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      ‘Oscar Peterson: Black + White’ Review: Never Mind the Talking Heads

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      The flashing fingers of this jazz piano icon, and his mesmerizing tracks, are all the perspective we need.At one in point in “Oscar Peterson: Black + White,” Barry Avrich’s documentary about the Canadian jazz pianist, Billy Joel is raving about the speed of Peterson’s hands on the piano. “You’d try to watch what he was doing,” he explained, “but it’s a blur.”True enough, but completely redundant: We’re already watching Peterson’s hands flash across the keys, in the crisp archival concert footage Joel is talking over. The breathless praise adds nothing; in fact, it distracts from the pleasure of seeing a jazz great perform. As a recent viral tweet skewering this music-doc convention sarcastically pointed out, we don’t need a bunch of interviews with experts “to put the band in historical context.” Seeing Peterson play is more than enough.“Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance. The footage of Peterson at work is an infinitely better testament to that brilliance than words of admiration from artists he influenced. What’s more, the relevance of the interviewees varies wildly. Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock are understandable. But if, like me, you wonder why we’re hearing so much from Randy Lennox, a pretty nondescript corporate media executive, stay through the credits: he’s one of the film’s producers. If you don’t already believe Oscar Peterson was a genius, I doubt he’ll be the one to convince you.Oscar Peterson: Black + WhiteNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Watching This Movie Taught Me It Was OK to Fail

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      Gena Rowlands’s destabilizing brilliance in “Opening Night” turned out to be the reassurance I needed.One evening in May 2017, I saw the director John Cassavetes’s 1977 film, “Opening Night,” starring his wife and collaborator, Gena Rowlands, in the lead role. Rowlands plays Myrtle Gordon, a successful stage actor whose life is upended when she witnesses a young fan’s death in a traffic accident. It’s an intense film, with long stretches of mortification punctuated with grim humor, concluding in a scene of agonizing victory: So drunk she can barely stand, Myrtle arrives hours late to the first night of her new play, delivering a chaotic and heroic performance which unravels and reshapes the production. It’s a triumphantly unhappy happy ending, which I watched with a mixture of horror and glee.I was in grad school at Berkeley at the time, studying literature, subletting a room in a too-expensive apartment around the corner from Chez Panisse. I was not enjoying myself. Most days I’d walk down Shattuck Avenue to the library, where I’d borrow as many books as I could carry, then head back to my room and leave the books in tottering piles, unread. I spent many evenings drinking alone, occasionally half-watching a movie on my laptop. I dreamed of dropping out, but was terrified of failure. When this routine eventually became too desolate, I occupied myself in the evenings by watching whatever was on at the Pacific Film Archive, where I caught “Opening Night.”The genius of Rowlands’s performance style is in the way she melds the unapproachable beauty — sophistication, elegance, poise — of Hollywood’s Golden Age with a gift for physical humor. There are moments in her performances that approach slapstick: In one scene in “Love Streams,” from 1984, she tries to persuade a French baggage handler to help her with a preposterous pile of luggage; it could be something out of Jacques Tati. Elsewhere, she reproduces erratic gestures reminiscent of vaudeville, wildly jerking her thumb in the air and blowing raspberries at a passer-by in Cassavetes’s 1974 film, “A Woman Under the Influence.”What Rowlands offered me was an uncompromising acknowledgment of the fear and doubt at the heart of life — the confusion, the distress, the trepidation.But these moments aren’t quite played for laughs; they’re as painful as they are funny. Her gestures border on tics: expressive of something painful, buried, hard to confront. There are these looks she gives people, an irresistible combination of refinement and corniness, simultaneously ingratiating and imposing. There’s this way she