Yerevan Dispatch.

David D'Arcy sends word from the capital of Armenia.

At the Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, Armenia, now marking its fifth year, international cinema is meeting the culture of this small nation whose diaspora reaches from the former Soviet Union to Paris, Santa Monica and Toronto. Armenia does not have much film production today, one to two features in a good year and those are made on low budgets (and then there are the documentaries, made with a lot of heart and even less money). But it did have its own active studio under the Soviet system, and its film culture runs deep.

Continue reading "Yerevan Dispatch."

Interview. Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber.

"This is part of the endless war machine. The war machine grinds on. They used to run Cold War simulations there. Now they run Iraq simulations there. They're beginning to evolve more into Afghan War simulations. For all I know, it'll be Iran in two years. They only have to re-jigger the actors and the sets, and the war continues."

That's Jesse Moss, talking about the National Training Center, which has built Medina Wazl, a fictional town out in the Mojave Desert, where soldiers train to fight the real war in Iraq. David D'Arcy talks with him and his filmmaking partner, Tony Gerber, about their documentary Full Battle Rattle, currently at Film Forum in New York through Tuesday.

Keep an eye on their blog for further screenings. Earlier: Reviews from the week of July 7.

Shorts, 7/19.

It's "David Lynch Day" at DC's.

Whether or not you plan to read Leigh Montville's The Mysterious Montague: A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf and Armed Robbery, do see Colman McCarthy's succinct telling of the tale in his review for the Washington Post.

"The uncut version, whether you call it Amanti d'oltretomba or Night of the Doomed, is an important title from the Italian Golden Age pantheon, and one of Barbara Steele's best star vehicles," writes Tim Lucas, reacting to news that an original negative has been found. "Not a notch on Black Sunday, of course, but it is significant as the only horror film for which Steele dubbed her own performance (one of her dual roles) - and the news about the discovery of the original negative element is wonderful. Just to know that people over there are looking for such things is wonderful."

Continue reading "Shorts, 7/19."

Fests and events, 7/19.

First, what's coming: "Salivate and prepare to be completely blown away by the first half of the Sitges 2008 program!" yippies Blake Ethridge at Twitch. October 2 through 12.

"The homegrown but internationally lauded Fantastic Fest - ground zero for all things horror, sci-fi, fantasy, animé, and the catch-all 'cult' - announced [on Thursday] the first wave of its 2008 festival lineup." Kimberly Jones in the Austin Chronicle. September 18 through 25.

Derek Elley has the lineup for the Locarno Film Festival (August 6 through 16) in Variety.

Continue reading "Fests and events, 7/19."

Sight & Sound. August 08.

"Who killed the double bill?" asks Jane Giles. "And when did our days or nights become so short that the very idea of going to the cinema to watch four to six hours of brilliantly compatible or creatively contrasting content became impossible?" A quick history of creative repertory programming in London follows as an introduction to the heart of the new issue of Sight & Sound, nine pages of fantasy "Dream Tickets," put together by 52 critics and programmers and downloadable as a PDF.

Also:

Continue reading "Sight & Sound. August 08."

Mad Detective.

"Hong Kong genre-jumping auteur Johnnie To's films are invariably pretty and intelligent (though not always clear-headed and restrained), and his specific achievement here is in pushing neo-noir conventions (already a hyphenated set of narrative rules developed from Chinatown through Blade Runner, LA Confidential and beyond) into post-neo-noir territory," writes Benjamin Sutton in the L Magazine.

"Whereas Johnny To's gangster sagas are usually efficient, operatic and serious-minded, his frequent collaborations with co-writer and co-director Wai Ka-fai often come equipped with some goofy supernatural twist," notes Nick Schager in Slant. "In the duo's latest, Mad Detective, the conceit is that detective Bun (Lau Ching-wan) is an investigative ace as well as a complete loon who reenacts crimes in order to crack them and claims to be able to see people's 'inner personalities.'"

Updated.

Continue reading "Mad Detective."

