Film

David Bowie passed away on January 10, 2016, an evening no one attending the 73rd Golden Globes will likely forget. That night, after the ceremony, revelers crowded the dance floors of the after-parties, when one DJ after the next started playing Bowie songs while fans shed tears for their fallen idol.

Lockdown getting you down? Unlock your spirits with a timeless classic. How about William Wyler’s Roman Holiday? Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, enchantment, and la dolce vita, all guaranteed to lift your mood.

It was August 1945 and in his two-story house on Whitley Terrace in the Hollywood Hills, Max Ophüls had started writing a personal bio at the request of a publicist for the company that had finally hired him after four years of unemployment. Like many of his European colleagues before him, the German-born and French-naturalized filmmaker had moved to America in 1941, hoping to find work in Tinseltown.

“In this semi-autobiography, where I often wander from the subject like the wayfarer in a picaresque novel seduced by the charm of the unexpected intrusion, the unforeseen story, certain false memories have undoubtedly remained, despite my vigilance. But it doesn’t matter.

It was October of 1953 when then powerful Argentina Sono Film, the largest film studio in the region, released El Vampiro Negro in glorious black and white. It had all the makings of an instant hit: Roberto Escalada, one of the most prestigious leading men of the time playing against type as a vile prosecutor willing to do anything in his power to achieve his goals, Olga Zubarry, a beautiful young actress who was as popular as she was respected.

FTA is the title of a documentary, lost for almost 50 years, directed by Francine Parker and produced by 15-time Golden Globe nominee and 7 times winner Jane Fonda with eight-time Golden Globe nominee and two-time winner Donald Sutherland. The film is about the tour that the two famous actors did of military bases across the United States, the Philippines, and Japan in 1971, bringing political satire, songs, poetry, conversations and questions about the role of the United States in the Vietnam war to the soldiers, many of whom were actively opposed to the conflict at the time.

The second annual HFPA Restoration Summit culminated with the screening of the newly restored print of Federico Fellini’s Roma. The pristine print has been brought back to life by the world-renowned labs at Cineteca di Bologna which, as Gianluca Farinelli, the Cineteca’s founding director explained in his introduction, had an object to restore the original brilliance of the film’s color as filmed by Fellini’s long-time DP Giuseppe Rotunno, while also preserving the “sense of fragility” inherent to 35 mm film.

An entertaining, surprising and instructive voyage through the silent era of film was one of the highlights of the two days of celebration of classic and restored that took place on February 15th at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. The first event of the second annual HFPA Restoration Summit was titled Serge Bromberg Presents: Treasures of the Silent Era, and filled the historic theatre with enthusiastic fans of the early days of Cinema.

Every year, the Sundance Film Festival has one big controversial documentary on their schedule. Just remember Alex Gibney’s anti-Scientology film Going Clear, and last year’s Leaving Neverland, a multiple-part HBO doc about Michael Jackson’s pedophilia.

In the early 1990s, children’s cable network Nickelodeon, seeking animated programming different from the medium’s traditional powerhouse providers, opened itself up to outside pitches and turned to a hyperactive, highly imaginative upstart, John Kricfalusi, giving him a shot with a six-episode order for Ren & Stimpy, a TV show about an emotionally imbalanced chihuahua and his good-natured but dimwitted feline best friend. When the series premiered in August 1991, it was an out-of-the-gate smash hit, breaking rating records, immediately challenging The Simpsons (then just entering its third season) for domination among animation fans, and eventually raking in, at its peak, several billion dollars in merchandising per year.