has of telling people to “listen,” half-imperative, half-plea; a way that the skin around her eyes crinkles in a petition to be understood. She is adept at using physicality to undercut her humor with desperation, her characters buoyed by a willingness to withstand humiliation.Watching Rowlands’s performance in “Opening Night” showed me the necessity of embracing failure. That film is an exploration of the intense, sometimes mortifying personal commitment needed to create art. It dislodged something inside me and sharpened the smudged textures of my days. Rowlands’s character is thrown into personal and professional crisis by the prospect of becoming stuck — typecast in a particular kind of role — and of her life’s becoming constricted as a result. Watching her writhe against this tightening, I recognized myself: I realized that my graduate studies were primarily a way of rerouting my blocked desire to write. Again, I was afraid: incapable of writing because I was unwilling to risk rejection.A little over a month after that screening of “Opening Night,” my father died suddenly. I came back to England and, half-glad for the excuse, abandoned my Ph.D. But I didn’t know what to do instead, and hunkered down into my despair. Feeling the weight of the failure that I’d feared, I slid into a morass. In my grief I had to figure out how exactly I was going to live, and I felt wretched about my prospects. To distract myself, I began a project of writing about every movie I watched. Slowly, the words started to come, but I still struggled with a reluctance to look too closely at the difficult feelings that my grief had left me with.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Somewhere With No Bridges’ Review: Of Men and Memories

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      Charles Frank’s documentary about a Martha’s Vineyard man tries to turn a shadow into a portrait.In the compact documentary “Somewhere With No Bridges,” the director Charles Frank sets out to put a heartbeat to a memory. The movie’s ostensible subject, Richie Madeiras, was 44 in October 1999 when he fell from his boat. Days later, divers pulled his body from the water a few hundred yards off Martha’s Vineyard, where he had deep roots, made lifelong friends and worked as a shellfish constable helping to protect the island’s precious natural resources. A local paper said of Madeiras: “Friends and family say he was born to fish.”The genesis of this documentary was the enduring impact that Madeiras’s death had on friends and family, including on Frank’s father, Dale. Charles Frank was just about to turn 5 in October 1999. “My family likes to joke that before the age of 12, I don’t remember anything,” he says in voice-over soon after the movie begins. That isn’t true, he continues, as the camera holds on a handsomely framed aerial shot of lapping ocean waves. He remembers how his father reacted to the loss of his close friend.“He stepped out of his car and collapsed into my mother’s arms,” Charles says, as the waves keep coming and he methodically draws out the words, as if from the deep. “It was the first time I sensed that something was wrong, and it was the first time I saw him cry.”This childhood memory serves as a kind of creative statement of intent and an emotional through line for “Somewhere With No Bridges,” which seeks to explore Madeiras’s life and legacy through its many traces. This effort emerges piecemeal through a combination of archival imagery, original interviews and supplementary material, including a great many shimmering beauty shots of the island and its residents, though primarily men, on the water. Much like the photograph of Madeiras that Frank develops in an old-fashioned chemical bath, the documentary tries to turn a shadow into a portrait.That never satisfyingly happens, partly because Frank never figures out what story he’s trying to tell: his, his father’s or Madeiras’s. Richie appears to have been a vividly charismatic, memorable figure, one who, decades after his death, his friends and family easily conjure up with tears and sweet and rollicking reminiscences. He was strong, mischievous and could take on a couple of guys at a bar all by himself. He loved, and he was loved in turn. Yet even as Frank keeps questioning and exploring, Madeiras and the full sweep of his life remain as out of focus as this documentary, an essay without a coherent thesis.