Wonderful Town.

"An affectionate love story that apes the studied art-drone minimalism of Tsai Ming-Liang and the haunted lushness of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the ironically titled Wonderful Town rewards more in its social-realist backdrop than its minor foreground drama," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

"Wonderful Town, by its third act, is a title drowning in irony," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "Wondrous, nevertheless, is Mr Assarat's sustained command as he guides his material into darker waters. It's no small feat to pull off as sweet and sensitive a romance as that between Na and Ton, and something rarer yet to suffuse such affections into a poem of wounded landscape."

Updated.

Continue reading "Wonderful Town."

Transsiberian.

"A suspenseful Hitchockian course is charted by Transsiberian, which concerns the murderous intrigue that envelops American tourists Roy (Woody Harrelson) and wife Jessie (Emily Mortimer) while making the famous week-long Transsiberian train trek from Beijing to Moscow," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Despite HD cinematography that can't quite capture the ominous grandeur of the vast landscape through which the train travels, director Brad Anderson establishes a suitably portentous mood through claustrophobic staging and an overarching air of linguistic and cultural isolation."

"At its queasy best - when absorbing the naturally phantasmagoric vibes of Siberia and surveying Jessie's grueling efforts to discard a backpack filled with unwanted goods - Transsiberian more subtly critiques our American sense of privilege than any of [Eli] Roth's Hostel pictures," writes Ed Gonzalez in the Voice. "But just as nasty as the titular mode of transport is the script's wanton declaration of theme and a cynical and fashionable belief in moral grayness that may complement the frosty setting but nonetheless feels easy."

Updated through 7/19.

Continue reading "Transsiberian."

Mamma Mia!, round 2.

"Any film that asks us to imagine the comingled semens of Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth competing in the fallopian tubes of Meryl Streep ought to be at least slightly more compelling than this," notes Glenn Kenny - and 14 further points follow.

"For all its half-hearted stabs at catering to the transatlantic youth market (with a little gift tucked in for the stage show's voluminous gay following), Mamma Mia! is a (Shirley) valentine to fiftysomething, we're-not-done-yet broads," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "The three fiftysomething British broads - director Phyllida Lloyd, screenwriter Catherine Johnson, and co-producer Judy Craymer - who so successfully courted that wildly under-served demographic in the smash-hit stage version of Mamma Mia! came on board the movie with no prior film experience. They haven't a clue, and though their screw-it-all ineptitude lends the movie a sporadically infectious gaiety, basically it's a mess."

Updated through 7/20.

Continue reading "Mamma Mia!, round 2."

Summer Hours in the UK.

Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours "is a quiet and lyrical movie that poses a pertinent question in a time where philanthropists like Eli Broad are wresting power from museums: if you are fortunate enough to inherit art, what should you do with it?" Laura Allsop, writing in Art Review, finds the film instructive.

The Guardian's Xan Brooks finds Summer Hours to be "an airy Chekhovian miniature in which Charles Berling and Juliette Binoche play bourgeois siblings parcelling up the estate of their dead mother and the great artist she shacked up with. In his unobtrusive fashion, Assayas poses telling questions about the ways we lay our past to rest."

Continue reading "Summer Hours in the UK."

Puffball.

"The release today of the movie Puffball is timed to honour the impending 80th birthday of its distinguished director, Nicolas Roeg," notes Mark Lawson in the Guardian. "But the screening date also marks another cinematic anniversary: it's exactly 35 years since Roeg's masterpiece, Don't Look Now, introduced what remains one of the most celebrated movie sex scenes: an extended, fragmented, ecstatic encounter between a naked Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.... But the journey between the two films shows the change in the relationship between moviegoers and erotic material."

Continue reading "Puffball."

The Human Condition.

