Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, Jane Campion has her classic The Piano joining the Criterion Collection, in 4K no less. This week’s slate also includes another high quality Criterion title in Dick Johnson is Dead (we interviewed filmmaker Kirsten Johnson here), as well as, well…not too much else. Read on for more…
The Piano (Criterion 4K)
From The Criterion Collection: “With this sublimely stirring fable of desire and creativity, Jane Campionbecame the first woman to win a Palme d’Or at Cannes. Holly Hunter is achingly eloquent through silence in her Academy Award–winning performance as Ada, an electively mute Scottish woman who expresses her innermost feelings through her beloved piano. When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter (Anna Paquin, in her Oscar-winning debut) to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband (Sam Neill) and a rugged frontiersman (Harvey Keitel) to whom she develops a forbidden attraction. With its sensuously moody cinematography, dramatic coastal landscapes, and sweeping score, this uniquely timeless evocation of a woman’s awakening is an intoxicating sensory experience that burns with the twin fires of music and erotic passion.”
American Rust (TV)
Gomorrah: The Series, Season Three (TV)
Dick Johnson is Dead
From The Criterion Collection: “This playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by Kirsten Johnson is a valentine to the director’s beloved father, Dick Johnson, made as she is beginning to face the reality of losing him to dementia. Using the language of cinema both to defy death and to confront it head-on, Johnson mischievously envisions an array of ways in which the man she loves most in the world might die, staging a series of alternately darkly comic and colorfully imaginative tableaux interwoven with raw vérité footage capturing the pair’s tender but increasingly fragile bond. Tackling taboo questions of aging, mortality, and grief with subversive humor and surprising grace, Dick Johnson Is Dead is ultimately a triumphant celebration of life, and of the gentle, funny, unforgettable man at its center. Long live Dick Johnson.”
*The Piano hits Criterion too, as a reminder from above*
Stay tuned for more next week…
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