Shorts, 6/2.

I've forgotten which class it was but I've never forgotten the final exam. After an hour or so of short answer stuff, we were shown a film which we'd then analyse right there on the spot. This would be the early 80s and the two profs were fairly confident that none of us kids would have seen the film before - no one would have a head start - and they were right. After a series of remarkable black-and-white still compositions, a single breathless moment of movement and a surprise ending whiplashing us through a time warp, the lights went up and a collective groan filled the room: disappointment that it was over, awe at what we'd just seen and a general reluctance to set pen immediately to paper rather than switch the lights back off and watch it again.

20 years later, there's no way you could show Chris Marker's La Jetée to a room full of film students and expect that not one of them has seen it before. Thanks primarily to 12 Monkeys, the cat's been out of the bag for some time. Starting Wednesday, lucky New Yorkers will have the chance to take in much more of Marker's work at the Anthology Film Archives and, in the New York Times, David Thomson lays the groundwork.

Maybe we should start a "David Thomson Watch" around here. Just the day before, he was reviewing John Walsh's Are You Talking to Me? A Life Through the Movies in the Guardian. The bottom line: Thumbs up for this "vivid memoir." Two more memoirs are reviewed in the NYT: Public Places: My Life in the Theater, With Peter O'Toole and Beyond, by the actor's former wife, Sian Phillips, is praised by Ben Brantley as a "sparklingly cleareyed memoir" (first chapter) and The Memory of All That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood, and Paris (first chapter; the New Yorker's party report), by Gene Kelly and Karel Reisz's former wife, Betsy Blair, is championed by James Toback: "I know of no other book, written from inside that mythical-historical Hollywood world, or from outside it, that comes close to so vivid an evocation of its mood."

Good stuff in the Los Angeles Times lately. There's Manohla Dargis, fun as ever, listing her favorite westerns and: "I've said it before, I will say it again: There is something deeply twisted about a country that allows its children to watch human beings eviscerating one another, in gloriously realistic gore-a-vision, but won't allow adults to watch other adults engaging - or even pretending to engage - in mutually consensual sex." Amen. Then, a piece on the filming of The Bridge of San Luis Rey with its outstanding cast: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates, F. Murray Abraham, Geraldine Chaplin, Gabriel Byrne and a smorgasbord of Europeans. "There are 12 fantastic characters in the story, and I just scribbled a name down of my favorite actors for each one," says writer-director Mary McGuckian. "I thought, oh well, let's be really ambitious. I never for a moment thought that they'd all do it." It took some serious campaigning, but they did. And then there's David Chute on "a new pan-Asian 'fusion cinema'."

If you've been reluctant to sample even the best of Bollywood, even as a rental, yet you get Turner Classic Movies, your chance to catch up will be tossed right into your lap starting on Thursday as TCM launches its Hooray for Bollywood series of 12 top Indian movies. On the other hand, if you're an old Bollywood pro, you'll want to check George Thomas's Beware of the Blog fairly frequently. Terrific batch of posts on Friday, for example.

The Guardian reports on that full-page ad Sean Penn took out in the NYT while Salon runs the actual text. Adds Gary Younge: "Presumably Sean Penn would not have paid around $125,000 (£76,000) to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times on Friday to write an essay against Bush if he thought he could read it elsewhere."

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers came about as close as a film can to a sweep at the MTV Movie Awards.

Big profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Washington Post.

Leonard Klady interviews Chen Kaige for Movie City News: "For me, the project I would most like to do someday would be about the Cultural Revolution."

The online viewing tip comes via Stephen Reid at Tagline who, after a most concise summary of the latest insult George Lucas has hurled has his fans, points to the much more fun Death Star Repairmen.



Posted by dwhudson at June 2, 2003 5:42 AM