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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.FESTIVALSMay Days.As many as 200 French film festival workers plan to stage labor actions during Cannes, citing insufficient pay and the exclusion of many festival staff from unemployment benefits when they are not under contract. The movement is being organized under the banner of Sous Les Écrans La Dèche: Collectif Des Précaires Des Festivals De Cinéma.A new report outlines the institutional dysfunction at the Toronto International Film Festival, which recently lost the support of the telecommunications company Bell as its major sponsor. Citing a desire for “greater accessibility,” Slamdance Film Festival will relocate from Park City, Ut, to Los Angeles in 2025.NEWSHarlan County, U.S.A..Now that all thirteen IATSE locals have reached tentative agreements with the AMPTP,...

Paul Auster, the celebrated author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy, screenwriter on Wayne Wang’s Smoke and director of Lulu on the Bridge, has died. His friend, Jacki Lyden, confirmed the news to the New York Times. Auster was 77.

Auster’s debut work, a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude, won critical praise.

His stature as one of America’s most prominent authors was cemented with with a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. They are City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986). The books in the Trilogy play on tropes of the detective novel to address existential questions.

Critic Michael Dirda wrote of Auster’s work, “Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set...

We recently had the good fortune to speak with the talented, prolific filmmaker Wayne Wang about his long career, in particular his film Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, whose Director-Approved Special Edition Blu-ray is now available from Criterion and also streaming on the Criterion Channel. Additional B-Sides we chatted about with Wang included Eat a Bowl of Tea, Life Is Cheap… But Toilet Paper Is Expensive (also on Criterion Channel), Smoke (and its own B-Side Blue in the Face), Chinese Box, and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Wang elaborated on making films efficiently, his career-long ambition to make a different kind of picture every time, how he constructed the perfect “pillow shot” (an homage to filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu) in Dim Sum, and some smaller films of his that he hopes more people discover. There’s also talk about his faltering first steps into Hollywood (Slam Dance) and...

Roseanne Barr will make her return to the stand-up stage after 16 years with “A Roseanne Comedy Special,” which will premiere exclusively on Fox Nation in the first quarter of 2023.

The Fox News Media streaming service signed the Emmy winner to also produce the special, Fox Nation president Jason Klarman announced. He said in a statement, “Roseanne is a comedy icon whose humor connects with the American audience like no other. Her ability to channel the challenges of everyday people and find the humor in it all has earned her the passionate following of millions of dedicated fans. We are thrilled to add her comedy special exclusively to the Fox Nation catalog.”

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Michael Fishman Says It Was His ‘Honor’ to Be on ‘The Conners’ After News of Season 5 Exit

The one-hour special will appear alongside other Fox Nation originals like series “Duck Family Treasure” and the upcoming “Sharon Osbourne:...

Wayne Wang is one of the pioneers of Asian-American cinema, often providing a unique voice on the topics of identity, immigration and integration. In his long and fruitful career, listing 22 feature-length films over the course of 44 years, he has made some of the biggest and most beloved indie hits like “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and “Smoke” (1995), had his chance of earning Hollywood fame with “Maid in Manhattan” (2002), but he always came back to Asian-American themes. The other thing characteristic for Wang is the tendency to work with the material sourced in literature. Both stated facts hold for his latest film, “Coming Home Again”, which was shown at Toronto and Busan before having its European premiere in the official selection at Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn.

However, “Coming Home Again” will take a special place in Wang’s filmography. The reason for that is the type of the material he works with: a deeply personal,...

Exclusive: Paul Auster novel In The Country Of Last Things is getting a Spanish-language movie adaptation from Argentine filmmaker Alejandro Chomski (Asleep In The Sun).

Shoot is underway at Pinewood Dominican Republic Studios on the feature starring Argentine newcomer Jazmín Diz, Mexican actor-singer Christopher Von Uckermann and Maria De Medeiros (Pulp Fiction). Funding comes from Caribbean outfit Lantica. Above is a first look at Diz in the film.

Set in a devastated city that was once a thriving metropolis, the dystopian story follows Anna (Diz) who is searching for her brother, a journalist who is missing. In her quest to find him, she meets and falls in love with Sam (Von Uckermann), another journalist. Chomski adapted Auster’s novel, which has been translated into more than forty languages.

Producers on the long-gestating project, which was originally developed as an English-language film, are Alexandra Stone of UK-based Streetcar Productions, Capa Pictures...

