Home
The Academy Award-nominated director of the new-to-video Il Postino doesn't have much time to talk these days, let alone take jaunts to the video store. Radford is currently editing his first post-Postino project, B. Monkey, which he calls ''a contemporary love story set in London about a girl who's on the fringe of criminality and a kind of straight guy,'' in time for Cannes. But during a quick trip to New York, he stopped long enough to tell us what he's watched recently.
-- WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956, Universal) ''I think this Douglas Sirk [melodrama] is one of the great American movies. It's an incredible, emotional piece -- in the very best sense, it's unsentimental. It's about human feelings but expressed in the most moody and atmospheric way.''
-- BEETHOVEN (1992, Universal) ''I have a small son, age 5 1/2, and it's hard to figure out what's good for him to see. He adores this. It [stars] Charles Grodin, who's very funny anyway. It's a well-made movie, and kids absolutely love it. Beethoven is full of wonderful slapstick, like when [the dog] comes in and shakes himself and the water goes everywhere.''
-- BLUE (1993, Miramax) ''I rented this before starting B. Monkey to refresh my memory of what great mise-en-scene is all about. What I like about Blue is the way Krzysztof Kieslowski manages to create an almost surreal world of color while keeping reality going in the movie. He doesn't have the great tools of Hollywood to work with, and yet it's aesthetically very pleasing. And that is what I tried to do -- make not a naturalistic, gritty British picture but something which is out of the movies yet has a reality to it.''
