija i unutrašnjih lomova ni sam glavni junak nema pravi punokrvni dramski sukob. Kada se na to doda potpuno moronska motivacija glavnog junaka da uđe na turnir koja bi funkcionisala u kineskom, ali ne i u američkom filmu, i to čini ovaj film kineskijim, onda imamo dosta propusta na kakve nismo navikli kada je na ekranu neko kao što je Reeves.

Uprkos tome što, kako rekoh, ovaj film treba tretirati kao kineski borilački film, Reeves na kraju nije uspeo da postigne odgovarajući balans tamošnjeg scenarističkog nemara sa zapadnim senzibilitetom. Ipak, uprkos svim greškama, Cooneyu i Reevesu se ne može osporiti da su razmišljali dok su pravli ovaj film.

Krajnji rezultat je međutim borilački film koji će se više dopasti ljubiteljima i poznavaocima nego običnoj publici. Zanimljivo je da posle gore fu filma koji je snimio RZA sada i Reeves odlazi u Aziju i snima kudikamo hermetičniji borilački film od onih kakvi se tamo snimaju sada, u režiji domaćih autora, naročito za izvoz.

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Stari se bavi problemom odnosa štampe prema kulturi.

http://novinenovosadske.rs/kulturna-rubrika/

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Snowpiercer: Film Review
8:20 PM PDT 7/23/2013 by Clarence Tsui



A politically charged, fantastical action thriller, which is both contemplative and entertaining, hammering home points about social injustice of the present day -- but maybe a bit too overtly.
Cast

Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Ko Ah-sung, Jamie Bell, John Hurt, Ed Harris
Director


South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's first English-language production, an adaptation of a French comic book series starring Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton, centers on a revolution in a class-segregated train carrying the last human survivors on Earth after the world is iced over.

All the world's a train, and all the men and women are merely passengers -- a twist on one of William Shakespeare's most oft-recited lines could serve well as a summation of director Bong Joon-ho's latest film. An adaptation of the cult French comic book series Le Transperceneige, Snowpiercer is an epic yet nuanced, contemplative yet entertaining vehicle that uses its titular locomotive as an allegory for human existence as we see it in the here and now.
our editor recommends

Boasting a stellar cast that will certainly help open doors to the international market -- with the presence of Chris Evans, Octavia Spencer and Alison Pill to whip up the interest of U.S. filmgoers, and Tilda Swinton and John Hurt to cement the film's art house credentials -- Snowpiercer sees Bong maintaining his own artistic grip on the proceedings.

VIDEO: Chris Evans Rides Post-Apocalyptic Train in 'Snowpiercer' Trailer

Veering away from mainstream narrative tropes -- romance doesn't even get a look-in during the (male) protagonist's quest, a departure from the original French bande desinee -- the South Korean director, who is most well known internationally for his monster hit The Host, presents a unique vision of a despairing present channeled through a dystopian future. Expanding beyond the scope of his former films -- servings that taste best when one's frame of reference includes South Korea's recent history -- Snowpiercer is an ambitious piece with a universally comprehensible theme and accessible aesthetics.

The viewer is basically thrust into the thick of things right from the start, with tensions aboard Snowpiercer -- a perpetually moving convoy carrying Earth's only remaining human inhabitants -- on the verge of boiling over as a result of segregation between the elite, living in comfort in the front carriages, and the impoverished masses huddled in the rear cars -- a "preordained" order designed by the locomotive's owner, Wilford (Ed Harris).

Seventeen years have passed since the world has frozen over -- a result of an experiment to combat global warming gone very wrong -- and the oppressed masses are plotting to break out from their confinement. The raid on the front cars is led by Curtis (Evans) and the younger Edgar (Jamie Bell), with the bespectacled, one-armed elder Gilliam (Hurt) serving as the sage and conscience of the whole operation.

Winning an initial skirmish and breaking through the first gates, the revolutionaries are soon joined by Namgoong Minsu (Song Kang-ho, a longtime collaborator with Bong), the solitarily confined security expert who created the train's inter-carriage protective doors, and his teenage daughter, Yona (Ko Ah-sung, who played the daughter-in-peril opposite Song in The Host). And forward they move, with Curtis' professed aim of subverting the class system by taking over the means of locomotion: "All past revolutions failed because they didn't take the engine -- now we'll take the engine," he says. It's a politically charged, Marxist-inflected remark that lays the groundwork for Snowpiercer's gradual exposé of the savage, alienation-spawning modus operandi of modern-day capitalism.

PHOTOS: 'Snowpiercer' Character Posters: Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton in Propulsive Sci-Fi Thriller

In a conceit that recalls Dante's journey through the afterlife in his Divine Comedy, Bong sets the Snowpiercer locomotive up as a horizontal journey from Inferno to Paradise, with the protagonists trekking past representations of the unsavory episodes of recent history that we now know well.

In the hellish parts of the train, a shoe is thrown at a loathed figurehead, here personified by Wilford's spineless lieutenant, Mason (Swinton); scenes depict the poor being fed with (literally) junk -- and loving it; and infrared goggles-wearing soldiers mete out deadly violence upon skimpily armed resisters. Moving further up the train, there are scenes of pseudo-paradise: the affluent knitting, drinking tea, swimming, getting top-notch dental treatment and drinking champagne in a discotheque – all signs of hypocrisy and excess as the train careens forward through icy, barren landscapes.

Bong's vivid depictions -- aided by Ondrej Nekvasil's production design, Hong Kyung-pyo's cinematography and Steve M. Choe's editing -- are exceptional, adding to a film that is as much about philosophical reflections of an age of social and moral collapse as it is about blockbuster-friendly, CGI-enhanced sequences. (In fact, one of the flaws of this film is the CGI, which does look sub-par in places.)

As it stands, Snowpiercer is still an intellectually and artistically superior vehicle to many of the end-of-days futuristic action thrillers out there. But while the references to real-life atrocities should certainly resonate with international audiences, the overt ways in which Bong hammers his points home actually make the film less powerful than the more layered political allegories of his previous films like Memories of Murder and The Host.

Still, Snowpiercer remains a riveting ride, and Bong is now poised for the foreign breakthrough that has eluded his fellow South Korean directors Kim Jee-won (The Last Stand) and Park Chan-wook (who encouraged Bong to adapt the property and served as a producer on the film). Just like his onscreen gate-cracking alter-ego Nam, Bong has opened doors and revealed a pretty disturbing status quo of a disheveled world, an infernal hell into which humankind has plummeted; the question is whether this species actually deserves to be saved. Adeptly shaped up for the screen, it's a point that makes Bong's film deserving of praise.

Production companies: CJ Entertainment, Moho Films, Opus Picture and Stillking Films
Cast: Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Ko Ah-sung, Jamie Bell, John Hurt, Ed Harris
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Screenwriters: Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson, based on the comic Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette
Producers: Jeong Tae-sung, Lee Tae-hun, Steven Nam, Park Chan-wook, Robert Bernacchi, Choi Doo-ho, David Minkowski, Matthew Stillman
Director of photography: Hong Kyung-pyo
Production designer: Ondrej Nekvasil
Costume designer: Catherine George
Music: Marco Beltrami
Editor: Steve M. Choe
Art Director: Stefan Kovacik

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Pogledao sam WE'RE THE MILLERS Rawson Marshall Thrubera i za sada ovo je jedna od TIH komedija u 2013. Kao što su HORRIBLE BOSSES sa vrlo sličnom podelom (Sudeikis & Aniston) uspeli da se izdvoje 2011. godine tako su MILLERSi ove godine spojili beskompromisan hard-R pristup sa potvrđenim zvezdama u žanru i napravljen je jedan od onih filmova koji su konzistentno smešni, sa nekoliko upečatljivih vrhunaca. Najzanimljivija stvar u ovoj komediji o stoneru je to što nije reč o stoner komediji, humor mahom proizilazi iz dekonstrukcije porodične dinamike kada grupa ljudi koja nema iskustvo ili nema uspešno iskustvo porodičnog života pokuša da simulira porodični život. Ako imamo u vidu da je ceo film baziran na ideji kako stoner regrutuje lažnu porodicu ne bi li preneo drugo iz Meksika, i ako imamo u vidu da se u filmu nalaze tone droge, zanimljivo je da nema nijednog zapaljenog džointa. Ipak, nešto stonerskog humora ima pre svega u odrđenim pop kulturnim referencama po čemu su me MILLERSi podsetili na TED. Ipak, rekao bih da je TED ipak mnogo više zavisio od pop kulturnog znanja nego MILLERS i Thurber je definitivno snimio autonomniji film u kome će duže moći da se uživa.

WE'RE THE MILLERS je godinama pripreman kao trijumfalni comeback scenarista koji su pisali WEDDING CRASHERS, i uprkos tome što je high concept CRASHERSa atraktivniji i što je to opšte uzev bio još snažniji i svežiji film, MILLERS ima jako duhovit scenario i što je još važnije, podelu koja je spremna da mu se prepusti. Čini mi se da je veliki deo skepse koju je pokazala kritika zapravo psoitsicao iz uvođenja respektabilnih glumaca u takav R-okvir iako to ni Sudeikisu ni Aniston nije strano. Ipak, jedino R-rejting šala može da objasni toliki animozitet kritičara. Drugi razlog je svakako istovremeno ciničan i afirmativan odnos prema porodici u kome cinizam ipak prevladava koji je sasvim sigurno zbunio kritiku do tačke da mnogi među njima kažu kako ovaj film nije smešan, što je čini mi se netačno.