Plus… Carol producer Christine Vachon to receive special Teddy Award.Scroll down for full list of new additions

Berlin Film Festival (Feb 11-21) has announced that its Panorama Special strand will open on Feb 12 with Daniel Burman’s The Tenth Man (El rey del once) and the previously announced War on Everyone by John Michael McDonagh.

Argentinian director Burman opened the main programme of Panorama in 1988 with his debut A Chrysanthemum Bursts in Cinco Esquinas (Un crisantemo estalla en cinco esquinas). After presenting further works in Panorama and Competition, including Lost Embrace (El abrazo partido) which won two Silver Bears in 2004, Burman is to return with a portrait of multi-layered life in Once, the Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires.

Another Argentinian film in the Panorama is Maximiliano Schonfeld’s The Black Frost (La helada negra). In his second film, Schonfeld uses elegiac images to explore a world disconnected from time, where ancestors...

Personally I think Paolo Sorrentino is too young to be ruminating on age. But to listen to Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine as they face the hurdles of growing old is a treat. And in the end, this is a film about youth, not old age.

In the 1980s producers Hisami Kuroiwa and Peter Newman created the two hit films “Smoke” and “Blue in the Face” in which Harvey Keitel played a younger version of himself while living in Brooklyn in a working class neighborhood. Now in “ Youth”, he is a director of some note, planning his next production to star the great “Brenda” (Jane Fonda) while holing up with his crew in an A level sanitorium (spa) somewhere in the Swiss Alps. La Fonda is superb as a brassy, vulgar star who in her sneering way causes Harvey to lose hope in the future. Future is an attribute of Youth.

While memory shows the past forgotten and far away, it is the future that looks so close and that keeps us young. Harvey Keitel demonstrates this to his crew by having them look though the different ends of a telescope. The demonstration of the different views captures the essence of this film as it looks out upon the beautiful clean mountain nature of the Swiss Alps.

Michael Caine, a retired composer and conductor, and his daughter played by Rachel Weisz, are superb as only a father and daughter of their high caliber could be. While Caine refuses to appear before the Queen to conduct his simple tunes created and sung only by his deceased wife, he is able to conduct nature and its noises divinely and is able to reconstruct a future for himself and his daughter.

This Pathe-sold, Pathe coproduction between Italy, France , Great Britain and Switzerland, looks like the sequel to “A Great Beauty” and like most sequels, it falls short of its model. Part Fellini and party Thomas Mann (Magic Mountain) the visuals and the music almost exceed the film itself. However, the cast holds the entity together and like life on Magic Mountain, the audience must allow itself to sink into the posh comfort while dealing with the distinct discomforts of life’s aging processes.

In the press conference, a large dias with Paulo Sorrentino, Paul Dano

Harvey Keitel, Michael Caine, Rachel Weisz and Jane Fonda, in a smallish press room spoke of what made them work on this film; what past roles they, like the actor in the film, could not shake off; their thoughts on aging, how it is to work in Hollywood with Hollywood mores.

Watch the press conference here:

http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/mediaPlayer/15329.html

Jane said, “This film is not a satire on Hollywood, it is very true to life. The relationship between the actress Brenda, and her producer-director is very true to life, ‘a la Sorrentino’, that is, somewhat surreal.”

Michael Caine’s response to the question of working in Hollywood and the relationships among actors, directors and producers was that “Making movies is the same everywhere, only [in Hollywood] you get more money for it.”

It has been 49 years since Michael Caine was in Cannes. “Alfie” 50 years ago won in Cannes, but he did not, and so he never came back. This time however he loves the film so much that he would go with it anywhere for free. “If any of us gests an award we all [the cast] should get awards.”

Someone asked Sorrentino about his choice of the Norwegian group. He looked a bit confused and said he did not choose them. His music supervisor and composer, David Lang did it all.

His Dp, Luca Bigazzi, and he have been friends for a very long time and Sorrentino’s own vision and the Dp’s are very close to the same. It is the visuals which are always most outstanding in his films and within such a framework, the characters he studies are rigorously tested by the high level of circumstances in which they must perform. This is literal for the actors as well as for the characters who find themselves in the top, almost god-like position.

When asked, “Have any roles stuck to them longer perhaps than they would like?”

· La Fonda immediately spoke up naming “Barbarella” which has stuck to her and said she, she is conflicted by it.

