Latest news with #CoolidgeCorner
Boston Globe
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Francis Ford Coppola stopped by the Coolidge Corner Theatre for a screening, an award, and a conversation about life
After a sold-out screening of the film on Monday at the Coolidge Corner, Coppola himself took the stage. Coolidge CEO Katherine Tallman presented him with a special edition of the Coolidge Award, the honor the theater has periodically bestowed on film artists of notable originality since 2004. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The rest of the event was intended as a conversation between Coppola and the Boston College professor Advertisement The celebrated director of the 'Godfather' trilogy, the Vietnam fever dream 'Apocalypse Now' (1979), and the surveillance thriller 'The Conversation' (1974) had requested a white board, on which he instructed an assistant to list 10 elements of human life that, he suggested, need wholesale reform, including work, money, education, politics, and the law. Advertisement Dressed in a safari jacket, a tie, and boat shoes, the 86-year-old filmmaker launched into a spontaneous lecture about human enterprise and ingenuity. He peppered his commentary with references to books he's read on the history of civilization. 'It's time to talk about the future in this wreck of a world we're in now,' he said. Career politicians, he proposed, should be replaced by citizen caretakers with short terms – a new mayor every two months, say. We should abolish money and let the robots do the manual labor, he went on, while human beings create things for each other. The Boston-based composer To demonstrate, Coppola invited a group of young audience members onstage to participate in the improv exercises he often uses on his movie sets. He formed a circle with the group, then instructed them to toss around an imaginary ball while adding sound effects: 'Bip!' 'Pow!' His spontaneous work with actors often helps determine the stories he tells, he explained. 'When you make a movie you don't know how to make, something wonderful happens,' he said: The movie tells you what it should be. 'Megalopolis,' with its abundant allusions to the classic films that inspired Coppola, was one of those films. 'Every movie I ever loved since I was a kid, I tried to put in this movie,' he said. Advertisement A few audience members asked questions. One wanted to know why the populist politician Clodio Pulcher (played by Shia LaBeouf) was treated with such scorn in the film. 'What's so bad about populism?' the man asked. Coppola's reply was simple. 'I love people, and I want them to be happy,' he said. 'We should all have ice cream. 'I like populism when it doesn't hurt other people.' A little after 11 p.m., Coppola received a warning that he should wrap up his talk. He seemed prepared to talk until morning. 'I can stop time,' he joked. The last dimension of social life listed on Coppola's white board was 'celebration.' Famous not just for his movies but for his wineries, his San Francisco cafe, and his all-consuming love of art and ideas, Coppola had one last thought for the dwindling crowd. 'I wish we could just throw a party now,' he said. James Sullivan can be reached at .
Boston Globe
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Frederick Wiseman, superstar
'That's amazing,' said Wiseman when informed of Google's description. 'Not that I don't think my films are funny. There are some sad, funny sequences in that one.' 'Hospital' is one of nearly two dozen highlights from Wiseman's colossal filmography that will be screened over the next two months at a consortium of venues, including the Brattle, Somerville, and Coolidge Corner theaters and the Museum of Fine Arts. The retrospective kicks off Saturday, March 1, with a rare screening at the MFA of Wiseman's feature-length debut, 'Titicut Follies' (1968), a disturbing glimpse inside the old Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, which helped spark a national debate about healthcare reform. Screenings of the film in Massachusetts were banned until 1991. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Since then, the Cambridge-based filmmaker has completed more than 40 observational films, averaging a new one every year and a half. From his early focus on institutional settings ('High School,' 1968; 'Basic Training,' 1971; 'Welfare,' 1975), Wiseman has expanded both his scope of interest ('Aspen,' 1991; 'La Comédie-Française ou l'Amour joué,' 1996) and the length of his films. 'At Berkeley' (2013) and 'City Hall,' his 2020 opus on Boston's city government under the Walsh administration, are two of several that clock in at more than four hours. Advertisement "City Hall." Courtesy of Zipporah Films, Inc. Wiseman, who was born in Boston in 1930, released his last film in 2023, and he's not sure he'll make another. Reached by phone at his second home, in Paris, he explained that he's been fighting a cold. 'Doing one of these films requires a lot of energy, and at the moment I don't have a lot,' he said. 'I'd like to go on forever, but I have to recognize that I'm 95.' 'I feel like he has one of the most important filmographies, in documentary and indeed in filmmaking in general,' said Ned Hinkle, the Brattle's creative director. 'He's so expert at painting a portrait of a place and a time. Advertisement 'I know Fred doesn't like to think of these movies as the 'truth' of a situation. It seems like a real fly-on-the-wall thing, but he admits that camera placement, editing, all these things come with some kind of bias. In the editing process, he tries to find a truth.' In an essay about Wiseman's work, his friend and fellow filmmaker Errol Morris once wrote that Wiseman's films — all those scenes of bureaucrats and educators and attendants — excel at 'showing a disconnection between what people think they are doing and what they are doing. Irony abounds in Wiseman's films. No one, absolutely no one, really knows what he is doing.' "National Gallery." Zipporah Films In conversation, Wiseman disagrees, as he often does. 'I don't think Errol really believes that,' he said. 'I have a theory about what I'm doing. You don't make the films by throwing the rushes [raw footage] down the stairs and splicing them together in the order they fall.' When it comes to the people in front of his camera, however, he concedes the point. 'If you're talking about what people do in their daily lives, absolutely. In many situations, we have no idea the effect we're creating by what we're doing.' The subjects of Wiseman's films are typically institutions of some sort — a boxing gym in Austin, Texas; a public housing complex in Chicago; London's National Gallery. Wiseman said he finds the second Trump administration's recent purge of many of America's institutions 'extremely depressing.' 'I think they don't know what they're doing,' he said. 'Trump is a man who has no education, no experience. It's cliche to say, but he's a classic narcissist.' Advertisement The impact of the administration's drastic cuts to institutional staffing and budgets will affect the sort of people Wiseman has been watching in his films for 60 years, he said, 'both the workers and the clients. And they have no awareness of how destructive their policies are.' "Hospital." His films — he prefers that term to 'documentaries' — feature no talking heads, no voice-over narrative, no sense that there is a director behind the camera. As unassuming as his technique, Wiseman speaks plainly about the legacy his films will leave. 'I hope that people continue to watch them,' he said. 'I think there might be, in 50 years, somebody who wants to know something about the institutions that existed during the time that I lived, and they'll be able to look at a police department or a high school. 'People a hundred years ago couldn't have done that. People a hundred years from now will be able to do that, assuming the world still exists.' The Boston retrospective follows a similar program that ran earlier this year at New York's Lincoln Center. Hinkle said the collaboration among the city's theaters has reached a level he has not experienced in his years at the Brattle. 'I'm hesitant to use the word 'unprecedented,' but I think this is verging on that.' The reason is simple: Wiseman, he said, is one of a kind. There are talks underway to schedule local screenings of even more Wiseman films later this year, Hinkle said, perhaps with more venues involved. Wiseman and his team have restored 33 of his films in Ultra HD. To the filmmaker, they're all of a piece. 'I don't have any list of favorites in my head,' he said. 'Strangely enough, I like them all.' Advertisement For more information go to James Sullivan can be reached at .