Thurber nije reditelj Phillipsovog ili Dobkinovog kalibra, ali MILLERS je ujednačen i fino realizovan film u kome su humoristički detalji vešto usaglašeni sa pripovedanjem, priča i komedija ne smetaju jedna drugoj.

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Bio je veliki pisac.

http://www.vijesti.me/kultura/umro-mirko-kovac-clanak-145058

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Producers Distribution Agency will release Randy Moore's "Escape From Tomorrow," a horror film shot surreptitiously at several Disney theme parks.

"Escape," which debuted at Sundance, will be released theatrically in select cities on Oct. 11 and be available via FilmBuff on VOD. PDA used a similar model in the distribution of Banksy's doc "Exit Through the Gift Shop."

Movie, shot in black and white, centers on a middle-aged American husband and father of two who learns he has lost his job. Keeping the news from his nagging wife and wound-up children, he embarks on a full day at a Disney theme park, where the family vacation quickly unravels into a surrealist nightmare.

The film was produced by Soojin Chung and Gioia Marchese.

Disney has not commented on the film.

Rob Nelson gave the film a strong review at Sundance: "Shot without permits at Disney World, "Escape From Tomorrow" is a sneakily subversive exercise in low-budget surrealism and anti-corporate satire."

[BladeRunner]

Pogledao sam WE'RE THE MILLERS Rawson Marshall Thrubera i za sada ovo je jedna od TIH komedija u 2013.

+1

[Meho Krljic]

Stari se bavi problemom odnosa štampe prema kulturi.

http://novinenovosadske.rs/kulturna-rubrika/

U tom smislu možda treba istaći POLITIKU koja još uvek ima relativno disciplinovanu kulturnu rubriku, uključujući subotnji dodatak. Sad, naravno da se tu razno smeće provlači, ali postoji kultura i praksa umetničke kritike, likovne, kinematografske, pozorišne i muzičke i to pišu artikulisani autori koji uglavnom poznaju materiju (Duda Lakić dobija dosta podrugljivih komentara sa svih strana, ali ipak, uzevši u obzir da radi za jedan mejnstrim medij ona obavlja značajno bolji posao od maltene bilo kog drugog kolege na sličnoj poziciji). U Kulturnom dodatku Subotom ima povremeno i spektakla kao što je bio višenedeljni rat između Ivana Medenice i aktuelne postave organizatora Sterijinog pozorja u koji su se umešali i drugi kulturni poslenici. Tu su onda i transkripti raznih tribina koje Politika organizuje itd. Naravno da sve to možemo da kritikujemo, ima za šta, ali treba imati u vidu da je zapravo konkurencija tako slabo postojeća da Politika i nema insentiv da se unapredi, pa je nivo koji drže prilično respektabilan ol tings konsidrd.

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Slažem se za Politiku ali je problem sa njom u tome što na dve strane jednu do druge možeš da nađeš kolumne Ivana Medenice i nekog potpunog frika što zbunjuje čitaoce jer recimo ti i ja znamo da je Medenica stručnjak a i umemo da prepoznamo (mada ne uvek ) da je neko frik, ali običan svet to ne može. Što se Dude tiče, ja odavno nju doživljavam kao ozbiljan fenomen i kritičara koji nije za potcenjivanje. Njen problem je naprosto u tome što je još uvek lako uplatiti kritiku kod nje i onda se lako LED nađe kao najbolje primljeni film 2012. u Politici.

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Rodrigo Santoro ("300," "Love Actually") will play the foil to Will Smith in Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's heist thriller "Focus" at Warner Bros. Pictures.

Smith plays a con man who becomes romantically involved with a novice (Margot Robbie). He is then thrown off his game when the former flame shows up just as he's staging an elaborate con in Buenos Aires.

Santoro plays the magnetic and powerful owner of an international auto racing team. He seeks Robbie's affections, and hires Smith to gain a competitive edge for his racing team.

Denise Di Novi is producing. Filming begins in October in New Orleans and Buenos Aires.

Source: THR

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Stari ispraća Mirka Kovača.

http://dobanevinosti.blogspot.com/2013/08/mirko-kovac-1938-2013.html

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Pogledao sam I DECLARE WAR Jasona Laypeyrea i Roberta Wilsona, vrlo zanimljivu indie parafrazu STAND BY ME, a u određenom smislu neizbežna referenca je i LORD OF THE FLIES, premda ovaj film zapravo nema suštinske veze sa tim jer ova deca jesu sama ali nisu istrgnuta iz društva odraslih niti su u bilo kom trenutku sklona tome da uspostavljaju odnose dominacije kao odrasli. No LORD OF THE FLIES je neizbežan barem da bi dočarao deo atmosfere, emotivnog i fizičkog nasilja koje deca sprovode među sobom. Međutim, u osnovi, emotivni osnov ove priče je zapravo dečji, na prelazu iz faze latencije i pubertet.

Lapeyre i Wilson su vrlo maštoviti u tome kako vešto prikazuju klizanje unutar i izvan sveta mašte, kako kroz detalje vešto tumače u kom su odnosu junaci u odnosu na igru u koju su upleteni i signaliziraju u kojim trenucima vrag odnosi šalu.

Glumačka podela je izvanredna, sve uloge igraju deca, od kojih neka imaju prilično iskustvo na filmu i televiziji. Ipak, reč je o izuzetno izabranom dečjem ansamblu, bez slabog mesta. No, ovaj indie film je očigledno imao tu privilegiju da je iskusnu decu-glumce očigledno jednostavno angažovati pošto ne verujem da bi ovakva produkcija mogla da se dokopa odraslih glumaca sa takvim filmografijama.

U svakom slučaju, I DECLARE WAR je film posle koga ovi reditelji verovatno mogu dobiti priliku da rade nešto skuplje. Kad je o deci reč, njima nije bio potrban showcase ali kvalitetan i cool film u karijeri svakako jeste i to su dobili.

Lapeyre i Wilson su očekivano vrlo dobro iskoristili metaforu o deci koja se igraju rata ne samo kako bi generalno secirali međuljudske odnose već i da bi kritiovali savremeni američki ratnički etos koji uključuje prevaru i mučenje. Srečćom, ni kada se više ne bude znalo za ono kako se Amerika ponašala ovih godina, ti detalji će pored ideološke imati i očuvanu narativnu ulogu.

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[Albedo 0]

Sad sam pogledao, odličan je film, samo nema antiratnih aktivista, Nataše Kandić ni od korova!

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Pogledao sam THE PURGE Jamesa De Monaca i prilično sam razočaran time što je ovaj film doživljen ako ne kao dobar a ono barem kao svež/drugačiji high concept rad u produkciju Blumhouse koja je stekla kapital na bazi serijala PARANORMAL ACTIVITY i rada sa Orenom Pelijem. Međutim, De Monaco nije snimio film koji je "radikalan" kao Pelijevi i njegov rad nažalost više podseća na DTV radove sa poznatim glumcima, i među njima se kvalifikuje u sredinu, možda čak i začelje kad je reč o kvalitetu. Osnovna premisa o Purgeu kao godišnjem prostoru u 12 sati tokom kog se zločin ne kažnjava u Americi, čime se narod doveo u red jer ima prostor da se izduva, samo po sebi poziva na mnogo ambiciozniju priču, i u tom pogledu sve što se dešava van kuće je zanimljivije od onoga što se dešava u njoj. De Monaco nije dovoljno ubedljiv reditelj da nam "silom" pomeri pogled sa šire slike na manju, i da kroz manju priču ispriča onu širu već nas prisiljava da unutar "zanimljive" postavke gledamo prilično konfuzan home invasion film, bez prave napetosti, sa razvučenom ekspozicijom itd.

Sama ideja da postoji Purge je zanimljiva ali je De Monaco svodi na želju građana da sprovodi nasilje, tuče i ubija, premda nisam siguran da su takvi porivi jedina stvar koja bi ljudima pala na pamet, niti da bi u startu klasna borba činila okosnicu tog nasilja, kako insistira De Monaco. Naravno, u ovakvim futurističkim premisama nema potrebe da se traži logika ili uverljivost nekog društvenog procesa, ovo iznosim kao primer suženosti De Monacove vizije.

THE PUIRGE je film koji nije skup ali je u rediteljskom pogledu krajnje konvencionalan. U tom pogledu, Blumhouse nas je na neki način prevario. Umesto high concepta kojine košta puno, podmetnut nam je jeftin film, ali je očigledno publika to itekako progutala i dovela ga do odličnog bioskopskog skora. Time je počinjena nepravda masi DTV naslova koji su bolji od THE PURGE ali nikada nisu dobili takvu priliku.

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[Meho Krljic]

Whoa... Warner ne štedi kad su u pitanju glumci. Ben Aflek će igrati Betmena u nastavku Man of Steel a onda, cenim i u JLA filmu ako Bejl odbije

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/holy-big-ben-affleck-set-play-batman-man-022440197.html

[Ugly MF]

Ben Aflek!?!?    

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To su sjajne vesti. Onaj shotrlist koji je navodno bio u Warneru je sadržao samo jedno smisleno ime a to je Josh Brolin. Affleck je još bolja opcija. Mislim da sada sa Snyderom i Nolanom, kada je ostvaren pravi balans, sa Millerovom idejom u temelju, imamo čemu da se nadamo.