      The title “Somewhere With No Bridges” refers to Martha’s Vineyard, which can only be reached via boat or plane. It’s a beguiling, resonant title that starts to seem considerably less romantic or helpful as the documentary evolves, intentionally or not, into a portrait of a cloistered community of men who fish, hunt, talk and talk some more, occasionally play ball and spend a lot of time on the water. There are women here, yes, but mostly what you are left with are men and their sorrow, notably that of Dale Frank, whose heart still breaks for Richie Madeira and whose filmmaker son, Charles, clearly yearns to understand why.Somewhere With No BridgesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Ivan Reitman, Director of ‘Ghostbusters,’ Is Dead at 75

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      The filmmaker injected giant marshmallow boogeymen and toga parties into popular culture with movies that included “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “Stripes” and “Kindergarten Cop.”Ivan Reitman, a producer and director of a string of movies including “Ghostbusters” and “National Lampoon’s Animal House” that imprinted their antics on the funny bones of a generation of filmgoers, died on Saturday at his home in Montecito, Calif., The Associated Press reported. He was 75.His children, Jason Reitman, Catherine Reitman, and Caroline Reitman, confirmed the death in a statement to The A.P.During his decades-long career, with credits as recent as last year, Mr. Reitman produced and directed major box-office comedies that became iconic to the generations that grew up with them and contributed to the rise of actors like Bill Murray and Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he cast in the unlikely role of a police officer masquerading as a kindergarten teacher in “Kindergarten Cop” (1990).He produced, with Matty Simmons, the 1978 movie “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” an hour-and-a-half-long depiction of Greek life’s chaotic energy and absurdity that has become one of the most beloved comedies in the history of the genre. The film injected the concept of the toga party into modern culture. After the staggering success of “Animal House,” he returned to directing, later telling The New York Times that he regretted not directing it.His 1984 film “Ghostbusters,” which he did direct, was nominated for two Oscars, despite lukewarm reviews from some critics, who complained of disjointed humor that heavily prioritized special effects.Viewers disagreed, enthralled and entertained by Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Mr. Murray clad in heavily accessorized jumpsuits and the bizarre visuals that included a 100-foot-high marshmallow dressed in a sailor suit and a neon green ghost. Five years later, he directed a sequel, “Ghostbusters II,” and he helped produce another spinoff, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” that was directed by his son, Jason, and released last year.In a 2007 interview with the CBC, he recalled the first time he saw the stars of “Ghostbusters” in their outlandish ghostbusting outfits, rounding Madison Avenue for a pre-shoot. “There was just something so extraordinary about that image,” he said. “I turned to the script assistant next to me and said, ‘I think this movie’s gonna work.’”Ivan Reitman was born in Komarno, in what is now Slovakia, on Oct. 27, 1946, to Jewish parents who survived the Nazis. Four years later, his family fled Czechoslovakia to escape communism and eventually landed in Toronto.“We came here penniless,” he told the CBC in 2007 as he was about to get a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame. “I didn’t speak the language.”He began producing movies as a student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.Working Off Broadway on “The National Lampoon Show,” he forged an early partnership with Mr. Ramis and with John Belushi and Mr. Murray before they became stars on “Saturday Night Live.”After “Animal House,” he directed “Meatballs” (1979), starring Mr. Murray as the head counselor at a chaotic summer camp, and “Stripes” (1981), in which Mr. Murray plays a rebellious Army recruit.Survivors include his children Jason, Catherine and Caroline.“Our family is grieving the unexpected loss of a husband, father, and grandfather who taught us to always seek the magic in life,” they told The A.P. “We take comfort that his work as a filmmaker brought laughter and happiness to countless others around the world. While we mourn privately, we hope those who knew him through his films will remember him always.” More

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      'Lunana,' a Movie From Bhutan, Is Nominated for an Academy Award

