William Wellman Film Festival in the Times Union

Amy Biancolli blogs our upcoming William A. Wellman Film Festival in the Times Union:

A mini-festival of five movies from the long-running, wide-ranging career of Hollywood heydey director William A. Wellman forms the core of this spring’s classic film series offered by the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany, which has announced its slate of free movies and related events for the upcoming season.

The run of Wellman films opens with rat-a-tat gangster saga “The Public Enemy” on Friday, Jan. 30, and concludes on Friday, May 1, with a reading and discussion by the director’s son, William Wellman Jr., an actor and author of the forthcoming biography “Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel.” “Wings,” Wellman’s soaring, silent 1927 Oscar winner (the first ever) depicting World War I fighter pilots, will screen on Friday, April 24. Also in the festival: “The Public Enemy,” “Nothing Sacred” and “Beau Geste.”

Besides the helpings of Wellman, other films in the springtime lineup at Page Hall include Tanya Hamilton’s 2010 Black Panther drama “Night Catches Us,” Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 adaptation of “Much Ado About Nothing” (screened in conjunction with an April 13 Writers Institute appearance by Shakespeare & Company founder Tina Packer) and the classic 1939 iteration of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” from another legendary Hollywood Bill, William Wyler.

In the TU:   http://blog.timesunion.com/localarts/wellman-festival-anchors-writers-institute-spring-movie-series/36137/

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John Sayles: Good Guys Shouldn't Always Win

John Sayles, the "grandfather of indie cinema" who visits UAlbany on Monday 2/27, talks to the New Jersey Star-Ledger:

“The studios realize that most people don’t go to movies for complexity,” he says. “Most people want escapism, and white hats, and bad guys who are so bad you can cheer at the end when they get torn to pieces by wild dogs. Movies that are complex are rarer and they confuse audiences at first. Honestly, we figure it’s going to take the average moviegoer who doesn’t necessarily go to this sort of thing 10 or 15 minutes to decide if they’re going to stay or walk out. And maybe they’ll stay and say, well, that was interesting, that was cool. Or they say, what the hell was that? The good guys didn’t win.”

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