[Ugly MF]

....ali on ne zna da glumiiii.....jedino ako ne skida masku ol d tajm....

[mac]

Ma samo ne treba da se smeška pod maskom, i biće sve u redu.

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Pogledao sam ELYSIUM Neilla Blomkampa, jedan od najočekivanijih filmova godine and then some.

ELYSIUM dolazi pod bremenom velikh očekivanja posle Blomkampovog debitantskog ostvarenja DISTRICT 9 i u senci toga se ponajviše i apostrofiraju njegovi problemi. Da je ovo prvi film nekog reditelja, ili, da je ovo zrelo ostvarenje nekog drugog reditelja, postojalo bi mnogo manje primedbi. Ipak, Blomkamp je stvorio određena očekivanja i u ovom filmu ih je delimično ispunio, odnosno moglo bi se reći da je pošao nešto drugačijim putem. Od Blomkampa se posle DISTRICT 9 očekivalo da bude novi Cameron, i ELYSIUM tako i počinje, kao realistična kameronovska slika mračne budućnosti, međutim, ubrzo, kada se u brzinu ubace B-elementi, shvatamo da je Blomkamp mnogo bliži Verhoevenu.

Kombinujući kameronovski realizam i sentimentalnost sa verhovenovskim raspologanjem narativima B-filma, Blomkamp stvara jedan neočekivan derivat koji zapravo funkcioniše sasvim dobro, kada se izmesti izvan očekivanja koja su bila vezana za Camerona i A + pristup temi.

Za razliku od Verhoevenovog cinizma, Blomkamp nudi Cameronov aktivizam, i sve ovo deluje kao jedan zanimljiv i neočekivan derivat, kao TERMINATOR ispričan u formi ROBOCOPa.

Ono što se javlja kao problem jeste to što B-odnos prema priči uzrokuje da se likove izlažu vrlo efikasno, bez prostora da se naprave upečatljive kreacije, film je dosta ubrzan i iznosi likove kao da je reč o tipskim postavkama, što međutim nije u potpunosti tačno. Barem tri lika u ELYSIUMu su mogla da iskorače izvan tipskog, to su glavni junak Max, glavni negativac Kruger i Ministarka odbrane Elyisuma Delacourt. Blomkamp međutim kod njih pre svega više nudi transformaciju nego razradu lika. I zbilja, sa trajanjem od 109 minuta, ELYSIUM spada među najkraće ovogodišnje blokbastere.

Konačno, ono što svemu ovome daje naročit dignitet jeste to što (nezavisno od komercijalnog uspeha) ELYSIUM jeste koncipiran kao standalone film, ne nudi prostor za nastavak, ne zahteva snimanje sledećeg filma, nema viceva posle špice, sve je to vrlo jasno, ortodoksno i definitivno su nam takvi sadržaji nedostajali.

U samoj priči, Blomkamp se sa lakoćom kreće kroz SF milje. Ovo je film u kome se oko tridesetog minuta nešto već overrajduje, oko četrdesetog, junaku biva ugrađen egzoskelet. Motiv egzoskeleta je zanimljiv je se češe o Blomkampovu temu transformacije čoveka iz DISTRICT 9, s tim što ovde egzoskelet, uprkos elektronici nikada ne obuzme junaka. No, smrt i transformacija junaka su opet u centru pažnje. Ipak, isto tako, uočljivo je da Blomkamp ovde ne nudi nikakav originalni doprinos SFu, nema suštinski neke naročite invencije ni u pogledu novih izuma niti novih pogleda na već poznate miteme.

U ideološkom pogledu, ELYSIUM je vrlo otvoren - ovo je priča o čoveku koji je želeo da se preseli u luksuz ina kraju odlučio da ga nekako "oslobodi" od manjine i podeli sa većinom. U tom smislu, Blomkamp je neprikriven, na pravoj je strani i slično kao u slučaju AVATARa mnogi ljudi na svetu će se identifikovati sa odnosima koji se predstavljaju u ovom filmu. Kao stranac, Blomkamp očigledno kada govori o "svetu" misli na ceo svet a ne samo na Ameriku, kao većina američkih autora i ELYSIUM je jedan od retkih ovogodišnjih blokbastera koji nije oportuno namenjen publici van Amerike već joj se u određenom smislu i obraća. Uostalom, među bogatima koji vladaju Elyisiumom, Amerikanci čak i nemaju dominantnu ulogu ali Elysium kao takav jeste pronalazak američke korporacije.

U tehničkom pogledu, koji je Blomkampu jača strana, ELYSIUM je izvanredan, akcija je spektakularna i dinamična, R-rejting je pošteno zarađen, isključivo kroz nasilje nimalo kroz seks. U pogldu akciju, ima ponešto Verhoevenove groteske (ali ne želim da spoilujem detalje) no ipak ovo je opet od onih domena u kojima se očekuje da Blomkamp nasledi Camerona.

Čini mi se da ELYSIUM zapravo dolazi na svoje tek tokom drugog gledanja, kada gledalac nije opterećen očekivanjima, i da mnogo bolje funkcioniše u okvirima onoga što jeste nego kada se poredi sa onim što smo očekivali da će da bude. S druge strane, to što smo očekivali da će da bude definitivno jeste vredniji film od ovoga za koji se Blomkamp na kraju opredelio.

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Filmmaker James Cameron has tapped noted science fiction author Steven Charles Gould (Jumper) to write four stand-alone novels based upon – and expanding — Cameron's history-making 2009 film Avatar, and Cameron's stories for his three upcoming Avatar sequels.

Cameron commented, "Steven Gould is one of the shining lights in contemporary science fiction, and I've long admired the worlds and characters he's created in his books and stories. We're very fortunate to have Steven bring his formidable talents to the Avatar universe. He is already working closely with me and the screenwriters to flesh out the expanding world of Avatar."

While Gould is best known for his 1992 novel Jumper, which Twentieth Century Fox and New Regency turned into a motion picture in 2008, he has been acclaimed for his short fiction, including his Hugo Award-nominated short story "Rory," and the novelette "Peaches for Mad Molly." The latter was also on the shortlist for the Nebula Award. His other novels include Wildside, the Jumper sequel Reflex, 7th Sigma, and Impulse. He is president of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Kathy Franklin, Lightstorm Entertainment's President of Franchise Development, noted, "The novels are just one example of our commitment to our fans to extend the world of Avatar, in this instance in partnership with Twentieth Century Fox Consumer Products."

Cameron also is currently writing the screenplays for the three new Avatar pictures, along with screenwriters Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds), Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver (Rise of the Planets of the Apes) and Shane Salerno (Savages, Salinger).

The sequels will be filmed back-to-back with production beginning next year. The release of the first sequel will be in December 2016, with the second to follow in December 2017, and the third a year later.

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Pogledao sam A TEACHER, Sundance favorit koji je režirala Hannah Fidell. Ovaj film svakako spada u najradikalniju Sundance struju, sa najmanjim budžetima, najradikalnijim postupcima, ali ovog puta rezultat itekako može da crossoveruje kao vrlo intenzivna intimistička drama o "sramnoj" vezi profesorke i učenika koja glavnu junakinju dovodi do propasti, lične i profesionalne.

Lindsay Burdge igra glavnu ulogu i nastavlja svoju intenzivnu saradnju sa Fidellovom, nudeći se praktično kao stub i svoje vrsni ko-autor ovog filma. Interzitet centralne uloge bi se najpre mogao porediti sa onim što je pružio Ryan Gosling u filmu HALF NELSON i u određenom smislu kada imamo u vidu milje u koji je smeštena priča i stil, rekao bih da A TEACHER i jeste ženska verzija tog filma.

Kao i u HALF NELSONu ili KLIPu, naracija se iznosi kroz praćenje lika, više nego kroz neke tehnike u kojima autori usmeravaju gledaočevu pažnju i prikazuju širu sliku. Tim pre je Lindsay Burdge ostvarila značajniji doprinos.

Fidell se fokusira na temu opsesije, krivice, i ne proširuje vidike na druge stvari, međutim atmosfera školskih aktivnosti je vrlo vibrantna i oseća se razlika između učenika kojima je to usputna stanica i nastavnika koji tu zauvek ostaju.

A TEACHER je prilično lapidaran film tako da utisak koji ostavlja na gledaoce pre svega zavisi od toga da li ih je kupio svojim prikazom atmosfere. U svakom slučaju, smešten u formu koja češće ne uspeva, A TEACHER je postigao svoj cilj.

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Why a New Golden Age for UI Design Is Around the Corner



Over the past four years, the Walt Disney Company has been engaged in a secretive effort to redesign the Disney World experience. It'll go like this: You buy your ticket online and plan all the details of your visit. Then you'll get a wristband in the mail, which will be a passport to the experience that you've curated. Snug around your wrist, the so-called MagicBand will use radio frequency to communicate with sensors around the park, all orchestrated by software that effectively turns Disney World into a computer interface. You can enter the park by holding your hand up to a kiosk; you can arrive at shows with 30 seconds to spare, having already reserved your seats; you can jump onto rides you've selected at preselected times without waiting in long lines; you can buy anything you want with a wave. An It's a Small World character could call you by name and wish you happy birthday. So could Mickey, who can also greet you at a preselected meeting time. This is all in the service of fun, of course, but it is also a glimpse of the future: an integrated experience, a smooth hybrid of real-world and digital interactions.

