It was announced yesterday that New York’s Museum of the Moving Image will present a rare big-screen showing of Andrew Dominik‘s 2007 Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell and Sam Shepard with Dominik in attendance on Saturday, December 7, at 6:00 p.m. The screening will take place in the Museum’s Sumner Redstone Theater, with the post-film conversation moderated by Chief Curator David Schwartz.
[amz asin=”B0010V60XE” size=”small”]The film is being included in the Museum’s ongoing See It Big! series, a special edition devoted to “Masters of Cinematography” and in the case of Jesse James, it was filmed by 10-time Oscar nominee Roger Deakins. It’s also the first time a film has been screened in the series with the director in attendance, all due to one fan and Museum member, Jamieson McGonigle, who tracked down Dominik and helped organize the entire thing.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of the movie. I placed it at #3 on my list of the my review in which I note Deakins’ work in my final paragraph:
Assassination of Jesse James is a triumph on most every level. If Oscar talk is your thing this one deserves a couple nods, but probably at the forefront will be cinematographer Roger Deakins who coincidentally is also receiving buzz for another Oscar hopeful in No Country for Old Men. The camera work he provides with this film is astonishingly beautiful and only assists that much more to the methodically paced storytelling.
Ironically enough, Deakins would end up nominated for both Jesse James and No Country, but they would end up just two more of his Oscar losses as Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) took the win that year.
[amz asin=”B009AMALBM” size=”small”]In addition to this news, an unused trailer for Dominik’s shamefully overlooked 2012 feature Killing Them Softly has hit the Internet today (via The Playlist). Like Jesse James, this was yet another film I loved and gave an “A” in my review last year, which I teased writing:
After The Assassination of Jesse James it has taken four years for us to get a second film from Andrew Dominik. It was worth the wait. Killing Them Softly is not only a bullets and bloodshed gangster film told with a visual panache you won’t find in many films, but it’s also a straight-forward commentary on the state of America and it holds nothing back.
Killing Them Softly made my Top Ten of 2012 and I can only hope people continue to remind movie fans of these two great films as both have been criminally overlooked and deserve to live on, if not in the minds of the masses at least in the minds of true movie fans.
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