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      “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. It’s now an Academy Award nominee, a first for Bhutan.THIMPHU, Bhutan — As a crew of 35 people prepared to make a movie in Bhutan’s remote Lunana Valley, they faced a slew of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.The valley had no electricity. It could only be reached by walking eight days from the nearest village. And the schoolchildren who were expected to star in the film knew nothing about acting or cinema.“They did not even know what a camera was or what it looked like,” Namgay Dorji, the village schoolteacher, said in a telephone interview.On Tuesday, the movie, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” was nominated for an Academy Award — a first for Bhutan. Its director, Pawo Choyning Dorji, said he had been on an “improbable journey” ever since deciding to shoot the film, his first, in a Himalayan village about three miles above sea level.“It was so improbable that I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish,” said Mr. Dorji, 38, who is from a rural part of Bhutan that is east of Lunana.“Somehow we now find ourselves nominated for an Oscar,” he added. “When I found out, it was so unbelievable that I kept telling my friends: ‘What if I wake up tomorrow and I realize all this was a dream?’”The ‘dark valley’“Lunana,” which was released digitally on Friday, tells the story of a young teacher from Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, who is assigned to work at a remote mountain school against his will. He dreams of quitting his government job, emigrating to Australia and pursuing a career as a singer.Yogesh Gurav, a boom operator, during the filming of “Lunana.” The crew sent their equipment into the mountain valley on mules.Pawo Choyning DorjiBut the teacher, Ugyen, is fascinated by the people he meets in Lunana — particularly 9-year-old Pem Zam, a radiant student with a difficult home life. As the months go by, he begins to take his job more seriously.Mr. Dorji, who wrote the script, said he made a teacher the protagonist after reading news reports about Bhutanese educators quitting their jobs. He saw that as a symbol of discontent in a poor, isolated country where globalization has caused profound social changes.Bhutan prides itself on measuring, and maximizing, the “gross national happiness” of its roughly 750,000 people. But Mr. Dorji said young Bhutanese increasingly believe that true happiness lies abroad, in places like Australia, Europe or New York City.He said he picked the Lunana Valley as the film’s setting because it presented a dramatic contrast with a “well-lit” foreign city. The area is isolated even by the standards of this remote Himalayan kingdom; in Dzongkha, the national language, lunana means “dark valley.”“My idea was: Can we discover in the shadows and darkness what we are so desperately seeking in the light?” Mr. Dorji, who divides his time among Bhutan, India and Taiwan, said in an interview from Taipei, Taiwan.Keeping it naturalTurning his vision into a movie was a giant undertaking. The Lunana Valley borders far western China, has glacial lakes and some of the world’s highest peaks, and cannot be reached by car. When health workers administered coronavirus vaccines there last year, they had to fly in by helicopter and walk from village to village through snow and ice.When Mr. Dorji’s film crew traveled to Lunana in the late summer of 2018, they transported their firewood, batteries, solar chargers and other essential gear on mules. They brought nonperishable rations, such as of dried pumpkin and mushrooms, because there was no refrigeration. And when they arrived, they had to build their own temporary housing.There was just enough solar power to shoot the movie on a single camera, but not enough for Mr. Dorji to review his footage each night after shooting, as most directors do. So he had to go by his instincts and hope for the best.His cast presented another challenge. The three main roles were played by nonprofessional actors from Thimphu. The others were all from Lunana — a place where families survive through subsistence agriculture and by harvesting a valuable alpine fungus — and had never even seen a movie.“The camera in front of them could have been a yak, for all they cared,” Mr. Dorji said.Pem Zam, left, and Sangay Lham in a scene from “Lunana.”Samuel Goldwyn PicturesMr. Dorji said he adapted to his characters’ lack of experience by tailoring the script to their lives, encouraging them to essentially play themselves. Pem Zam, for instance, goes by her real name in the movie.Mr. Dorji also shot scenes in the order in which they appear in the film, so that his actors could let their characters develop with the story. He also added scenes that he felt were poignant examples of real village life. One example: In a scene where Ugyen teaches his students how to use a toothbrush, they aren’t acting; they really didn’t know.The result is a film that successfully captures a sense of innocence, the Oscar-winning director Ang Lee told Mr. Dorji in a video call last month. He described “Lunana” as a “breath of fresh air.”