This represents a new frontier for design. Over the past 30 years, as every facet of our lives, from our shopping to our schooling, has migrated onto computer screens, designers have focused on perfecting user interfaces—placing a button in just the right place for a camera trigger or collapsing the entire payment process into a series of swipes and taps. But in the coming era of ubiquitous sensors and miniaturized mobile computing, our digital interactions won't take place simply on screens. As the new Disney World suggests, they will happen all around us, constantly, as we go about our day. Designers will be creating not products or interfaces but experiences, a million invisible transactions.
Andrew B. Myers

We are constantly adding new gadgets.
Even as they have gotten simpler individually, the cumulative complexity of all of them together is increasing.

Already we're seeing a groundswell of new products that insinuate themselves seamlessly into users' lives. These include personal sensors like Jawbone's Up, the voice- and gesture-controlled Xbox One, hyper-intelligent apps like Highlight that alert you to interesting people in your immediate vicinity, and Automatic, a gadget that communicates with your smartphone to tell you when you are driving inefficiently. But this is just the beginning. Within the next five years we will be surrounded by embedded devices and services. Just as the rise of the screen challenged designers to create software interfaces, the rise of screenless digital interactions will challenge them anew. After all, it's one thing to invent a unique kind of digital experience in Disney World, a controlled space where people expect magic. It's altogether trickier to do the same thing in people's houses, offices, and bedrooms—the most intimate areas of their lives—in a way that feels both natural and inevitable.

Bill Buxton bears a striking resemblance to Doc Brown from Back to the Future—more strapping than you'd expect for a mad scientist, his bald head rimmed with a snowy hedge of hair. In conversation, he can be piercingly intense. And just like Doc Brown, in 1985 he unleashed a breakthrough. Buxton, a lifelong musician who has also worked for Xerox PARC and Silicon Graphics, created one of the world's first multitouch interfaces when he turned an electronic drumhead into a tactile synthesizer control. That drum was a progenitor of every touchscreen in use today.

In the mid-aughts, Buxton wrote a journal article that helped define a new discipline called experience design—a focus not on products or devices themselves but on the impact they have on people's lives.As an example, he wrote about two orange juice presses—an electric model and a manual lever press called the OrangeX. The electric juicer had flimsy plastic buttons, and the motor screeched to life with an annoying whir. The OrangeX required a bit more effort but also sported an inverted rocker crank that gradually transmitted more force as you pressed down. Buxton's point was that the OrangeX created a feeling of tangible mastery that helped him enjoy the juice more. Designers didn't shape just gadgets but behaviors and visceral responses around those gadgets.

Microsoft Research's Bill Buxton, holding the GRiDPad 1910, an early tablet computer. Eric Ray Davidson

Matt Webb, CEO of London design firm Berg, is inventing a system that will allow multiple users to share smart connected devices. Levon Biss

Today, Buxton, who is principal researcher at Microsoft Research, says that the next challenge for experience design is to create a constellation of devices, including wearable gadgets, tablets, phones, and smart appliances, that can coordinate with one another and adapt to users' changing needs. This focus on the totality of our devices stands in contrast to where we find ourselves today: constantly adding new gadgets and functions without much thought as to how they fit together. (For instance, anyone lugging around a laptop, iPad, and iPhone is also carrying the equivalent of three video cameras, three email devices, three media players, and probably three different photo albums.) Even as our devices have individually gotten simpler, the cumulative complexity of all of them is increasing. Buxton has said that the solution is to "stop focusing on the individual objects as islands." He has come up with a simple standard for whether a gadget should even exist: Each new device should reduce the complexity of the system and increase the value of everything else in the ecosystem.

To see what he means by increasing the value of the ecosystem, consider the phone syncing built into many cars. After you link your phone, the vehicle boots up its own voice-recognition technology so you can make hands-free calls. When you leave the car, you simply grab your phone and it blinks to life again. The car and the phone engage in a quiet dialog geared toward providing only the capabilities you actually need at any moment.

Without the proper design, any new technology can be terrifying. The task of making it can't be left to engineers alone.

If all our devices interacted so cooperatively, whole new possibilities would begin to emerge. For example, Frog, the company best known for the Apple IIc's industrial design of the early 1980s, has been building a prototype lightbulb that will sense where people are in a room and project touchscreens onto walls or tables. Now imagine if a device like that could communicate with your mobile gadgets—if the lightbulb, sensing your presence in the kitchen and knowing the apps on your phone, projected your cooking apps onto the refrigerator when you began preparing dinner.

To deal with such complexity, our devices will have to become smarter. Dave Morin, CEO of mobile social-networking company Path, has a maxim to explain how to think about the coming age of experience design: "AI is the new UI." That is, the effort and attention that designers once poured into interfaces should be extended to code that doesn't just react to the push of a button but anticipates your actions. For instance, Path will automatically update your location when it senses that you've settled somewhere new. But that's really just a proof of concept. Morin's maxim hints at the silent conversations that our phones and wearable devices will have with the world around us and each other. For example, Apple's new mobile operating system, which uses Bluetooth Smart to share data with devices in your vicinity, could power a number of these kinds of intelligent background features.

Innovations like this present great challenges for designers. Today's app and software designers already have a deep understanding of how customers interact with their products. They know down to the pixel where to place a button, how fast a screen should scroll, and how to make an app simple without making it simplistic. But as designers move off of screens and into the larger world, they'll need to consider every nuance of our everyday activity and understand human behavior every bit as well as novelists or filmmakers. (Otherwise they may engender the same kind of backlash as Google Glass, a potentially cool product that has unleashed a torrent of privacy concerns.)

That will require a shift in how tech designers view the world. Matt Webb, CEO of Berg, a London design firm that has created forward-looking prototypes for clients such as the BBC, Google, and Nokia, says it will demand thinking beyond today's standard scenario of a person working on a computer. For example, he says, "our technology can't understand what it means to be in a room of two to six people. I find it totally nuts that when you sign in to something, no one else can use it. Imagine having to sign in to a lightbulb before turning it on!"

Berg is trying to solve that problem by inventing a system that will allow multiple users to share smart, connected devices that can adjust to their individual tastes and preferences. "That's the world we actually live in," says Jack Schulze, Berg's cofounder. "But it's a massive challenge for software."

Just consider how these challenges apply to Netflix: If your spouse watches something on your account, it probably renders the company's super-sophisticated recommendation engine worthless. Netflix is trying to address this problem by creating a feature allowing multiple user profiles on one account. "But even that's the wrong solution," Webb says. "When we watch TV together, that group isn't just multiple people added together. That group is something more." It's easy to imagine a smarter, future version of Netflix—one that uses, say, an Xbox Kinect camera to recognize who's in the room and can determine everyone's overlapping interests.

The true potential of experience design comes as that kind of sophistication gets applied to all of our interactions. "We have all of these incredible benefits to our online life," says Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects, a media design firm, "and they're suddenly being applied to physical space." Take the example of Warby Parker, the online eyewear retailer that has begun opening retail storefronts. Imagine if the store automatically brought up your online profile—which you've already filled with your favorite styles—allowing you to focus only on the glasses that the company's computers know you already like. Or look at Nespresso, whose physical stores offer its customers an RFID card that allows automatic billing and personalized service based on purchase history. Barton believes that the next step will be to create a universal, portable electronic identity that allows all of our experiences to be that customized. Companies like digital-payment pioneer Square are already working to build just that.

In the wrong hands, this is a dystopian prospect—technology's unwanted intrusion into our every waking moment. But without the proper design, without considering how new products and services fit into people's day-to-day lives, any new technology can be terrifying. That's where the challenge comes in. The task of making this new world can't be left up to engineers and technologists alone—otherwise we will find ourselves overrun with amazing capabilities that people refuse to take advantage of. Designers, who've always been adept at watching and responding to our needs, must bring to bear a better understanding of how people actually live. It's up to them to make this new world feel like something we've always wanted and a natural extension of what we already have.

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Pogledao sam TRAP FOR CINDERELLA Iaina Softleya. Sa ovim filmom Softley se vraća u Evropu posle neujednačene karijere u Holivudu u kojoj je uspeo da se izbori za poziciju pouzdanog profesionalca na kog studiji mogu da računaju, gde ga je na kraju pregazilo i vreme. TRAP FOR CINDERELLA je ekranizacija često adaptiramog Sebastien Japrisota i po svom duhu ne samo da podseća ma francusku školu makabrističkog krimića u tradiciji Boileau-Narcejac već u određenom smislu pokušava da estetizuje priču kao neki arhaizirani francuski krimić.

Uprkos tome što se sudeći po automobilima i odeći dešava sada, film ima nekoliko konvencija starinskog krimića koji odaju utisak namerne Softleyeve intervencije čija mi znakovitost izmiče. Preokreti se baziraju na konvencijama kao što su čitanja pisama poslanih poštom ili prisluškivanje razgovora na fiksnom telefonu koji deluju potpuno apsurdno u današnje vreme, a pronalaženje javnog telefona te vrste kakav vidimo u ovom filmu graniči se sa arheologijom.

Ne znam šta je tačno Softley želeo da postigme ovim intervencijama, osim da nas podseti na stara vremena kada je zločin bio romantičniji za realizaciju nego danas.