"The three-part fuming World War II bummer The Human Condition (1959 - 61) - considered the magnum opus of socially critical Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri) - runs just shy of 10 hours and is an arduous watch in ways beyond its creator's intentions," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "Based on Jumpei Gomikawa's ambitious novel and seasoned with Kobayashi's own experiences, this overly melodramatic trilogy set in Japanese-occupied Manchuria depicts the dehumanizing brutality of war with on-the-nose pedantry, never subtext, and offers little richness to Western eyes already adjusted to the next half-century's deeper anti-war tales."

Updated through 7/18.

Continue reading "The Human Condition."

All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green.

The retrospective All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green opens tonight at BAM with Snow Angels and closes with a sneak preview of the stoner comedy Pineapple Express on July 24.

"Has David Gordon Green gone pop?" asks Nick Pinkerton in the Voice before revisiting George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow and Snow Angels. Pinkerton then looks ahead to Express, "the best movie (as opposed to an arrangement of scenes) to ever come from Camp Apatow," and, with Green, further on: "Upcoming is a remake of Suspiria ('The way that horror is going, I think we're losing sight of the artistry and the complexity and the kind of strange, surreal, emotional element'), a John Grisham true-crime adaptation, and 'a cartoon TV series.' ('That doesn't include all the weirdo projects— little, bizarre, personal, intimate portraits and things that I try to develop on the side.')"

Updated through 7/18.

Continue reading "All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green."

Lou Reed's Berlin.

"What a beautiful and strange album Lou Reed gave us with Berlin, with its haunted and melancholic lyrics about a relationship being dragged down into the depths of despair, with a little bit of heroin and a little bit of suicide and a little bit of loathing and a section where the main character's children are taken away by social workers," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "And yet this tragic record achieved an intense, crystalline grace with the weight of its orchestral accompaniment, its choir of young voices and lyrics containing the specificity of romantic detail one remembers in the haze of reminiscence.... Some concert documentaries give one an impression of watching a show, and experiencing the performance in a secondhand way but still enjoying the vicarious experience. Others, such as Lou Reed's Berlin, seem like the movie experience gets in its own way."

Updated through 7/18.

Continue reading "Lou Reed's Berlin."

Before I Forget.

"Before I Forget, the new feature by the French writer, actor and director Jacques Nolot, trains an unflinching spotlight on a species that, to judge from the movies, might as well be extinct: the aging homosexual." Dennis Lim in the New York Times: "Practically a lifetime removed from the buff heroes of the typical boy-meets-boy romances, Mr Nolot's Pierre is a 60ish writer and ex-gigolo who has been HIV-positive for 24 years.... 'I don't know if it's provocation, but there is a wicked pleasure to the film,' Mr Nolot said on a warm May evening at Le Select, the famous literary cafe in Montparnasse, not far from where he lives. 'I expose myself, and I show myself naked and sick. Here is how we are, how we live. People can take it or leave it.'"

Updated through 7/18.

Continue reading "Before I Forget."

indieWIRE to SnagFilms.

"As you can read today on indieWIRE, we have some big news to share," announces editor Eugene Hernandez. "In the waning hours of our 12th anniversary on Tuesday, we signed a deal to sell iW to SnagFilms, a new company founded by Ted Leonsis and backed by Steve Case and Miles Gilburne."

Updated through 7/18.

Continue reading "indieWIRE to SnagFilms."

Shorts, 7/15.

"What can one say about Rudy Wurlitzer that doesn't suggest multitudes of overlapping worlds?... After several years in the New York literary and visual arts underground as a participant observer, Wurlitzer emerged with a series of one of a kind novels - Nog, Quake and Flats and the screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop in collaboration with Monte Hellman in the late 60s and early 70s. He has worked with Sam Peckinpah, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alex Cox, Bernardo Bertolucci and then some." So Lee Hill gets him talking for Vertigo.

"A humanist intellectual, whose layered studies of conflicting social forces and individual fates may have been too subtle for the culture surrounding them, [Helmut] Käutner qualifies as one of the pantheon directors of German cinema, possibly even the nation's finest major filmmaker of the sound era save, perhaps, Fassbinder," argues Christophe Huber.

