Memorial Day Weekend Edition

First, thanks a zillion to Craig Phillips for leaping in when I was out and disconnected. So, I'm back in and reconnected and the first thing I see is that while critics and journos are yawning in Cannes, the Seattle International Film Festival is off and running hard and will carry on through June 15 and the thing is just huge. 226 features and docs and 80 shorts from nearly 50 countries over 25 days. Too much for any dedicated cineaste to sort through alone, so The Stranger offers up a handy guide: SIFF Notes. Cute. Comics and illustrations by Jason Lutes, an intro by Sean Nelson and an amusing little something by one Prof. Nigel Grinchgibbins.

The Times of London has a remarkable little exclusive, a magazine piece on all that was Babylonian about Hollywood back in the day - by none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald. Never before published. Because he missed his deadline, evidently, but you'd think it would have appeared in one collection or another before now. Written in 1924, nearly decades before the launch of Cahiers du Cinema, Fitzgerald writes: "[T]he moving picture is a director's business, and there never was a good picture or a bad picture for which the director was not entirely responsible." Well! Of course, he's also got a couple of points to make Bazin and Co. might have a bone to pick with, but still. Via Movie City News.

"Robert McNamara is not the über-hawk, the main instigator of the Vietnam War. I realized pretty quickly it just doesn't work that way. This is not to say he's blameless or absolved of responsibility for what he's done, but that the story is far more complex and far more interesting than I imagined." That's Errol Morris talking to Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times about his new documentary, The Fog of War, recently shown at Cannes and subtitled Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert McNamara. The most interesting quote is probably the last: "He's ostensibly talking about things that happened 40, 50, 60 years ago, but he could as well be talking about next week."

The kick-in-the-gut interview of the week, though, has to be Henry Sheehan's with Marooned in Iraq director Bahman Ghobadi in the LA Weekly: "They eat their breakfast squatting down, ready to run, because there's always someone coming. The Turks are coming! The Iraqis are coming! They've got their backpacks with them, ready to run and carry... You don't learn how to say 'Mom' or 'Dad' first in Kurdistan. You learn 'bomb,' 'war,' 'run, run, run!'"

Meanwhile, in the land of plenty, TiVo is reporting a healthier quarter, but the Financial Times asks, "Is Tivo the Apple of the digital versatile recorder industry?"

"It scares me when art becomes artifact." For MCN, Ray Pride segues from Jean-Pierre Melville, whose films "are hushed, deadpan abstractions of space and gesture, and his blunt, efficient cutting of shootout scenes are among the glories of precise, elegant filmmaking. Men with hats. Men with guns..." to a round-up of recent DVD releases by way of a not entirely undue disparagement of the medium and its fanatics: "It's the Pantheon as fetish: Mr. Lubitsch and sensei Kurosawa and crazy-mad Terry Gilliam belong to me." Even so, even he goes all lusty over The Adventures of Antoine Doinel ("[Criterion's] most elaborate box set since Brazil"), Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran, Throne of Blood ("dense, thrilling, lyrical"), Quai des Orfèvres, Derek Jarman's Jubilee, Lars von Trier's Medea ("an interesting footnote in a career that's going to turn out to have more footnotes than a David Foster Wallace novel") and - to close with a bang - Miklos Jansco's 1974 Electra, My Love:

[A]n astonishment, a seventy-one minute retelling of the classic myth on an open, desolate Hungarian plain, camera in constant motion, seldom cutting, with galloping horseman, nude choruses and fireworks underscored throughout by a tattoo of drums.

Bamboo Dong, too, offers up a fresh batch of DVD reviews of another sort at Anime News Network: .hack//SIGN (Vol. 2; "getting better with every episode"); Banner of the Stars (Vol. 3; "both one of the nicest done anime series and also the slowest"); Geneshaft (Vol. 1; "I have a good, throbbing vibe about this show"); Rurouni Kenshin: Trust & Betrayal Director's Cut ("why tamper with perfection?"); Dragon Ball GT (Vols. 3 and 4; "can't say that it's the best series ever... but it definitely has its moments"); Hello Kitty's Paradise Collection )"the pinnacle of what is known as wholesome family entertainment") and Great Dangaioh (Vol. 4; "doesn't hold its weight against the original Dangaioh at all").

Over the past couple of years, it's come as a surprise to many that the director of Pi and Requiem For A Dream would be interested in making a film based on a comic, but Darren Aronofsky has already tried and failed twice; the third shot may be the charm, reports ICv2, as he aims for Lone Wolf & Cub, a series of samurai graphic novels by Kazuo Koike.

Online viewing tip. A leisurely narrated Cannes slide slow, especially during this, one of the festival's most lackluster years, according to just about everybody, may not sound like riveting viewing, and it isn't. But for a kick-back Memorial Day weekend, Tony Scott's chat is just the thing. You've probably seen it highlighted and floating around on that front page for the New York Times's movie section.



Posted by dwhudson at May 24, 2003 9:11 AM