Posle holivudskih projekata u kojima nije mogao mnogo da vrda od žanrovskih matrica, Softley ovde pravi neke francuske mešavine melodrame i krimića u kojima nije baš tačno jasno šta je osnovni zamajac priče, ali ako se izmakne iz repertoarskog miljea trilera u kome ne bi opstao u nekakav trofejni art house krimić, TRAP FOR CINDERELLA je relativno prijatan za gledanje.

Ipak, Softley operiše sa jako niskim budžetom u ovom filmu, i u nekoliko nabrata vidljivo je da produkcija nije mogla da isprati njegovu viziju. Srećom pa Softley nije doživeo brodolom kao De Palma u filmu PASSION.

Tuppence Middleton i TV zvezda Alexandra Roach čine ubedljiv i čitljiv duo glavnih junakinja koje se toliko vole da u jednom trenutku to postaje materijal za Patriciu Highsmith.

Nažalost, pre svega produkcija a zatim i neke sumnjive kreativne odluke čine da TRAP FOR CINDERELLA deluje zanimljivije od Softleyevih recentnih holivudskih radova ali i znatno manje razrađeno i zaokruženo.

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Richard Curtis opet na BBCu >

Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench have joined the cast of BBC One's upcoming telemovie adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1990 novella "Esio Trot".

Hoffman play Mr Hoppy, a retired bachelor who harbors a secret passion for his neighbor, Mrs Silver (Judi Dench). Sdly, she lavishes all her affection on Alfie... her pet tortoise.

Dearbhla Walsh ("Little Dorrit") directs from a script by "The Vicar of Dibley" show runners Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer.

Hilary Bevan Jones will produce and filming begins next spring in London.

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Pogledao sam EMPIRE STATE Dito Montiela. Ova istinita priča o čuvenoj pljački trezora u Njujorku, smeštena u milje grčkih iseljenika, završila je na DTV tržištu i ponovo nije uspela da plasira Dita Montiela u prvu rediteljsku ligu, na čijim se obodima on vrzma već čitavu deceniju. Montiel je zaslužio poštovanje svojim doslednim bavljenjem urbanim dramama i krimićima u duhu sedamdesetih, ali rezultati na tom polju mu nisu baš toliko upečatljivi. Međutim, Montiel je upečatljiv kao figura jer dosledno snima onu vrstu filmova koja je zapostavljena u savremenom Holivudu i iz koje su onomad proisticali veliki klasici. Rečju, šteta je što nije nešto talentovaniji jer bi sa takvom upornošću maltene mogao da revitalizuje ovaj žanr.

EMPIRE STATE je istinita priča čiji su pojedini detalji toliko bizarni da se u njih maltene ne može verovati, a Montiel ne uspeva da ih predstavi na pravi način i kod njega oni više deluju kao greška u realizaciji nego kao nešto što se zbilja dogodilo. S druge srane, Montiel nastavlja bizaran trend angažovanja The Rocka za istinite priče. Koliko je u filmu PAIN & GAIN on imao smisla kao rešenje za ulogu bildera, tako ni u EMPIRE STATE ni u SNITCH on ne deluje uverljivo. U EMPIRE STATE on igra policajca koji je na tragu pljačkašima, i uprkos tome što čak ni ne igra loše, njegova fizionomija pripada drugoj vrsti filma - naprosto nemoguće je smestiti čoveka sa takvom fizionomijom u bilo kakvu realističku ili istinitu priču osim neke u kojoj naprosto igra bildera. Održavanje takvog izgleda deluje kao posao sa punim radnim vremenom i on prosto ne može da prođe kao lik koji usput radi nešto drugo.

Liam Hemsworth, Chrisov brat i zamenik je solidan u glavnoj ulozi, Michael Angarano kanališe mladog Dustina Hoffmana kao njegov pričljivi i pohlepni najbolji drug, i ostatak ekipe se prilično solidno uklapa u žanr.

Scenario Adama Mazera nedovoljno reaguje na bizarnost čitave situacije, i čini se da je morao da stavi malo veći akcenat na to kako su takve stvari mogle da se odigraju a da neko ne odreaguje ozbiljnije. Možda je to i do montaže, ali priča ima nekoliko ozbiljnih rupa u pogledu logike izvršenja dela i kasnije istrage.

Ipak, EMPIRE STATE je vibrantan film, one vrste koja se ne pravi tako često tako da je uprkos raznim frustrirajućim nedostacima vrlo pitak i prijatan. Taj domet ipak nije dovoljan da bi danas ovakva priča došla do bioskopa.

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Pre nekoliko godina, kada se pojavio, pokušao sam da gledam FOUR LIONS Christophera Morrisa. Prekinuo sam posle desetak minuta, sada sam pogledao ceo film, smogao snage da izdržim do kraja, i uprkos tome što sam u međuvremenu do detalja upoznao i zavoleo rad Jesse Armstronga, Sam Baina i Simona Blackwella, ponovo nisam uspeo da se sporazumem sa ovom idejom. FOUR LIONS je crna komedija o džihadistima koja nije smešna, ali ne zbog toga što je reč o provokativnoj i delikatnoj temi već naprosto zato što nisam primetio dovoljno duhovitih detalja, situacija ili likova koji bi generisali barem nešto što je čitljivo kao humor. S druge strane, film je realizovan vrlo svedeno, i tako je snimljen da bi morao da bude urnebesno smešan jer su sve karte bačene na glumce i situacije. Doduše, kada pogledam kritike i reakcije drugih gledalaca, očigledno je da su neki našli dosta toga zanimljivog i smešnog u ovom filmu. U seriji pokušaja da film bude politički nekorektan, na kraju ispada politički korektniji nego što bi se očkivalo od ove teme. Otud, ovo ostaje znatno inferiorniji rad od onoga što su pružili u seriji THE THICK OF IT ili u filmu IN THE LOOP.

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[Джон Рейнольдс]

Anniversary of DPRK to Be Marked in Serbia

Pyongyang, August 25 (KCNA) -- A Serbian preparatory committee to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the DPRK was inaugurated on Aug. 16.
    The general secretary of the New Yugoslav Communist Party of Serbia was elected chairman of the preparatory committee.
    The committee set the celebration period from Sep. 1 to 15 and decided to organize during this days colorful political and cultural events including a meeting, seminar and lecture to highly praise the revolutionary careers and immortal exploits of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il in founding and developing the DPRK into a socialist power and widely introduce them. -0-

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Johne, idemo na to!

[Джон Рейнольдс]

Хајде, само сазнај о којој је од нових комунистичких партија реч, пошто их има мали милион и нисам успео да нађем детаље о овом хепенингу.

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Ovo je NKPJ, pretpostavljam da su to Kitanovićevi, on je ionako umro istog dana kao Kim Džong Il.

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U sklopu pripreme za Evropsko prvenstvo, pogledao sam prilično grozan dokumentarni film Mariusa Markeviciusa THE OTHER DREAM TEAM. Ovaj hagiografski rad prilagošđen za publiku u SAD pokušava da prikaže "potresnu" sliku o litvanskohj nezavisnosti koju su inspirisali njeni košarkaši svojim velikim uspesima u sovjetskom i drugim dresovima. Međutim, u ovom filmu ne samo da su prećutani i iskrivljeni mnogi značajni istorijski događaji već su falsifikovane i karijere igrača o kojima se govori. Ne samo da su mnoge značajne stvari vezane upravo za njihovu afirmaciju preskočene (recimo Kurtinaitisovo učešće na All Star takmičenju u trojkama 1989. godine) već bih rekao da je to učinjeno tendenciozno kako bi se stvorio utisak da je Marculionisov odlazak u NBA 1989. bio gest u ravni Solženjicina, a informacije govore da nije kao i da je Marculionis zajedno sa Sabonisom dominirao u Žalgirisu iako je on značajan deo tog perioda proveo u drugom klubu.

Poneki detalj i poneki dokumentarni snimak čine ovaj film relativno zanimljivim za hardkor ljubitelje košarke.

* 1/2 / * * * *

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Pogledi sa strane
Zoran Ćirjaković
Pravi Srbi i slučajni Hrvati

Da bi Hrvatska mogla da ,,ode sa Balkana" i bude prihvaćena u društvu ,,modernih" i ,,civilizovanih" Evropljana njeno zlo je moralo da prestane da bude posmatrano kao hrvatsko

U dominantnim tumačenjima holokausta kao da nedostaje jedna reč. Često se pominju nacisti i dobrovoljni egzekutori, (malobrojne) psihopate i (mnogobrojni) obični ljudi, totalitarni režim i propaganda, ali tu nekako nema mnogo Nemaca.

Nije reč samo o političkoj korektnosti. Hvale vredan obzir u velikoj meri odražavaširoko prihvaćeno verovanje da Zapadna Evropa predstavlja sinonim za moderno, kulturno i civilizovano – ono podrazumeva i da u srcu Evrope, u domovini Kanta, Hegela i Vebera, jedno ovako veliko, teško pojmljivo zlo može biti ili banalno ili znak neke teške ali, ipak, akutne bolesti. Tako je u priči o oko šest miliona ubijenih Jevreja, bez izuzetka golorukih civila, nemačka kultura ispala nevina.

