Tag Archives: Films

Definitive Restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

This should be great if the design of the website is anything to go by.

Shortly after that 1927 release, an entire quarter of Lang’s original version was cut by Paramount for the US release, and by Ufa in Germany, an act of butchery very much against the director’s wishes. The excised footage was believed lost, irretrievably so – that is, until one of the most remarkable finds in all of cinema history, as several dusty reels were discovered in a small museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2008.

It’s being shown at Birmingham’s Electric Cinema from the 10th to 16th of September.

More Trailers

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Since we are talking films, however tangentially, I wanted to post links to a couple of trailers.

I talked about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button before. There is now a full trailer posted on the film’s website.

The other trailer that’s caught my eye is the one for Bill Meher’s documentary Religulous. There is also a related site called disbeliefnet with the tag-line “you won’t believe what people believe”.

Kubrick, Lyndon and Zeiss

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This will be of limited interest to none-camera nerds: It’s an article, largely in Italian about the ultra fast (f/0.7) lenses that Stanley Kubrick either had made, or heavily modified for use on Barry Lyndon.

It allowed him to shoot night-time, candle lit interior scenes without any additional lighting. Unsurprisingly, they also had amazingly shallow depth of field, which must have been a bugger for the camera operators, but produced some amazing looking images.

It may be in Italian, but there are a lot of stills from the film showing the effect produced by these lenses.

Lets Get Lost

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This is excellent news:

Let’s Get Lost, the American photographer Bruce Weber’s documentary about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, won critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination when it was first shown 20 years ago, but did not get full cinema distribution. Its re-release means that this summer this poetic, melancholy homage to the troubled musician will finally be widely distributed in cinemas, and later, for the first time, on DVD.

Lets get lost got me interested in a lot of things when I first saw it. I’m really looking forward to buying the DVD.

Curiously Appropriate

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‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button‘ is not one of my favourite Fitzgerald stories, but it is still a Fitzgerald, and an average Fitzgerald story is still better than most things one is likely to come across.

The premiss of the story is eminently suited for cinema — not that this occurred to me when I read it. In any case I’m glad that it’s being made by David, ‘Fight Club’ Fincher. It should be interesting.