Harvey answered “no”. · Rachel said “The Mummy”. “I don’t regret it at all, but young people are always saying, ‘Oh you’re from ‘The Mummy’. I like it.”

· Michael Caine said “Alfie” and commented on Alfie being a womanizer whereas he has been married to the same woman for 46 years.

Why is Sorrentino so interested in the passage of time?

“This is the only thing that interests people”, he said, “me at least. The theme fascinates me. I am passionately interested in the future which gives us freedom. The future gives us the feeling of youth. Optimistically, it dispels our fears.”

The question arose about how Sorrentino got such a wonderful ensemble:

Harvey: “Everyone of us has personal reasons for working in this film. We all have feelings about time.”

Paul Dano: “For me, it comes from the writing. I pore over it and figure out how we’ll do what we do. Paulo’s writing is wonderful.”

Rachel agrees with both but for her it’s all about the director, unifed in turn by a piece of music. How a director directs gives a point of view. If another director directed this movie, it would be an entirely different movie.

Michael Caine, who already cited the fact that both he and Harvey Keitel were soldiers though at different times, but that they share a soldierly bond in their long-time friendship, again cited being a soldier, going into an extremely dangerous situation in which you try to keep everyone alive. This was his experience with “Youth”.

Paolo added that “Music and cinema are two forms of art, two forms of beauty that will never disappear and is constantly changing”

On aging:

Jane spoke of her obvious make up in her scene, showing her vulnerability to aging.

Michael Caine spoke of showing his aging body.

Jane answered, “Yes one is vulnerable playing an old woman putting up the mask of makeup. When she removes it (and the wig) she becomes very vulnerable and that is fun to play.”

How does Jane Fonda define youth?

“Age is very much a question of attitude. If you have passion in your life, you are young. You remain young and vital in mind when you have passion in your life. I do and the film does.”...

New films by Dietrich Brüggemann, Alex Ranisch and Philip Koch are to be judged by Munich Film Festival’s first ever Fipresci jury in its New German Cinema sidebar at this year’s forthcoming edition (June 25 - July 4).

Swiss film critic Beat Glur, Berlin-based, New Zealand-born Carmen Gray, and Israel’s Nachum Mochiach will choose their winner from 18 world premieres - 13 fiction feature films and five documentaries - including two titles which will then have their international premieres in Karlovy Vary: Brüggemann’s Heil, a politically incorrect satire on German neo-Nazis, and Kosovo-born Visar Morina’s feature debut Babai, which will be released in Germany by missingFilms .

The line-up also includes:

Özgur Yildirim’s dystopian sci-fi thriller Boy 7, starring David Kross and Emilia Schüle, based on the bestselling Dutch book by Mirjam Mous, to be distributed in Germany by Koch Media;

Florian Cossen and Elena von Saucken’s Canada-set black indie comedy Coconut Hero, which is being...

Blue in the Face: Amalric’s Simenon Adaptation an Exquisite Enigma

Though actor/director Mathieu Amalric’s last directorial effort, On Tour (2010), landed him a Best Director win at the Cannes Film Festival, it never received Us distribution. Thankfully, his latest effort, an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel The Blue Room, won’t be subjected to the same neglect, as it’s an elegantly staged exercise of what could have easily been a straightforward nourish tale of adultery and murder. Pared down to a regal running time of barely eighty minutes, Amalric’s film is cinema of sensation, a puzzle of subtlety detailed accents and various, deliberate textures. Swift and intoxicating, by the time its final implications have been announced, what’s left is a sense of paralytic comprehension, a goading motivation for a second viewing. It’s depiction of an adulterous affair is icy, complicated, isolating, but...

In the history of indie film, sequels haven’t been very common. If we exclude horror movies, that is. And now documentaries. There’s Clerks II, S. Darko, John Duigan’s Flirting, Wayne Wang’s Blue in the Face, Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? and I guess The Road Warrior (and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome). There tend to be weird circumstances and technicalities for a lot of them, too. One of the purest examples of an indie sequel is, of course, Before Midnight, which is even rarer for being a third part. It’s possibly the most beloved and critically acclaimed film of the year, and it could very well lead a new wave of follow ups to indie favorites and cult classics that aren’t necessarily easily banked genre flicks. Back in May we learned of another indie threequel in the works, Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle. The...