Nažalost, u dominantnim tumačenjima jugoslovenskih ratova devedesetih za sve kao da je kriva samo jedna kultura – tu sve vrvi od Srba. Čak i kada su opisani kao Miloševićevi, kontaminirani, palanački ili bestijalni, naglasak je na tome da su Srbi, ljudi programirani svojom navodno genocidnom kulturom.

Zato krivica jednog Srbina danas, po pravilu, nije shvaćena samo kao individualna – ona je uvek kulturalna, što, praktično, znači kolektivna, srpska. Tu treba tražiti i neke od razloga zašto je Srebrenica postala ,,srpska",a stotinak puta veći Aušvic ostao ,,nacistički".

Etnocentrične interpretacije ovdašnjeg zla su ponovo dobile na zamahu kada je prošle nedelje objavljen snimak veselih bratunačkih Srba kako pevaju i igraju uz odvratnu pesmu čiji je refren ,,Oj, Pazaru, novi Vukovaru, a Sjenice, nova Srebrenice".

Pesma poziva na ponavljanje naše dve najveće sramote i zaslužuje najoštriju osudu. Nažalost, ona je do sada uglavnom ostala u senci tumačenja koja jedan ružan događaj vade iz konteksta, depolitizuju i vezuju za nacionalnu, u ovom slučaju srpsku kulturu.

U uvodniku objavljenom u sarajevskom ,,Oslobođenju" pod naslovom ,,Nož, žlica, Sjenica" Boris Dežulović je preteće šovinističko lumpovanje predstavio kao svojevrsnu ekranizaciju popularnog srpskog obreda – banalni izraz jednog kulturom uobličenog zla.

Dežulović je svoju kulturom obojenu sliku smestio u vic koji mu je navodno ispričao izvesni Kožo: ,,Elem, došla na srpskoj slavi hrana za stol, a jedan rmpalija halapljivo dohvatio meso,pa ga rukama čereči i trpa u ralje. 'Nožem, brate, nožem', diskretno ga domaćin munuo laktom, a ovaj se trgnuo i dohvatio nož: 'Koga, brate, koga?'Ima taj vic i video-spot, vidjeli ste ga ovih dana na Jutjubu, zapis iz Bratunca, sa tamošnjeg tradicionalnog vašara".

Ali, dok Dežulović u jednom zlu prepoznaje srpske crte, na drugom ne vidi hrvatsko,već kako piše, ,,ustaško lice". ,,U Hrvatskoj je previše ustaških p...ica koje čvrsto drže do svojih stavova sve dok za njih ne treba riskirati", izjavio je u emisiji ,,Nedeljom u 2" na HRT-u.

Tako ustaše, slično kao i nacisti ranije, bivaju odvojeni od kulture – nečega što je postojano, što se teško menja, a kamoli ,,leči", a njihova zlodela se vezuju za pojmove koji sugerišu da se radi o nečemu što je privremeno išto se da kontrolisati, proizvod ljudske slabosti, retke bolesti ili prolazne ideologije.

Tu nema ničeg spornog. Štaviše, masovnim zločinima i progonima u dvadesetom veku obično je prethodilo ocrnjivanje i klevetanje jedne kulture i ljudi kojije nose u sebi. Zato svako raskidanje veze između kulture i zla treba pozdraviti. Problem nastaje onda kada se primenjuju dvostruki standardi, kada isti princip ne važi za sve.

Dežulović je jedan od autora koji nam sugerišu da su hrvatski zločinci samo slučajno Hrvati, svojevrstan nacionalni otpad prema kome splitski novinar ne skriva gađenje i prezir, dok su srpski zlikovci i ljudi ,,pomjerene pameti" predstavljeni kao otelotvorenje pravih Srba, slika i prilika srpske kulture.

Ovakva shvatanja su postala široko prihvaćena. Ne treba ih gubiti iz vida kada razmišljamo o ravnodušnosti prema tragičnoj sudbini krajiških Srba ili kada pokušavamo da razumemo potpuno odsustvo interesovanjaZapada prema činjenici da je nemali deo Hrvatske u Evropsku uniju 1. jula ušao pevajući zajedno sa Tompsonom i igrajući uz stihove ,,Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara, to je kuća Maksovih mesara" i ,,U Čapljini, klaonica bila, puno Srba Neretva nosila".

Ona su važna iz još jednog razloga. Da bi Hrvatska mogla da ,,ode sa Balkana" i bude prihvaćena u društvu ,,modernih" i ,,civilizovanih" Evropljana njeno zlo je moralo da prestane da bude posmatrano kao hrvatsko. Njegovi koreni su preneti iz domena (nacionalne) kulture – koja je letos primljena u klub ,,najviših", onih koje su dostojne prideva zapadna – u sferu psihopatologije, nečega što je po sebi univerzalno, nekako banalno, ljudski i normalno, čak i u svojoj monstruoznoj nenormalnosti.

Hrvatska kultura je tako obezbedila, makar privremenu, ispisnicu iz mnogih tumačenja naše zajedničke ružne prošlosti. Za budućnost Balkana ne bi bilo dobro da ostane poslednja kojoj je to uspelo. Ima tamo još mnogo suvišnih i opasnih reči.

Fakultet za medije i komunikacije
Zoran Ćirjaković
objavljeno: 27.08.2013.

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 ŽELJKO CVIJANOVIĆ: O ŽRTVI ILI TRI MLADIĆA
utorak, 27 avgust 2013 13:17

Ontološko obezvređenje žrtve tekovina je našeg vremena, i u tome leži samo obezvređenje svake ideje dobra

Mladom redovu američke vojske Bredliju Meningu u sredu je američki vojni sud odrezao 35 godina zatvora. Možda je prošao čak i dobro budući da je u interpretaciji slučaja između Meningovog tužilačkog i advokatskog tima bilo više saglasnosti nego i u jednom sličnom slučaju još od Moskovskih procesa. Ali opet, one kojima se kazna čini brutalno visokom treba podsetiti na izvansudske realnosti i vanredno dubok smisao, čak prevratnički, koji sa sobom Meningov čin nosi.

Jer on robijom na svojim nimalo vojničkim leđima gotovo da drži neku vrstu globalne moralne ravnoteže, on u granicama mnogo širim od američkog društva svedoči ne samo o postojanju dobra i zla već i o još sačuvanoj ljudskoj sposobnosti da ih jasno razlikuje. I onda, zar je i mogao i trebao drugačije da prođe mladić – u to vreme 22-godišnjak – koji je poverljivim podacima hranio Vikiliks i omogućio da se saznaju najskrivenije tajne o američkim zločinima u Avganistanu i Iraku? Šta je manje moglo i šta je manje trebalo da zadesi mladića koji je, uverljivije od bilo koga pre njega, posvedočio o metamorfozi zapadne demokratije u totalitarni poredak? Uostaloom, zar nema neke suštinske harmonije u tome da u zatvoru bude upravo Mening, ako već, okićeni ordenjem, na slobodi hladuju generali Klark, Petreus i ceo niz odgovornih za ogromna svetska razaranja od kraja prošlog veka do danas, i žrtve koje su odavno prešle milionsku cifru? Da bi simbolika bila potpuna, sve se to dešava u danima najave novog rušilačkog pohoda totalitarne imperije, koji preti da bude krvaviji od svih prethodnih.

PRINCIP Nije samo reč o tome što je, zajedno sa Asanžom i Snoudenom, svojim delom Mening ispisao svetle stranice američke povesti u doba kad su one ređe nego ikad od Deklaracije o nezavisnosti do danas. Više od toga, radi se o tome da Meningova kazna njegov čin vraća u tradicionalni poredak žrtve za ideale slobode, koje savremeni globalistički totalitarizam ne samo da ne priznaje nego na svaki način nastoji da unizi. I baš zato je i sa strane advokata i tužilaca, važnije od drakonske kazne, bilo neophodno da Mening bude ponižen, da njegov čin ,,izdaje" ne bude žrtva pobunjenog mladića, već proizvod krize njegovog polnog identiteta, čina čoveka koji je raskrinkao najveću svetsku imperiju a da pritom ni sam nije siguran ni u to da li je muško ili žensko. Poruka je bila sasvim jasna: nema žrtava u borbi protiv totalitarne imperije, nema čak ni zavera protiv nje, postoje samo oni koji su dovoljno ludi i dovoljno izgubljeni da ustanu protiv najsuperiornijeg poretka ikad.

Bilo je zato zanimljivo čitati kako se prenošenjem navodne Meningove želje da postane žena, čak bizarnim detaljisanjem o njegovim zahtevom da ga ne zovu Bredli, već Čelsi i drugim unižavanjima njegove ličnosti sladostrasno bavi upravo onaj svet koji mesecima iz svih svojih medija optužuje Vladimira Putina za kršenje prava homoseksualnog sveta.

