Who is killing the great chefs of Europe? (1978)

Sunday@home

Happy birthday!

Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE ( born February 20, 1927) is an Academy Award-, Golden Globe-, BAFTA- and Grammy award-winning Bahamian-American actor, film director, author, and diplomat. He broke through as a star in acclaimed performances in American films and plays, which, by consciously defying racial stereotyping, gave a new dramatic credibility for black actors to mainstream film audiences in the Western world.

In 1963, Poitier became the first black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field. The significance of this achievement was later bolstered in 1967 when he starred in three very well received films—To Sir, With Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—making him the top box office star of that year.

Poitier has directed a number of popular movies such as Uptown Saturday Night, and Let's Do It Again (with friend Bill Cosby), and Stir Crazy (starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder). In 2002, 38 years after receiving the Best Actor Award, Poitier was chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive the Honorary Award, designated "To Sidney Poitier in recognition of his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being."

Since 1997 he has been the Bahamian ambassador to Japan.

Jerry again

The Black Hole (1979)

The Black Hole is a 1979 science fiction movie directed by Gary Nelson for Walt Disney Productions. It stars Maximilian Schell, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins, and Ernest Borgnine. The voices of the main robot characters in the film are provided by Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens. The music for the movie was composed by John Barry. The plot was inspired by Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, filmed by Disney in 1954. Alan Dean Foster novelized the screenplay.

At $20 million (plus another $6 million for its advertising budget) it was at the time the most expensive picture ever produced by the company. It was generally not well-received by critics, although the special effects were highly praised. At the time of its release, the movie's opening credits sequence featured the longest computer graphics shot that had ever appeared in a film. The film also had a digitally recorded soundtrack, reportedly the world's first.

The movie earned $36 million at the US box office, making it the 13th highest grossing film of the year. The film was nominated for cinematography and visual effects Academy Awards and was notable for being the first Disney film not to have a universal rating, due to mild language (being the first Disney film to include profanity of any type) and scenes of human death never seen in a Disney production before (e.g., a character is eviscerated). To that end, it was rated PG in the U.S. Along with frequent subtexts, there were also metaphysical and religious themes expressed through the film. This film led the company towards experimenting with more adult-oriented films, which would eventually lead to the creation of its Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures arms to handle films considered too mature in nature to carry the Walt Disney label.

The Black Hole

La Jetée

La jetée (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker.

Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel.

The survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, "to summon the past and future to the aid of the present." The traveler is a male prisoner; his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time.

He is thrown back to the past again and again. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the deep future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. On his return, he is cast aside by his jailers to die. Before he can be executed, he is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be returned to the time of his childhood. He is returned, only to find the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult.

La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax 24x36 and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex. The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan. Due to its brevity, La jetée is often screened in theatres alongside other films; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film with which it was first released. 

The scene in which the hero and the woman look at a cut-away trunk of a tree is a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which Marker also references in Sans soleil.

Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995) was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La Jetée.

i n B r u x

Kyle Cooper

Kyle Cooper is a designer of motion picture title sequences. His work includes the opening credit sequences of Se7en (1995), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Flubber (1997), The Mummy (1999), Spider-Man (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Godzilla Final Wars (2004); and the video games Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001) and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004). For his work in the credits field is often considered the Saul Bass, of whom replaced his role as title designer for Martin Scorsese's 1990 film Goodfellas.

He has also directed a film, New Port South (2001).



Cooper specializes in crafting title sequences - the short introductions and closings to films, videogames, and television shows that list the names of the cast and crew involved in the production. In this boutique industry, Cooper is king. He has designed the lead-ins to 150 features - including Donnie Brasco, the 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Sphere, Spawn, Twister, and Flubber. The movies themselves may not be cinematic classics, but Cooper's credits - which operate as minifilms in their own right - consistently stun and entertain audiences. For this spring's Dawn of the Dead, he even used real human blood. Critic Elvis Mitchell, in his New York Times review of the movie, summed up the Cooper effect: "The opening and closing credits are so good, they're almost worth sitting through the film for." Indeed, the word in Hollywood is that some filmmakers have refused to work with Cooper, says Dawn of the Dead director Zach Snyder, because he's "the guy who makes title sequences better than the movie." Not since Saul Bass' legendary preludes to The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Vertigo (1958) have credits attracted such attention. Cooper counts Bass' work, along with Stephen Frankfurt's lead-in for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as his greatest influences.



Directors don't call on Cooper for a signature style; they hire him to dig under the celluloid and tap into the symbolism of a film. That aptitude first became apparent in 1995, with the abrasive and highly stylized intro to David Fincher's Se7en. In it, the letters - hand-scratched by Cooper with a needle onto film stock, frame by painstaking frame - disintegrate to the industrial rhythms of a remix of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer." The oft-imitated setup perfectly captured the addled mind of the movie's serial killer and set the tone for the entire film. "It's a unique blend of auteur and creative genius that makes his sequences memorable - but not at the expense of the film," says Grant Curtis, coproducer of Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. "That's what makes Kyle truly unique, his innate sensibility that opening title sequences are not separate from the film, they're part of it."