The music world lost a legend today with the death of Lou Reed. But the film world is mourning as well. Reed provided music for the soundtracks to many television shows and films, including "Berlin Alexanderplatz," "Natural Born Killers," "Velvet Goldmine," "High Fidelity," "Trainspotting," "Prozac Nation," "The Royal Tenenbaums," "Brick," "Juno" and many more. Reed also appeared in many films, including Wim Wenders' "Faraway, So Close!," Wayne Wang's "Blue in the Face" and Paul Auster's "Lulu On The Bridge." Reed had his directorial debut in 2010 with the short film, "Red Shirley" co-directed by Ralph Gibson. The film is a portrait of Shirley Novick, a 99-year-old woman who lived through the Wwi and fled Poland for Canada during WWII. She eventually illegally immigrated to the U.S. where she worked in a textile factory. She engaged in union struggles and participated in the Civil Rights March on Washington,...

Even though his impact in front of the camera was rarely felt, the music and mood of Lou Reed has had a staggering influence on film soundtracks through the years. So it’s with heavy hearts that we report the rock pioneer has died at the age of 71.Born in Brooklyn in 1942, he got into song writing early, kicking off his career after university working at novelty records label Pickwick. After befriending John Cale, he formed a band called the Primitives, which would mutate into the Warlocks and then the incredibly influential Velvet Underground, with whom he would have some of his earliest hits.Reed split from the band in 1970 and struck out on his own as a solo singer, producing such memorable albums as Transformer, Berlin and Metal Machine Music.Film-wise, he’s cropped up in movies such as 1980’s One Trick Pony (written by and starring) Paul Simon,...

New York — Thanks to the printed word and the moving image, Salman Rushdie has recaptured the worst part of his life and relived one of the best.

Last fall, the 65-year-old author published the best-selling memoir "Joseph Anton" about his years in hiding that followed the 1988 publication of "The Satanic Verses" and the call for his death by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Rushdie is now promoting the film adaptation of his breakthrough novel, "Midnight's Children," winner of the Booker Prize in 1981 and one of the most highly praised works of fiction of its time.

"It was cathartic to write `Joseph Anton,'" Rushdie explained during a recent interview, wearing a gray suit and no tie, sipping coffee at a hotel rooftop garden in midtown Manhattan. "And `Midnight's Children' was the book where I really became a writer."

Much of the world only learned about Rushdie after "Satanic Verses," which was...

To my friends and readers: We are about to conclude the Jewish High Holidays which began 10 days ago with Rosh Hashanah and ends tomorrow with Yom Kippur. In the spirit of this season, I must ask everyone, if I have offended any of you, whether knowingly or unknowingly, I ask your forgiveness. If I have not published articles I promised you I would, please forgive me. I meant to when I said I would but have so many other commitments and things I must do. I am sure that the article is not forgotten and I may get to it in the coming year. But I ask forgiveness for overreaching and for commitments and promises I have not kept.

By the way this free ranging stream of consciousness blog will go, it could also be called Jews in the News, the “News” being New Years and New York, and of course films. Imagining this as a new feature, and because it might only run once a year, I am going to use it here as a platform to mention everyone on my mind as they come up as a sort of New Year’s wrap up of things left undone.

To begin, I am writing about all the people and things I saw and did in New York and, again, I hope friends I don’t mention will forgive me. Like Lynda Hansen whom I did see at New York Film Society's Walter Reade Theater…or Wanda Bershan whom I saw across the room at a press screening or Gary Crowdes the editor-in-chief of Cineaste Magazine and whom I meant to greet but didn’t. I saw so many old New York friends and acquaintances and because it was New Years and a time of reflection, I revisited what were my circumstances when I left it in 1985 to return to L.A.

When I first moved to New York in 1980 to work for ABC Video Enterprises, I had spent 5 years practicing Orthodox Judaism. Being in New York represented the apotheosis of all things Jewish (outside of Israel, whose films and festivals will be the subject of another blog - excuse me Katriel Schory of the Israeli Film Fund and Alesia Weston the new director of the Jerusalem Film Festival). In New York, even those who were not Jewish by religion seemed Jewish to me by virtue of living in New York. When I realized this, my own Orthdoxy fell away from me as if I were shedding a cloak. I understood that my Jewish self was Jewish no matter what life style I would live. And I liked the New York life style most of all.

After Tiff 12 (Toronto International Film Festival 2012), Peter and I came for a week of relaxation to New York City. What a city! So New York, in-your-face, loud, crowded, lots of horns honking, and people: People. The best. We saw our friends, we saw New York with New Eyes.