Žrtve, srećom, postoje – uči nas tome i 20-godišnje stradanje celog jednog naroda, koji je, kao i uvek u svojoj prošlosti, ostajao na na pravoj strani istorije, čak i onda kad su gotovo svi drugi bili na drugoj strani, i onda kad su njegove ološ-elite bile tamo, i onda kad su se njegovi lideri umarali i kapitulirali. Danas, dok totalitarnoj imperiji prvi put klecaju noge, dok, moralno odavno poražena, bije svoju staljingradsku bitku u Siriji i Egiptu, taj žrtvovani narod seća se svojih istorijskih žrtava. Nije li naš mladi Bredli Mening pre gotovo sto godina žrtvovao sebe pred svetinjom slobode, svestan da njegov kratki put života neće biti posut ničim sem mukom i poniženjem? Nije li današnje poniženje Gavrila Principa isto ono što se radi i sa Meningom – stvaranje konteksta u kome će se pokazati da žrtve ne postoje, ali postoje teroristi i ludaci koji polaganjem svoje lude glave uzalud pokušavaju da zaustave točak istorije? Ontološko obezvređenje žrtve tekovina je našeg vremena. Ona je samo obezvređenje ideje dobra, jer zašto bi neko bio toliko lud da ide u zatvor ili smrt umesto da troši novac sa svoje kreditne kartice?

LAZAR Jedan treći mladi čovek – imenjak jednog srpskog vladara koji se svojom žrtvom posvetio – ovih dana došao je u Srbiju i takođe obećao žrtvu. Umesto sopstvene, obećao je da, zarad bolje ekonomske budućnosti, mora da se žrtvuje narod. Nije on prvi koji je tu žrtvu tražio od naroda, s tim što je većina onih koji su žrtvu tražili u bliskoj prošlosti učestvala u bednoj moralnoj (i materijalnoj) pljački najvrednijeg što može da bude u jednom narodu. Kako će taj narod danas znati da li se žrtvuje za bolju budućnost ili ga samo još jednom žrtvuju? Ne, ovaj put jednostavno neće morati da čeka da se sve završi da bi znao da li je u pravu. Po tome hoće li ovaj treći mladi čovek samo tražiti narodnu žrtvu ili će ponuditi i sopstvenu, greške neće moći da bude.

Za njega, njegovu žrtvu, međutim, nisam siguran. Ono što je određivalo Meningovu i Principovu žrtvu jeste njihova istoričnost ili, prostije, njihova akcija na strani pravde. Žrtvovati se možeš samo na strani pravde, na strani nepravde, na mestu gde si aistoričan, po definiciji žrtvuješ druge. O tome bih, pre nego što sednem u srpsku vladu, razmišljao da sam na mestu Lazara Krstića. Dvojica njegovih pomenutih prethodnika nisu pogrešila. Iako su njegove karte koje su pale pred nas rezultat deljenja starih pokeraških varalica, možda neće ni on. Uostalom, u ozbiljnijim je godinama i od Principa i od Meninga.

Šira verzija teksta objavljenog u ,,Novinama Novosadskim"

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Venice Film Review: 'Gravity'

August 28, 2013 | 03:00AM PT
Alfonso Cuaron's white-knuckle space odyssey restores a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide.
Justin Chang
Senior Film Critic @JustinCChang   

 

About halfway through Alfonso Cuaron's astonishing "Gravity," Sandra Bullock, playing a lost astronaut stranded 375 miles above Earth, seeks refuge in an abandoned spacecraft and curls into a floating fetal position, savoring a brief respite from her harrowing journey. Of the many sights to behold in this white-knuckle space odyssey, a work of great narrative simplicity and visual complexity, it's this image that speaks most eloquently to Cuaron's gifts as a filmmaker: He's the rare virtuoso capable of steering us through vividly imagined worlds and into deep recesses of human feeling. Suspending viewers alongside Bullock for a taut, transporting 91 minutes (with George Clooney in a sly supporting turn), the director's long-overdue follow-up to "Children of Men" is at once a nervy experiment in blockbuster minimalism and a film of robust movie-movie thrills, restoring a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide.
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Opening Oct. 4 Stateside following its Venice and Toronto premieres, the Warner Bros. release offers in abundance the sort of eye-popping, screen-filling spectacle that demands to be viewed in a theater. Not unlike earlier triumphs of 3D and vfx innovation such as "Avatar" and "Life of Pi," though conceived along less fantastical, more grimly realistic lines, "Gravity" is at once classical and cutting-edge in its showmanship, placing the most advanced digital filmmaking techniques in service of material that could hardly feel more accessible.

As scripted by Cuaron and his son Jonas, this tale of one woman's grim expedition into the unknown is a nerve-shredding suspenser, a daring study in extreme isolation, and one of the most sophisticated and enveloping visions of space travel yet realized onscreen. It falls among that increasingly rare breed of popular entertainments capable of prompting genuine "How did they do that?" reactions from even the most jaded viewers, even as its central premise is so simple and immediately gripping that one might just as readily ask, "Why didn't anyone do it sooner?"

The answer to both questions is that Cuaron, in another remarkable collaboration with longtime cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber ("Children of Men"), has pushed the relevant technologies to their limits in order to tell this story with the sort of impeccable verisimilitude and spellbinding visual clarity it requires. The long, intricate tracking shots the three devised for the earlier film were a mere warm-up act for what they unleash here, as is clear from the stunningly choreographed opening sequence — an unbroken, roughly 13-minute long take that plunges us immediately into the deafening silence of space. Specifically, we are in the atmospheric layer known as the thermosphere, the Earth's massive form looming large in the widescreen frame as an orbiting shuttle gradually cruises into focus.

Three members of the crew have left the shuttle to help repair the Hubble telescope, though dramatically, the picture is concerned with only two of them: Matt Kowalsky (Clooney), a seasoned astronaut leading his final mission, and Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock), a medical engineer on her first. The mood is relaxed initially, even humorous; radio music plays in the background as the astronauts exchange banter with mission control. Kowalsky, drifting lazily about in his harness, brags that he's about to break the official record for longest spacewalk. The far less experienced Stone nervously tries to stay focused on her task, not the easiest thing to do for someone still adjusting to the woozy effects of zero gravity.

"Houston, I have a bad feeling about this mission," Kowalsky quips early on. Yet all joking ceases when Houston suddenly reports that a cloud of debris, triggered by the self-destruction of a nearby Russian satellite, is headed their way. The camera, having gracefully bobbed and weaved around the astronauts without a single cut so far, continues to observe with unblinking concentration as the ship is pelted with shrapnel, killing the third astronaut, causing widespread damage and severing all communications with Houston. Amid the chaos, Stone comes untethered and finds herself spinning, alone and helpless, in the vast emptiness of space, an experience the audience will soon share to a deeply unnerving degree.

In one continuous shot, the film has not only introduced its central crisis — will Stone survive? — but also completely immersed us in the beauty and majesty of a dark, pitiless universe. While "Gravity" is hardly the first film to send characters into orbit, few have so powerfully and subjectively evoked the sensation of floating right there with them. As it glides nimbly around the action, the camera induces a deeply pleasurable feeling of weightlessness (the film might just as well have been titled "Dancing With the Stars") that can suddenly turn from exhilarating to terrifying, leaving us gasping for oxygen alongside the characters.

The filmmakers' technical command here is so precise that they're able to shift perspectives at will; more than once the camera zooms in tighter and tighter on Stone until it seems to enter her helmet, sharing her frightening view of the great, black expanse before her. Exactly what she sees and endures over the course of her journey would be unfair to reveal. Suffice to say the script modulates the tension expertly, deftly preying on the claustrophobic and the agoraphobic alike, and maintaining an unflagging sense of peril as it carefully throws Stone one lifeline
after another.

The most crucial of these lifelines turns out to be Kowalsky, who initially comes off as the film's most obtrusive element, a glib smart-ass who's there to help Stone and the audience find their bearings, and to provide a measure of comic relief. Yet while Clooney's flippant leading-man charm may seem incongruous in this context at first, his tough-and-tender rapport with Bullock pulses with understated feeling, never more so than when the two astronauts are tethered together, trying to make their way to safety. Clooney gets one particularly audacious scene that perhaps only a star of his stature could have managed, pulling the viewer through various states of shock, disbelief and finally bittersweet understanding; it's a haunting moment that firmly ties "Gravity," for all its uncompromising realism, to the soul of classic Hollywood.

There are glimmers of artifice, too, in the script's conception of Stone, who turns out to have a tragedy in her past, an unhealed wound that feels rather needlessly engineered to provide the viewer with a psychological entry point, as well as a deeper stake in her survival. It's the one on-the-nose element in a screenplay that, given its rigorous intelligence in all other departments, might have done well to trust the audience to stay invested in Stone's journey without the benefit of an emotional hook. (Providing a fascinating contrast is J.C. Chandor's upcoming stranded-at-sea thriller "All Is Lost," in some ways a purer, more radical storytelling experiment in which words, motivations and explanations have been almost completely expunged.)

Nonetheless, Bullock inhabits the role with grave dignity and hints at Stone's past scars with sensitivity and tact, and she holds the screen effortlessly once "Gravity" becomes a veritable one-woman show. In a performance that imposes extraordinary physical demands, the actress remains fully present emotionally, projecting a very appealing combo of vulnerability, intelligence and determination that not only wins us over immediately, but sustains attention all the way through the cathartic closing reels.

The outstanding post-production 3D conversion enhances our sense of immersion in this foreign environment at every turn. Images of outer space give new meaning to the term "deep focus," while the scenes set in enclosed environs provide a pleasing visual balance and contrast, with floating objects supplying a natural depth of field. As visual an experience as the film is, it would be far less effective without the exceptional sound work by production mixer Chris Munro and sound designer Glenn Freemantle, which makes especially potent use of silence in accordance with the laws of outer-space physics. Helping to vary the soundscape is Steven Price's richly ominous score, playing like an extension of the jolts and tremors that accompany the action onscreen.