“It’s a precious, precious, very simple but very touching movie,” Mr. Lee said. “Thank you for going through all that and sharing your country and culture with us.”An unlikely hit“Lunana” is Bhutan’s first Oscar entry since “The Cup,” a 1999 film that was written and directed by Mr. Dorji’s teacher Khyentse Norbu. That film, which chronicles the arrival of television in a monastery, was not shortlisted or nominated for an Academy Award.The Bhutanese government submitted “Lunana” for last year’s Oscars, but it was disqualified: The national film committee had gone so long without submitting a film for consideration that it was no longer officially recognized by the Academy.For the 2022 awards, the country formed a special selection committee. And in December, “Lunana” was among 15 shortlisted of 93 Academy Award submissions from around the world. On Tuesday, it was one of five films — alongside others from Japan, Denmark, Italy and Norway — nominated for an Oscar in the International Feature Film category.Karma Phuntsho, the selection committee’s chairman, said “Lunana” reflects the maturation of a domestic film industry that’s only about three decades old.“I have been encouraging my friends in the film industry to look beyond the small Bhutanese market and share our stories with the world,” he said. “Pawo has done that with a flair and it is a proud moment for all Bhutanese and friends of Bhutan.”Mr. Dorji with some of his cast. Kinley WangchukMr. Dorji said the film was made on a $300,000 budget — “peanuts when it comes to filmmaking” — and that he never expected to have much help publicizing it. Now it’s being distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films and marketed by a public relations agency with offices in New York and Beverly Hills.News of the film’s success has trickled back to Lunana, according to Kaka, a 51-year-old village headman there who goes by one name. “The people back home are happy that their village has become known to the world,” he said by telephone.Namgay Dorji, 35, the real-life schoolteacher whose experience of living in the Lunana Valley for a decade inspired parts of the script, said the film’s international success had inspired him to stay in the area longer than he had once planned to.“When I was in front of the camera, I wasn’t that excited,” said Mr. Dorji, the schoolteacher, who appeared in the film as an extra. “But after watching it and listening to the children’s dialogue, I realized how much hardship our community has had to overcome.”Chencho Dema reported from Thimphu, Bhutan, and Mike Ives from Seoul. More

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      Douglas Trumbull, Visual Effects Wizard, Dies at 79

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      His technical savvy was on display in films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Star Trek: the Motion Picture,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Blade Runner.”Douglas Trumbull, an audacious visual effects wizard who created memorable moments in a series of blockbuster science-fiction films, including the hallucinogenic sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which an astronaut in a pod hurtles through space, died on Monday at a hospital in Albany, N.Y. He was 79.His wife, Julia Trumbull, said the cause was complications of mesothelioma.With colleagues, Mr. Trumbull was nominated for visual effects Oscars for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Blade Runner” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” but perhaps his most stunning work came in “2001” — his first big break in motion pictures.He was in his early 20s when Mr. Kubrick hired him as a $400-a-week artist, and his first job was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of HAL 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer that controls the Discovery One spacecraft at the center of “2001.”Then, using a process called slit-scan photography, he conceived the trippy five-minute scene in which the astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) soars at hyperspeed in his pod through a phantasmagorical cosmic passageway in the universe.Mr. Trumbull used a motorized camera that tracked to a slit in a rotatable rectangle of sheet metal, behind which he manipulated illuminated art — wedding his ambitious youthful vision to Mr. Kubrick’s.Keir Dulleau in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). Mr. Trumbull’s first job after being hired by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of the seemingly omniscient HAL 9000 computer.Warner Bros. via Museum of the Moving Image, New York“It wasn’t about the normal cinematic dynamics of close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots and reversals and conflicts and plot,” Mr. Trumbull told The New York Times in 2012. Mr. Kubrick, he said, “was trying to go into another world of first-person experience.”Over the next half-century, Mr. Trumbull became known as one of the film industry’s most innovative visual effects masters. He used old-school tools like mattes and miniatures to enhance science fiction films before digital effects animation became the industry standard.