We arrived by train from the airport, straight to our apartment! What great rapid transit, even if it is old and ugly, so blackened by dirt and age. I noticed new decorations on some walls of some stations, some works were better than others. I wish we had such a quick easy way to zoom around our fair city of L.A.

We stayed in an apartment in Chelsea – that of our daughter’s mother-in-law who lives half the year in the apartments built by the Amalgamated Ladies Garment Union. (The other half she spends in Truro.) Such history! Coincidently these are the very apartments I had wanted to live in when I was leaving NYC in 1985.

We were invited to a screening by Hisami Kuroiwa, whose friendship goes back to our early days in Cannes, or back to the days she produced Smoke and Blue in the Face with my other old friend Peter Newman. Araf (Venice Ff, Tokyo Ff, Isa: The Match Factory), which she associate produced, will be presented at the New York Film Festival (NYFF50), September 28 – October 14. The press screening at the new Walter Reade Theater was a great treat. The film’s director, Yesim Ustaoglu, ♀, who also directed Journey to the Sun and Pandora’s Box spoke via Skype at the press Q&A afterward.

Araf in Turkish means “somewhere in between”. The Somewhere in Between in the film is a 24-hour restaurant halfway between Ankara and Istanbul. The young girl whose first job it is; her friend – an “older” woman, not much older than herself who becomes her guide to adulthood; the girl’s childhood friend who works there as a teaboy and whose mother is not much older than the other two women and a truck driver who comes through en route, are the protagonists in this piece which brings to life a very distant place where the people’s most intimate issues are very much like our own to the degree that all the women share the same life issues of sex, love, work and family today in a world where traditions are giving way to the exigencies of modern life.

The issues are so much the same as what we are facing today, namely, our own bodies and all that entails. Parenthetically, these are the same issues in The Patience Stone (Isa: Le Pacte), which takes my prize for the Best Female Film at Tiff 12.

Both of these films deeply affected me in my own ways. When I say “affected”, what I mean is that some thought comes into my head which seems unrelated to the film but comes so suddenly and vividly to me and illuminates some part of my life. When this happens to me during a film, I know the film is really good because it is affecting a subconscious part of me and of something of concern to me. A thought comes to me which makes my life come together in a new way and I sometimes feel transformed by the experience. This is my criteria for what makes a good film. Of course story, script, direction, cast, music, costume and art decoration also count, but in the end, it is the emotional impact a film has upon me as a passive viewer which makes it a winning film for me. The same pertains to me for all art, whether painting, architecture (Wow factor here for NYC on the architecture front!) , sculpture, music, dancing, etc.

We were given a week’s guest pass to The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers by Alan Adelson whose documentary about James Joyce's hero, Leo Bloom in Ulysses, In Bed with Ulysses, is an exciting new film which I hope to see in the upcoming festival circuit. At the dinner, prepared and served by Alan and his wife Katie Taverna, an editor, who also has a new documentary about to surface, I was astounded by their home - so New York. Only in New York could someone live in Tribeca’s 19th century warehouse district in such an architecturally unique home amid such astounding works of art. Docu filmmaker, Deborah Schaffer and her late dear husband, the N.Y. architecht, Larry Bagdanow, introduced us to Alan several years ago. He also publishes Jewish Heritage Press, and he gave me a beautiful book entitled, The Last Bright Days: A Young Woman’s life in a Lithuanian Shtetl on the Eve of the Holocaust . Beile Delechy who, along with her brother, were the photographers for a small town called Kararsk in Lithuania, brought her photographs with her when she left Europe for the U.S. in 1938. They show the everyday reality for Jews and Lithuanians during the 1930s. Published by Jewish Heritage and Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, this book embodies my own aspirations. If I could have my books on my family published in such a way as this, I would die happy.

Speaking of Lithuania and this blog, being Jews in the News, must also cover some other Eastern European news because like New York, its innate character still seems Jewish, even though there are very few Jews there. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in the subject however, among the third generation since the Shoah.

