Results tagged “outofframe”

Séraphine Louis (1864-1942, dite Séraphine de Senlis), the subject of the recent film Séraphine, is not exactly an unknown painter. Her work is found in only a few museums now, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Les Pommes and Tree of Paradise). She was a naive painter, an ultimately unsatisfactory but unavoidable term indicating that although she was untrained, she painted as a sort of compulsion, what now is sometimes called visionary art. Director and screenwriter Martin Provost drew most of the material for his film from the work of Françoise Cloarec, who has also just published a version of her thesis on the painter with Editions Phébus. Provost has come out of practically nowhere as a director, his last film Le ventre de Juliette having won a prize at the 2003 Avignon Festival, to come close to a clean sweep of this year's César Awards, the French Oscars, with this beautifully crafted movie.

As demonstrated by so many remakes, often it is best to let a film remain in its genre or language of origin. Blood: The Last Vampire was apparently a pretty good, if somewhat short, manga film about a human-vampire half-breed who turns against her evil kind while working for a secret agency. Action flick director Chris Nahon, who made Kiss of the Dragon with Jet Li and the marginally better L'empire des loups, could not leave well enough alone and has made it into a live-action film. (Nahon reportedly replaced Hong Kong-born director Ronny Yu when the French independent studio Pathé took responsibility for co-production.) Screenwriter Chris Chow, who has also worked as an assistant cameraman, helped adapt the anime storyline created by Kenji Kamiyama from the comic book characters of Katsuya Terada. Manga fans will surely enjoy seeing a cult favorite come to life, as will anyone who has ever wondered if a film could satisfy an Asian school-uniform fetish and a love of martial arts violence at the same time. Everyone else, even those like me obsessed with vampire flicks, is advised to wait for DVD.