The production on Spider-Man 2's titles, from conception to delivery, has stretched almost an entire year. Cooper began by digitally scanning dozens of vintage Spider-Man comics and editing them together in a blink-and-you-miss-it five-second montage that encompasses the entire story arc of the first film. After that, "the credits get caught in the web. I love the moment when you kind of figure it out," he says. "Oh wow, metaphors! Flies in a web, type in a web like flies. That's great!"
Unlike the first Spider-Man's title sequence - which took months of tweaking with software apps including Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects, Maya, and Photoshop - Cooper this time relies on old-school filmic techniques. The credit's primary conflict between Spidey and arch nemesis Dr. Octavius is presented in striking stop-motion animation. Which brings us back to Cooper's black widows and the octopus. "I always liked the black cat fighting the white cat in the main titles for Walk on the Wild Side," Cooper says, citing Saul Bass' classic work. In homage to Bass, Cooper pits his spider and his octopus against each other. "They both have eight legs and very similar body designs," he says, showing off the photos he took of his pets for inspiration. "The metaphors of these animals already existed. I just thought the animals fighting would look good together."

Jazzin'withJerry!

In defence of Richard III - The Daughter of Time (1951)

The Daughter of Time is a 1951 novel by Josephine Tey. Born Elizabeth Mackintosh, she was also a well-known playwright. She used the pseudonym Gordon Daviot and her most successful play was Richard of Bordeaux. The Daughter of Time is undoubtedly the most popular of her crime novels and deals with the controversy of King Richard III in an innovative way.

The Daughter of Time (1951) brought the controversy surrounding Richard III and the Princes in the Tower to a wide public audience and is perhaps the most popular defense of Richard. This mystery novel addresses the issue of historical truth. Inspector Alan Grant, trapped in a hospital with a broken leg, is bored senseless. Because he fancies himself to be an expert on faces, his friend, Marta Hallard, a famous actress, gives him some portraits to study. In the portrait of Richard III, he sees power and suffering in the face of a man of conscience and integrity. Is it "a judge, a soldier, a prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier, perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in large design but anxious over details. A candidate for a gastric ulcer." Grant is dismayed to discover that it is the portrait of one of the most infamous villains in history, the "monster" said to have murdered his nephews to obtain the crown of England. How could he have misjudged? Grant decides that he will read everything he can find to discern the truth of the matter. With his detective skills and reasoning ability, he hopes to solve the mystery the missing princes.

Tey keeps the pace lively by the constant activities of contemporary characters, while Grant's "flashbacks" to the past through the reading of historical sources guides the reader stepwise through the collection of evidence, such as it is, and the reasoning process. Grant's research is very similar to a modern day criminal investigation, except that the witnesses are long dead and left behind little tangible evidence. Grant cross-compares facts from the various sources to try to forge a logical scenario. He discovers that once an erroneous account is published, it is often unquestioningly accepted as true. Historians subsequent to Sir Thomas More (in particular, Hall and Holinshed) appear to have accepted More's account as indisputable, when in fact he could have only obtained his information secondhand (most likely from the highly-prejudiced Bishop Morton.) In today's courtroom, such "evidence" would be inadmissible as "hearsay." Josephine Tey/Gordon Daviot addresses the question, in this book and others: "How much of history is solidly grounded in fact, and how much is it malleable for the sake of political expediency?" In The Daughter of Time, Inspector Grant eventually tries to dig up sources contemporaneous with Richard III to eliminate the Tudor bias. In writing Richard III, Shakespeare's goal was to write a compelling drama, and historical accuracy was sacrificed for the sake of plot. Because it was widely believed in those days that Richard III had had his nephews murdered, he was a logical villain; Shakespeare only needed to superimpose exaggerated physical deformities and a Machiavellian-inspired personality to create an unforgettable character.

In The Daughter of Time, Grant bounces ideas off of the other people in his life--nurses, doctors, and acquaintances to illustrate the reactions of varying personalities to the information he discovers; this gives him opportunities to expound on his findings and theories. The characters include the previously-mentioned Marta Hallard, the busy, efficient, no-nonsense Nurse Ingham ("The Midget"), the sympathetic and helpful Nurse Ella Darroll ("The Amazon"), and Brent Carradine, an American student who obtains research materials for Grant and discusses the issues with him at length. This mystery demonstrates that once an idea, right or wrong, becomes "fixed" in a culture, people resist changing their opinions on the matter, even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.

Arguments presented in the book in defence of King Richard:

The Bill of Attainder brought by Henry VII against Richard III makes no mention whatsoever of the Princes. There never was any formal accusation, much less a verdict of guilt. The Princes were probably still alive when Richard's reign came to an end.
The mother of the Princes remained always in very good terms with Richard III. No mother would ever be so friendly towards the murderer of her children.

The title of the novel is taken from Bertolt Brecht's play Life of Galileo, in which the eponymous hero observes: "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority."

Lezione Ventuno di Alessandro Baricco

In memoriam : James Withmore 1921 -2009

A kiss before dying

A Kiss Before Dying is a 1953 novel written by Ira Levin. It won the 1954 Edgar Award, for Best First Novel.
The book has been adapted twice for the cinema: first in 1956 and later in 1991.
Now a modern crime classic, Levin's story tells the shocking tale of a charming, intelligent man who will stop at nothing, even murder, to get where he wants to go. His problem is a pregnant woman who loves him. The solution involves desperate measures.

still alive!

Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner mother and daughter in "Imitation of Life"

ensamble

tonight from West Side Story

el tango de Roxanne from Moulin Rouge