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3 articles from 2009

15 March 2009 2:36 PM, PDT | Vanity Fair | See recent Vanity Fair news »

Sunday began with a funeral service. A service at Riverside Chapel for fashion designer, personality force, former neighbor, and friend Abbijane, whose fiftieth birthday party we had attended only last year. On Friday came the shocking news that Abbijane was in the Icu, felled by an aneurysm that had burst, leaving her brain dead; life support was being withdrawn at 5 pm. Abbijane had been plagued by headaches for a few days and went for an exam; an aneurysm was discovered, bursting when she was on the operating table and, like that, she was gone. The flyer for the upcoming show of her autumn collection had gone that very week. She died on Friday and the memorial service was organized for Sunday by her surviving sister and grieving friends, and the huge turnout despite the stunning circumstances and quick turnaround was a testament to the love, devotion, attachment, and electric affinities that Abbijane inspired and nursed. »

8 February 2009 10:50 AM, PST | FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news »

I always love the mid February edition of the NY Times Magazine. It tends to capture several Oscar nominees but spreads its net wider, too. One could say it's like a miniature version of Vanity Fair's traditional "Hollywood Issue". It then celebrates the handpicked field of glitterati with portraiture sessions. This year's man behind the lens is the award winning Italian photographer Paolo Pellegrin.

His subjects are almost entirely Oscary this year (shame. I liked the variety) with Kate Winslet as covergirl. Who else? She's in hair rollers for the cover but this photo above is my favorite still from her shoot. I love how bright-morning over lit she is and, it's so... red. The write up by author Tom Perotta (Little Children) is surprisingly interesting too in that, while very flattering, it's not entirely a puff piece. He expresses brief concerns about some career decisions and the way Winslet »

- NATHANIEL R

20 January 2009 6:42 AM, PST | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

By Michael Atkinson

Roberto Rossellini has never been the most accessible of cinema culture demigods -- his neo-realist trilogy seems more influential than timeless these days, and his Ingrid Bergman films often feel offhand and crude. In 1962, as critic Colin McCabe recounts in his essay for Criterion's release of "The Taking of Power by Louis Xiv" (1966), Rossellini renounced cinema per se, and promised he would from then on make only historical films for television. It's these films, in a string that lasted 13 years, that are the hardest to see and the most frustrating; the filmmaker's perspective grew more inhospitable and pedagogic the more he saw postwar culture slide into amnesiac self-indulgence. But, ironically, this irascibility resulted in a kind of stringency Rossellini never had before; "Louis Xiv" may be the least deliberately "passionate" film ever made by an Italian, perhaps partially because it is French.

There's no underselling the movie's »

- Michael Atkinson

3 articles from 2009