Monday Reads

Obituary:  Overrated director Bernardo Bertolucci, 77, has died after a battle with cancer.

Critics fell all over themselves when Bertolucci came out with Last Tango in Paris, a 1972 film, which starred Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.  I never saw it and never want to see it.  I read how Maria Schneider was treated by Bertolucci, and it is clear he was nothing short of a creep.  He almost ruined her life with that movie:

Bertolucci's movies also bore the imprint of the director's own experiences in psychoanalysis. He always said that making films was his way of communicating with the audience.

'Maybe I'm an idealist, but I still think of the movie theater as a cathedral where we all go together to dream the dream together,' he said upon receiving an award from the Director's Guild of America for The Last Emperor.

That movie handed Bertolucci his greatest success. In 1988 it won all the nine Academy Awards that it had been nominated for - including best movie and best director.

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If you are curious over where children in the U.S. are most likely to be poor, there is a map which depicts it

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Obituary:  Another noted director Nicolas Roeg, 90, died the other day.

Nicolas Jack Roeg was born on Aug. 15, 1928, in London to Jack and Mabel (Silk) Roeg. He did not attend film school, instead entering the business at the bottom in 1947, making tea and operating the clapperboard at Marylebone Studios in London.

He worked his way up to camera operator and then cinematographer, receiving the director of photography credit on films like François Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit 451” and Richard Lester’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” both in 1966. He also shot Mr. Lester’s “Petulia” (1968), which featured the jump cuts and leaps in time that would be among Mr. Roeg’s signatures.

“Performance,” his first directing credit, was completed in the late 1960s but shelved because Warner Brothers had misgivings about it. Some critics savaged it when it was finally released, but its reputation grew over time. In 1999 it made the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 best British movies ever made, as did “Don’t Look Now.”

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I can't believe the U.S. brought back silicone implants after all the controversy they caused.  I don't know where I was when they were brought back in 2006.