Kaunas International Film Festival’s Tomas Tangmark, who heads distribution for the festival, is also a filmmaker whom I met at Wroclaw’s American Film Festival last November. By now his 12 minute short films should have wrapped. In Cannes, when we met again, he showed me his financial plan for “Breshter Bund – A Union Forever” which has received Development Support from the Swedish Film Institute and money from Swedish TV, has a production budget of around €25,000. It is about the workers at the Vindsberg factory in Vilkaviskis, Lithuania in 1896. Influenced by the current events in the world, the workers at the factory organize a strike. Their demand is a 10-hour working day. Whether they win, or lose, the outcome could change The Russian Empire. It was to shoot on location in Vilkaviskis, Lithuania in Yiddish this year.

This 12 minute short is only 1 of the 2 Yiddish language films we have heard about. Peter also heard about a feature which will be entirely in Yiddish. Thank you Coen Brothers whose A Serious Man opened the way!

When I was in Cannes this past year, I heard about Jewish Alley (Judengasse) at The Short Film Corner. Unfortunately Blancke Degenhardt Schuetz Film Produktion GmbH did not include any contact information on the brochure I picked up. Judengassse tells of the ordeal that the Jewish family Blumenfeld undergoes from 1933 to 1938. It is shot in B&W from a single camera position and presents the Holocaust and thoughts for the coexistence of different cultures in our modern society.

Also in Cannes I was so sorry to miss Raphael Berdugo’s second film since he left his company, Roissy Films, in the hands of EuropaCorp in 2008. The Other Son (Le fils de l’Autre) (Isa: La Cite, U.S.: Cohen Media Group) directed by Lorraine Levy ♀ about a man preparing to join the Israeli army who discovers he is not his parents’ biological son. In fact, he was inadvertently switched at birth with the son of a Palestinian family from the West Bank.

Returning to the subject of Eastern Europe in Cannes, Odessa comes to mind. Odessa cinema tradition began in 1894, a year and a half before the Lumiere brothers showed on the Boulevard des Capucines and its first studio opened in 1907. Serge Eisenstein made Odessa legend. On the very place where Battleship Potemkin was filmed, the Odessa Film Festival holds an open-air screening for 12,000 with a view of the sea. During their first year, there were 30,000 attendees. By year three, there were 100,000. It takes place in an opera house on a level of that in Vienna, but their emperor did not pay as in Austria; the people themselves paid for the building. There are $15,000 cash prizes giving for Best Film, Best, Director, and Best Actor. Tomboy won last year. It has a small market for Russian and Ukrainian films, a pitch session and a “summer school” where the students live in tents at attend master classes and a sort of Talent Campus. There is good food by the sea! Don’t you want to attend? I’m hoping to find a way to go, especially after Ilya Dyadik, the program director, so graciously showed me all that goes on there and introduced me to Denis Maslikov, the Managing Director of the Ukrainian Producers Association. It takes place in July.

Estonia is another country on my mind. During Tiff A Lady in Paris (Isa: Pyramide) warmed my soul. Starring Jeanne Moreau, and costarring Laine MÄGI, an actress who reminds me of Katie Outinen, (Kaurimaki's favorite actress) the film was about women and love and oh so French! How could you not love the imperious Jeanne Moreau wearing Chanel and being won over by an Eastern European drudge who, under Moreau’s tutelage transforms herself in a vividly chic woman. And ,Patrick Pineau, who plays the owner of of those upscale cafes you like to have lunch in when in Paris, only needs to take one small step toward Laine, and oh la la, you too fall in love with him!

Edith Sepp, the film advisor for the Estonian Ministry of Culture, met us originally at the Vilnius Film Festival in Lithuania and we had a lot of fun hanging out there. We already had a connection to Estonia because the Estonian American documentary The Singing Revolution was our client’s film. We introduced our client to Richard Abramowitz in 2006 who did extraordinarily well with the film’s theatrical release. Edith invited us to their Cannes reception at Plage des Palmes and we continued our conversation. At Tiff 12 and Karlovy Vary, their film Mushrooming screened, but the one I am really eager to see is In the Crosswind. It shot through four seasons. The director is a 23 year old young man and this is his first film. It cost 700,000 Euros which went into historical costumes, extras and a new technology he is creating to make a profound drama about the relocation of whole populations by the Soviets, a theme which has shaped European history. I hope to see it in Berlin…or Cannes…or Venice.. The film is a sort of documentary story, somewhat similar to Waltz with Bashir, but it is old in live action and with still photography. During Cannes, they were seeking 200,000 Euros to complete the film. There is much to say about both of the Eastern European countries with their new generation of articulate and talented filmmakers. I hope they will be the subject of another blog or two in the coming year.