“He had this ability that I don’t think most people have — to see a final image in his mind and somehow figure out what was needed to get that image on film,” said Gene Kozicki, a visual effects historian and archivist. “Sometimes those images were crazy, like a diaphanous cloud traveling through space heading toward the Enterprise,” the spacecraft in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979).For Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium filled with a mixture of fresh and salt water to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of the extraterrestrial mother ship.For Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), Mr. Trumbull used, among many other things, models and images projected onto blimps and buildings to fashion the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles.When Philip K. Dick — whose book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was adapted into “Blade Runner” — saw a segment of Mr. Trumbull’s visual effects on a local newscast, he recognized them approvingly as “my own interior world,” he told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1982.An image from Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), for which Mr. Trumbull fashioned the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesFor “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” Mr. Trumbull oversaw the docking of the shuttle with the Enterprise and Spock’s spacewalk, a wild excursion (partly through a “plasma energy conduit”) that has obvious visual links to “2001.”“I thought it would be fun to just get kind of abstract and make it a fantasy dream sequence in a way, not literal,” he told TrekMovie.com in 2019.In 2012, Mr. Trumbull received the George Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions to the film industry and the Georges Méliès Award from the Visual Effects Society.Douglas Hunt Trumbull was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942. His mother, Marcia (Hunt) Trumbull, was an artist; his father, Don, worked in visual and special effects, most notably on “The Wizard of Oz,” but had gone to work as an engineer in the aircraft industry by the time Douglas was born.His father “never mentioned much about ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ except that he had something to do with the lion’s tail, the apple tree and rigging the flying monkeys,” Douglas Trumbull told VFXV, a magazine devoted to visual effects, in 2018.Growing up, Douglas was a fan of science fiction movies, became fascinated with photography and could build crystal radio sets. After high school he worked for an electrical contracting firm while studying technical illustration at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif.For “Close Encounters,” Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of a U.F.O. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesHe took a job with Graphic Films in Los Angeles, where his paintings of space modules and lunar surfaces appeared in documentaries for NASA and the Air Force. He was hired for “2001” after Mr. Kubrick noticed his work on a 15-minute film, “To the Moon and Beyond,” which was produced in Cinerama 360 and exhibited during the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.After working on “2001,” Mr. Trumbull created space scenes in “Candy” (1968), a comedy based on the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg; provided visual effects for “The Andromeda Strain” (1971), about a team of scientists trying to contain a deadly alien microorganism; and directed his first film, “Silent Running” (1972), in which botanical life has ended on Earth and plants are kept in a greenhouse on a space station by an ecologist played by Bruce Dern.Although Vincent Canby of The Times called “Silent Running” “simple-minded,” he praised its “beautifully eerie and majestic special effects — particularly its spaceship that looks like horizontal Eiffel Towers attached to gigantic oil tankers.”Mr. Trumbull resuscitated his father’s film career by hiring him for “Silent Running,” “Close Encounters” and “Star Trek.” The senior Trumbull also worked on George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” but his son was too busy for that one.Douglas Trumbull’s affinity for vivid visual effects led him to conceive ways to produce films with a format that more closely approached reality. He created Showscan, a cinematic process in which 70-millimeter film is projected at 60 frames per second (35-millimeter projection is usually at 24 frames per second).He shot part of “Brainstorm” (1983), his second directorial effort, with a Showscan camera. That film — about scientists who devise a system that can record and play a person’s thoughts — is better known for the death of one of its stars, Natalie Wood, during production. Mr. Trumbull fought to complete the film, but it could not be exhibited in Showscan because theaters would not invest in the necessary equipment until all studio films were shot in that format.But developing the Showscan camera earned Mr. Trumbull, Robert Auguste, Geoffrey Williamson and Edmund DiGiulio the Motion Picture Academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award in 1992.Mr. Trumbull in action in 2011, the year he returned to traditional filmmaking after many years of designing theme-park attractions and other projects and working for Imax.Joseph HeckThe experience led him to detour from Hollywood filmmaking and move to the Berkshires, where he worked on projects for the rest of his life. He developed simulator-based attractions like “Back to the Future: The Ride” for Universal Studios Florida, which opened in 1991, and, using Showscan, created “Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid,” a