Continue reading "Shorts, 7/15."

Fests and events, 7/15.

Michael Jones hears that Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or-winning The Class will open the New York Film Festival, which'll be running from September 26 through October 12. Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Chantal Akerman's Hotel Monterey is screening at the Camden Arts Centre alongside two installations, To Walk Next to One's Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge and Women from Antwerp in November, "more than a record of a dying habit," as Adrian Searle puts it in the Guardian. "It celebrates smoking's conviviality and the splendid isolation of the smoker, the smoker's exhibitionism and her pensive introversion. Meanings curl and writhe and disappear into the night. After a while, the idea seems stale and repetitive; it leaves you empty but hungry for more. That's smoking for you."

Continue reading "Fests and events, 7/15."

At the Crossroads: Slovenian Cinema.

James Van Maanen another series running in NYC. Updated through 7/17.

Last October, the Film Society of Lincoln Center offered New York City a surprising festival of Croatian film, the first in its four-part look at the cinemas of the former Yugoslavia. I managed to see a quartet of excellent films from that group - Armin, Fine Dead Girls, Dejan Sorak's brilliant Two Players from the Bench and a classic from the early 70s, A Village Performance of Hamlet - all of which convinced me that Croatian cinema was something to which I should pay more attention.

Continue reading "At the Crossroads: Slovenian Cinema."

Criterion's Trafic.

Trafic flummoxes some people; no less a comedy authority as Richard Lester has pronounced it 'unbearable,'" writes Glenn Kenny in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Playtime's wry and rueful view of modernity and 'progress' is here replaced by a mode of acceptance.... Trafic's lack of effective dramatic momentum is, it turns out, its whole reason for being: the movie insists that life really happens in the interstices of 'events'; that getting there is not only more than half the fun, but all of the meaning. One expects a satire, but what one gets instead is a Zen lesson, topped off by the sight of Hulot actually opening that umbrella he kept furled throughout his five-feature run, as the rain that never happened in the previous films begins to pour down."

Updated through 7/17.

Continue reading "Criterion's Trafic."

DVDs, 7/15.

"It's amazing to contemplate, but world cinema didn't really make serious feature films about children until after WWII; Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946) might've been the first," suggests Michael Atkinson at IFC. "Did cinema change with the war, or did we? Two new movies to DVD, Reha Erdem's Times and Winds (2006) and Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (2007), make their individual cases that little outside of the movie dynamic has changed at all, and that life as a 12-year-old in any corner of the globe is still subject to the grinding, merciless self-involvement of the adult world."

"[T]he new and restored Godfather Trilogy was released first in Europe on PAL DVD and only later in the year it will be released in the States," notes Yair Raveh. One of the bonus discs features the doc Emulsional Rescue, "only 18 minutes long but in its bright and succinct way it tells not only of the process used to save The Godfather deteriorating negatives but of what made this movie cinematographically exceptional."

Continue reading "DVDs, 7/15."

Charles H Joffe, 1929 - 2008.

Charles H Joffe, a legendary manager of comic talent who helped guide the careers of Dick Cavett, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Woody Allen and co-produced nearly all of Allen's films, died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after a long illness. He was 78.

Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times.

Updated through 7/17.

Continue reading "Charles H Joffe, 1929 - 2008."

The French, 7/15.

Vinyl Is Heavy celebrated Bastille Day all day yesterday with a series of pieces on French cinema.

La Possibilité d'une île (The Possibility of an Island) is Michel Houellebecq's adaptation of his own novel and Nicholas Lezard, blogging for the Guardian, thinks "it could work out.... The film has been described by his friend and fan, Frédéric Beigbeder, as completely different from any other film he's seen, and a long way from the book. It might be that Houellebecq's decision not to be too reverent to his own source material could produce something extraordinary. Let us hope it is for the right reasons."

Continue reading "The French, 7/15."

Yet more on WALL•E.

