This week’s ”Arts” page explores the ongoing creative collaboration between filmmakers-UTA grads Justin Hilliard and Frank Mosley. The Other Side of Paradise, Hilliard’s 2009 dark comedy co-starring Mosley and Hilliard’s actress wife Arianne Martin, will be released on DVD the last Tuesday of the month – check out the trailer and order a copy. Also take a gander at the trailer for their proposed web series Komodo.
Among the film artists Hilliard reveres, Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers are at the top. Another glance at their 1962 collaboration Lolita would seem in order. (As great a comic actor as Sellers was, I thought he was a hammy focus stealer in the movie. Another great hammy focus stealer, Shelley Winters, was the highlight of the picture, imho). One of Mosley’s fave flicks is 1961’s art house standard bearer Last Year at Marienbad. Pretentious French fraud or chilling examination of the frailties of memory and identity? Audiences all over the world have weighed in one way or the other. The curious thing about Marienbad is how its eerie atmospherics strongly remind contemporary viewers of Kubrick’s The Shining. As far as I’ve read, Kubrick never confessed to deliberately borrowing the vibe from Resnais’s movie, but who knows?