virtual reality experience featuring three films, at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, in 1993.In 1994, he signed a deal to bring his simulator-ride technology to Imax. He also served for a time as the company’s vice chairman.In addition to his wife, Mr. Trumbull is survived by his daughters, Amy Trumbull and Andromeda Stevens; his stepdaughter, Emily Irwin; his stepsons, John Hobart Culleton, Ethan Culleton and John Vidor; nine grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; his sister, Betsy Hardie; his stepsister, Katharine Trumbull Blank; and his half sisters, Kyle Trumbull-Clark and Mimi Erland. His marriage to Cherry Foster ended in divorce; his marriage to Ann Vidor ended with her death.Mr. Trumbull returned to traditional moviemaking when the director Terrence Malick, a friend, asked him to help on his film “The Tree of Life” (2011). Working as a consultant, Mr. Trumbull helped conjure the kaleidoscopic sequence that depicts the Big Bang and the creation of life on Earth, using chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, carbon dioxide, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics and high speed photography, he told cinematography.com in 2011.“It was a freewheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business,” he said. “We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.” More

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      Mifune’s Transcendent Films, With and Without Kurosawa

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      Yes, the Japanese team was one of cinema’s great collaborations. But Film Forum’s salute to Toshiro Mifune shows that he was a superb actor no matter who was in the director’s chair.Toshiro Mifune once wrote of his collaboration with the director Akira Kurosawa, “I have never as an actor done anything that I am proud of other than with him.”OK. Fine. Those were 16 pretty great movies the two of you made together. But you made roughly 170 movies! Never?We can judge whether Mifune, who died in 1997, was being a little too harsh on himself (and his many other directors) beginning this weekend at Film Forum, where a four-week festival will present 33 of the great Japanese actor’s films, as well as a documentary, “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”It includes all the movies Mifune and Kurosawa made together — certified masterpieces like “Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon,” as well as less well-known but excellent pictures like “High and Low” and “Red Beard.” The chance to see them on a theater screen shouldn’t be missed.But a lot has already been said about those films — I don’t have much new to offer on “Seven Samurai” — and it’s the other half of the Film Forum program where you’re more likely to find some surprises.As a contract player for the Toho studios, Mifune never stopped working — according to “The Last Samurai,” at the peak of his career he appeared in 27 movies in a four-year period. Some of them were filler, no doubt, but the 1950s and ’60s were a great era for Japanese film, and when he wasn’t with Kurosawa, Mifune got to work with other top-flight directors like Hiroshi Inagaki and Masaki Kobayashi.Here, in the order they were made, are some highlights from the series’s non-Kurosawa productions. Mifune might not have been working with his favorite director, but watching these, it’s clear that he still brought his expressive physicality, his quicksilver emotion and his unparalleled charisma to the set every day.Mifune making his film debut as a bank robber on the lam in “Snow Trail.”Janus Films‘Snow Trail’Mifune’s first feature, a tense and bittersweet 1947 thriller filmed in the snowy mountains of Hokkaido, feels as if it could be a Kurosawa film. That’s probably because Kurosawa wrote the screenplay for the director, Senkichi Taniguchi. The 27-year-old Mifune had been discovered in a Toho cattle call for actors, and he’s shockingly handsome, with a wild lock of hair hanging down over his face. He also knew how to command the camera from the very start. As the youngest and most ruthless of a group of bank robbers on the lam, he’s a tight bundle of angry, nervous energy — you spend the picture waiting for him to explode. (As an older and more conscience-stricken crook, Takashi Shimura makes the first of many appearances alongside Mifune.)‘Samurai Saga’Mifune’s Macbeth in “Throne of Blood” is widely celebrated, but fewer people know that he is also an excellent Cyrano in Inagaki’s 1959 adaptation of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” It’s a kick to see Mifune in a role in which his mastery of language is more important than his looks and just as important as his fighting ability (though swordplay is crucial to the story, of course). French 19th-century romance transfers well to the 17th-century Shogunate; Inagaki stages the famous first-act poetry duel on a Kabuki stage, with Mifune dealing sword blows between verses to an entire company of attackers. And Mifune’s ability to play the alpha male with notes of humor and abashment suits him perfectly when it comes to the ultimate rom-com hero.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More