One last note on Eastern European films. A veteran Czech producer, Rudolf Biermann whom we know since the early days of Karlovy Vary's freedom from the Soviet bloc, is still producing young, fresh comedies like the one one that showed at Tiff 12, The Holy Quaternity by Jan Hrebejk (Isa: Montecristo). This romp brings marital sex which has become boring to a new and simple solution between two couples who have been best friends throughout their marriage. It's risque and sweet and plays with two generations' differing views on the sex games we play for fun.

But I have digressed from New York...And now I must go to Yom Kippur services for the rest of today. This blog will be continued tomorrow!! Watch for Part II which will be about New York!

Novelist Paul Auster has seen his work on screen through a variety of processes: The Music of Chance adapts his novel of the same name (not very well); Smoke and Blue in the Face are the product of a collaborative writing/directing process with Wayne Wang, and Mr. Wang also filmed The Center of the World, on which Mr. Auster was a story collaborator. So: several films, but few direct novel adaptations. That could be in part due to the fact that his books aren't quite straight fiction, but rather a blend of genre tropes, existential curiosity and magical realism. Not the easiest adaptations. Those elements also make up a good part of the ingredient list for Terry Gilliam's scripts, however, and so it makes sense that he is now writing a script based on Mr. Auster's novel Mr. Vertigo. Terry Gilliam recently said at Q&A session, I got a book.

Director Wayne Wang has never been a director that could be easily pigeonholed. He broke through with a trifecta of critical and arthouse faves with “The Joy Luck Club,” “Smoke” and “Blue In the Face,” but he’s also tackled more mainstream fare (”Maid In Manhattan,” “Last Holiday”) while still taking chances on ambitious independent pics (”The Center of the World”). So it's no surprise that his next effort, "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," is another gear change for the director, a detailed period piece based on the novel by Lisa See that explores the relationship between two girls in…...

Good morning to you on this very special day! No, not Gavin McLoed's [sic] 80th birthday, though that deserves recognition, I can't lie. But! Lou Reed was born 69 years ago today in Brooklyn, NY -- a location that would become the partial subject of his fantastic appearance in the 1995 ensemble-improv weird-out Blue in the Face. Let's reminisce and pay some much-deserved respect below.

Wayne Wang's career has certainly been eclectic. He broke through with a trifecta of critical and arthouse faves with "The Joy Luck Club," "Smoke" and "Blue In The Face" but he's also taken big swings into broad mainstream fare ("Maid In Manhattan," "Last Holiday") while still taking chances on ambitious independent pics ("The Center Of The World"). And the ever restless Wang is now switching things up again. Deadline reveals that Wang will next direct a biopic of famed theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Working under the tentative title of "Einstein," the film has a script from Academy Award winner Ron…...

Hugh Jackman will join Wayne Wang's "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," an English-language adaptation of Lisa See's novel. South Korea's Jeon Ji-Hyunand and Chinese actor Li Bingbing also star. The story concerns a love between two women and the rigid codes that govern their friendship in 19th century China. Wendi Murdoch and Florence Sloan produce. Filming starts this week in Hengdian studios in Zhejiang province Zhang Ziyi was originally set to star but left the project. Wang's other credits include "Blue in the Face" and "Smoke."...

Hugh Jackman will join Wayne Wang's "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," an English-language adaptation of Lisa See's novel. South Korea's Jeon Ji-Hyunand and Chinese actor Li Bingbing also star. The story concerns a love between two women and the rigid codes that govern their friendship in 19th century China. Wendi Murdoch and Florence Sloan produce. Filming starts this week in Hengdian studios in Zhejiang province Zhang Ziyi was originally set to star but left the project. Wang's other credits include "Blue in the Face" and "Smoke."...

Coming Soon, who clearly keep an eye on the Oriental Morning Post, are reporting that Hugh Jackman has signed on to join Wayne Wang's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. The film was set to co-star Zhang Ziyi, but she's now reportedly been replaced by The Forbidden Kingdom's Li Bingbing.The film is based on a novel by Lisa See, centring on the old Chinese tradition of laotongs, or "old sames": girls who are paired together as lifelong friends at an early age. The nineteenth-century saga follows Snow Flower and Lily through years of famine, political unrest and the Taiping revolution, arranged marriages and footbinding, until the dire consequences of a terrible betrayal.Wayne Wang will forever be cool for his 1990s Paul Auster collaborations Smoke and Blue in the Face although our faith was slightly shaken when he brought us Maid in Manhattan. It's not yet...