All in all, it would be impossible to overestimate the difficulty of what Cuaron and his top-of-the-line crew have pulled off, or to guess at the staggering number of decisions that were made regarding specifics of camera placement and movement; the motion-control robots that were used on the actors to plausibly simulate zero-gravity conditions; the marvelous scope and detail of Andy Nicholson's production design; and the meticulous integration of visual effects, all-digital backgrounds, traditional lighting schemes and other live-action lensing techniques. But perhaps the boldest risk of all was the decision to combine these elements in a manner that would hold up under the prolonged scrutiny of the camera, in single-shot sequences of such breathtaking duration and coherence. Somewhere, one imagines, the spirits of Stanley Kubrick and Max Ophuls are looking down in admiration.
Venice Film Review: 'Gravity'

Reviewed at Dolby Laboratories, Burbank, Calif., Aug. 14, 2013. (In Venice Film Festival — opener, noncompeting; Toronto Film Festival — Special Presentations.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 91 MIN.
Production

A Warner Bros. release and presentation of an Esperanto Filmoj, Heyday Films production. Produced by Alfonso Cuaron, David Heyman. Executive producers, Heyman, Nikki Penny, Chris deFaria, Stephen Jones.
Crew

Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Screenplay, Alfonso Cuaron, Jonas Cuaron. Camera (Technicolor, Arri Alexa digital, widescreen, 3D), Emmanuel Lubezki; editors, Alfonso Cuaron, Mark Sanger; music, Steven Price; music supervisor, George Drakoulias; production designer, Andy Nicholson; supervising art director, Mark Scruton; costume designer, Jany Temime; special effects supervisors, Neil Corbould, Manex Efrem; sound, Chris Munro; supervising sound editor/sound designer, Glenn Freemantle; re-recording mixer, Skip Lievsay; visual effects supervisor, Tim Webber; visual effects producer, Charles Howell; visual effects, Framestore, Rising Sun Pictures, Nhance; stunt coordinator, Franklin Henson; stereoscopic supervisor, Chris Parks; associate producer, Gabriel Rodriguez; assistant director, Josh Robertson; casting, Lucinda Syson, David Rubin, Richard Hicks.
With

Sandra Bullock, George Clooney. Voices: Ed Harris, Orto Ignatiussen, Phaldut Sharma, Amy Warren, Basher Savage.

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Gravity: Venice Review
3:00 AM PDT 8/28/2013 by Todd McCarthy
The Bottom Line

Thrilling, and as close to feeling like you're in space as most of us will ever be.
Venue

Venice Film Festival (opening night)
Opens

Oct. 4 (Warner Bros.)
Cast

Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
Director

Alfonso Cuaron

George Clooney and Sandra Bullock star as astronauts in Alfonso Cuaron's jaw-dropping space thriller.

At once the most realistic and beautifully choreographed film ever set in space, Gravity is a thrillingly realized survival story spiked with interludes of breath-catching tension and startling surprise. Not at all a science fiction film in the conventional sense, Alfonso Cuaron's first feature in seven years has no aliens, space ship battles or dystopian societies, just the intimate spectacle of a man and a woman trying to cope in the most hostile possible environment across a very tight 90 minutes. World premiered at the Venice Film Festival, with Telluride showings following quickly on its heels, this Warner Bros. release is smart but not arty, dramatically straightforward but so dazzlingly told as to make it a benchmark in its field. Graced by exemplary 3D work and bound to look great in IMAX, the film seems set to soar commercially around the world.
our editor recommends

"Houston, I have a bad feeling about this mission," George Clooney's veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski half-jokes at the outset from his perch in orbit around Earth, which looms massively beneath. It's a sentiment few viewers will agree with once their jaws begin dropping at Cuaron's astonishing 13-minute opening shot, which gyrates and swoops and loops and turns in concert with the movements of the space shuttle and those of Matt, who jets around untethered while mission scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) tries to fix a technical problem outside the ship. It's as if Max Ophuls were let loose in outer space, so elegant is the visual continuity, making for a film that will have buffs and casual fans alike gaping and wondering, "How did they do that?" and returning for multiple viewings just to imbibe the sheer virtuosity of it all.

PHOTOS: George Clooney: Career in Pictures

The story, written by Cuaron and his son Jonas, is very simple and straightforward: How will the two surviving team members of a crippled American space shuttle contrive to get back to Earth before their oxygen runs out? Old-timer Kowalski, who flew his first mission in 1996, takes a self-deprecating attitude with space rookie Stone -- "You're the genius up here, I only drive the bus." -- but his smart-alecky kidding scarcely conceals his serious professionalism and vast knowledge of the ins and outs of staying alive in the frigid void.

Before Cuaron even resorts to his first cut, the peril jacks way up with word of approaching space debris, the result of a chain reaction from the Russians having shot down one of their own satellites. Suddenly and shockingly, the empty space is filled with a metallic torrent from which only dumb luck can save the exposed space travelers. In this terrifying interlude, the ship is damaged and Stone, her umbilical cord severed, tumbles toward oblivion.

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Here, as elsewhere in the film, Cuaron coils the tension and visceral impact of key scenes via a startling mix of the objective and subjective, and the extreme contrast between the stillness of empty space and the abrupt arrival of terrible threats. This is achieved by switching from the eerie electronic heaves of Steven Price's insidiously effective score to total silence; from violent physical action to tight shots of Stone's face, her breath visible on the inside of her mask and her nervous inhaling and exhaling the only sounds to be heard; from the beauty of a green, blue and tan planet on one side and the depths of infinite darkness on the other; from the awe of the cosmic to the terror of nothingness, from the warmth of the sun to the coldness of eternal limbo.

These oppositions provide the sensory frame for a narrative that, soon after Kowalski rescues Stone from her trajectory into deep space, shoots off in an unexpected direction. Urgently looking for a safe haven, Kowalski spots a Russian space station in the distance which might sustain them until a rescue ship can be sent up. Their oxygen supply is running low and Stone isn't convinced they can make it. Surprises await on the Russian craft and yet again on another space vessel, and when a weightless Stone goes floating about in nothing but her underwear, it's impossible not to think of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in Alien.

But no monsters pop out baring scary teeth, only adverse circumstances of such extremity that they place Gravity alongside Life of Pi and J.C. Chandor's contemporaneous All Is Lost as a survival tale requiring a heroically concentrated form of human resilience. Those two films involve the peril of oceans rather than space, but then Gravity, with its characters all suited up and their heads enclosed in helmets, sometimes almost seems like it's taking place under water -- except that you can see more clearly.

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And seeing is what it's mostly about here, seeing space as if the film was actually shot there. It's a wonderful cinematic jolt to watch this film for the first time, as it looks as if it had been filmed, as it were, on location. Given the brief running time, it will be tempting for many to return for second and third visits just to take it all in again, to absorb all Cuaron and his team of exemplary collaborators have done. The reliably brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who has shot all but one of the director's features, has outdone himself here with images of astonishing clarity that, given the finesse of the 3D here, you practically feel you could step (or float) into. Andy Nicholson's production design is mainly devoted to creating multiple much-lived-in space ships so battered and abused they resemble banged-up old cars, while Tim Webber's peerless special effects work never has a CGI look.

With all the excitement and beauty Gravity delivers, at a certain point, around the time of the final long exchange between Kowalski and Stone, it becomes clear that Gravity doesn't intend to offer more than that; it shies away from proposing anything metaphysical, philosophically suggestive or meaning-laden. For some viewers, that will be a good thing, as it avoids pretention and self-seriousness; for others, its refusal to acknowledge the eternal mysteries, to be anything more than a thrillingly made, stripped-down suspense drama, will relegate it to good-but-not-great status. The very ending is quite cool and replete with quiet cinematic as well as evolutionary reverberations.

Clooney supplies both manly reliability and welcome lightness as a guy anyone would want in their corner in a pinch, while Bullock is aces in by far the best film she's ever been in. An unseen Ed Harris supplies the voice of mission control.

Venue: Venice Film Festival (opening night)
Opens: October 4 (Warner Bros.)
Production: Esperanto Filmoj, Heyday Films
Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Screenwriters: Alfonso Cuaron, Jonas Cuaron
Producers: Alfonso Cuaron, David Heyman
Executive producers: Nikki Penny, Chris DeFaria, Stephen Jones
Director of photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production designer: Andy Nicholson
Costume designer: Jany Temime
Editors: Alfonso Cuaron, Mark Sanger
Music: Steven Price
Visual effects supervisor: Tim Webber
PG-13 rating, 90 minutes

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EXCLUSIVE: ImageMovers has acquired film rights to The Execution of Noa P Singleton: A Novel, the best-seller by first-time author Elizabeth L. Silver. Crown published the book in June. Robert Zemeckis, Jack Rapke and Jackie Levine will produce for ImageMovers. Sam Goldberg and Ilan Ulmer will finance development and will be  executive producers. The Execution of Noa P Singleton is a murder mystery about a twentysomething college dropout who sits on death row for murder in Pennsylvania until a powerful attorney, the victim's own mother, attempts to have the death sentence commuted. ImageMovers most recently produced the John Gatins-penned Flight, which Zemeckis directed. UTA brokered the book deal on behalf of Elizabeth L. Silver and publishing agent Richard Pine of Inkwell Management.

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