"Technically, WALL•E is indeed a marvel, especially the long, nearly wordless opening sequence that shows the title character, a trash-collecting robot, going about his lonely labors on an environmentally devastated Earth," writes Reed Johnson. "But this G-rated movie, with its lovable protagonist and ultimately reassuring message about mankind's fate, also strikes me as something of an evasion, a retreat from the knottier issues and themes raised in 2001 and other classic sci-films of the 60s and 70s, such as Planet of the Apes (1968) and Silent Running (1972)."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "I'm a conservative, and I just love the movie WALL•E," announces Charlotte Allen, noting that "WALL•E doesn't mark the first time that critics on the right have unloaded inexplicably on a piece of popular entertainment that you would think would appeal to their conservative ideals.... The irony of all this is that if WALL•E is didactic, what it has to teach is profoundly conservative."

Updated through 7/18.

Continue reading "Yet more on WALL•E."

Fests and events, 7/14.

Twitch's Todd Brown from Fantasia: "A Colt Is My Passport was apparently considered a fairly minor title by Nikkatsu at the time but it is a sharp, compelling film, one that has stood up to the test of time beautifully. Its fusion of styles and influences results in something truly unique, a treasure that can - and should - be recognized by fans of classic Hollywood, European arthouse and modern cult films alike." Todd notes that this one, along with six other Nikkatsu Action titles, has been picked up by Criterion.

Also, X-Cross: "Holy crap, Kenta Fukasaku went and made a film that doesn't suck." And: Adrift in Tokyo.

Continue reading "Fests and events, 7/14."

Red Cliff in Asia.

Stefan at Twitch on "John Woo's return to his Asian filmmaking roots following his stint in Hollywood": "Red Cliff is nothing short of spectacular."

"As the first film to re-create the 208 AD Battle of Chibi, the most famous military feat in Chinese history, John Woo's Red Cliff is a Pan-Asian project with the word 'monumental' written all over it," writes Maggie Lee in the Hollywood Reporter. "[H]ardcore disciples of his Hong Kong oeuvre will be straining hard to find the all-stops-out passion and sinewy machismo that ignited his bullet ballets such as A Better Tomorrow or The Killer. Such signature themes as male bonding and David-and-Goliath face-offs still drive the action, but the functional script has dismantled much of the original story's dramatic intricacies and character complexities, then reassembled it into a easy-to-follow three-act structure."

Updated through 7/15.

Continue reading "Red Cliff in Asia."

The Dark Knight, round 2.

"Even if the death of Heath Ledger hadn't already draped it in a funeral shroud, The Dark Knight would be a morbid affair," writes New York's David Edelstein: "It could only be darker if Batman died.... The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic. Even its most wondrous vision - Batman's plunges from skyscrapers, bat-wings snapping open as he glides through the night like a human kite - can't keep the movie airborne. There's an anvil attached to that cape."

"Warner Bros has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton's original conception for Batman (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle." David Denby in the New Yorker: "Yet The Dark Knight is hardly routine - it has a kicky sadism in scene after scene, which keeps you on edge and sends you out onto the street with post-movie stress disorder. And it has one startling and artful element: the sinister and frightening performance of the late Heath Ledger as the psychopathic murderer the Joker. That part of the movie is upsetting to watch, and, in retrospect, both painful and stirring to think about."

Updated through 7/20.

Continue reading "The Dark Knight, round 2."

"Is it curtains for critics?"

"It appears that consumers no longer feel the need to obtain their opinions from on high: the authority of the critic, derived from their paid position on a newspaper, is diminished. Opinion has been democratised." Does this clean cause-and-effect explanation for the current upheaval in criticism really hold water? The Observer's Jay Rayner talks with a wide range of UK bloggers and professional critics about how their respective roles are changing - and in a followup blog entry, he opens the discussion up to readers. And of course, they're responding.

As sidebars, the Observer asks for comments from bloggers and critics, while Hermione Hoby and William Skidelsky offer a brief - very brief - guide to "critics now and then."

Updated through 7/15.

Continue reading ""Is it curtains for critics?""