Toronto International Film Festival

TORONTO -- Like his new A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska centers on a Chinese character recently arrived on American soil. This time, it's a very young woman carrying a baby she isn't ready for.

Princess doesn't dovetail with Prayers the way Wang's pair of 1995 releases, Smoke and Blue in the Face, did, even though they share some general cultural ingredients. If each of these new titles appeals to a limited audience, the number of viewers who will appreciate both is smaller still. In the case of Princess, the tight narrative focus it shares with Prayers is colored by a bleaker outlook and edgier visual style, placing it squarely in the art house arena.

Sasha, a fairly unsympathetic girl, is from Beijing by way of Omaha. She has flown to San Francisco to meet a Westerner, Boshen, who isn't her child's father but is involved in some way we don't initially understand. We're not even certain what it is he's about to help her do -- Arrange an abortion? Make plans to sell the child or find adoptive parents? -- but we know they aren't especially fond of each other.

Boshen is more solicitous, though, than she is of him. He invites her to a dinner party, where Sasha alienates a bunch of upper-class Chinese-Americans and rifles through their purses when nobody's looking. (Later, she'll casually steal a family's shopping bag in a mall food court.) Bored, she sets out on her own to Chinatown, where an ugly night awaits.

Shot in a much more seat-of-the-pants style than Prayers, the film is as casual about framing as Sasha is about manners. Its colors tend toward the lurid or fluorescent, and its perspective sometimes shifts so that we see action through the viewfinder of Sasha's cell-phone camera. The style suits her night-time adventure, as she meets the tough-girl "X," who may be a prostitute and is definitely unsavory, and proceeds to get drunk in places she has no business being.

The source of Sasha's problems is revealed much as the troubles are in Prayers -- at the end of some fruitless wandering, to be followed by an ambiguous resolution. Here, the outlook is bleaker, stranding the expectant mother in the center of a very empty frame. Moving on, we're told in the film, is a very American idea -- viewers are left to guess whether Sasha can put anything behind her or will be carrying her mistakes for a very long time.

THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA

No Distributor

California Asian American Media

Credits:

Director: Wayne Wang

Co-director: Richard Wong

Writer: Michael Ray

Based on the short story by Yiyun Li

Producers: Yukie Kito, Donald Young

Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Stephen Gong

Director of photography: Richard Wong

Production designer: Amy Chan

Music: Kent Sparling

Editor: Deirdre Slevin

Cast:

Sasha: Ling Li

Boshen: Brian Danforth

X: Pamelyn Chee

Running time -- 77 minutes

No MPAA rating...

NEW YORK -- Novelist-turned-director Paul Auster's fantasy The Inner Life of Martin Frost and Argentinean director Alexis Dos Santos' coming-of-age feature Glue will open the 36th annual New Directors/New Films festival, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art's film department and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

The 26-feature lineup for the fest, which runs March 21-April 1, also includes recent Sundance Film Festival prizewinners from directors John Carney (Once) and Christopher Zalla (Padre Nuestro).

Other recent Sundance entries set to be screened at the festival are Andrea Arnold's Scottish thriller Red Road, Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine's Ugandan conflict documentary War/Dance and Craig Zobel's music biz scam exam The Great World of Sound.

Frost, based on a character in Auster's 2002 novel The Book of Illusions, stars David Thewlis as a writer haunted by bizarre characters who appear during his much-needed vacation at a country house. Irene Jacob, Michael Imperioli and Sophie Auster co-star.

Paul Auster is a slightly odd choice for a fest showcasing "new or emerging international directors" given that he helmed 1998's Lulu on the Bridge and co-directed 1995's Blue in the Face with Wayne Wang.

Hollywood producers Bob Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein are auctioning off thousands of props and wardrobe items from their most famous movies to raise money for charity. The online auctions begin on Friday and will feature the dress Renee Zellweger wore in Chicago's "All That Jazz" number, an outfit Madonna wore while delivering a singing telegram in Blue In The Face and Halloween killer Michael Myers' mask from Halloween H20. Also on the block will be movie memorabilia from Shakespeare In Love, The Cider House Rules, Spy Kids, Frida and Chocolat. The items will be listed on online auction sites eBay.com and PremiereProps.com and proceeds will benefit the Weinstein's Max Family Foundation and the Entertainment Industry Foundation.