June 6, 2003

Shorts, 6/6.

wes-anderson.jpg A widely reported news item can sometimes lead to a really nice find. The item: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Peter Stormare and Bud Cort have all signed up for roles in Wes Anderson's next film, The Life Aquatic.

Now, that last link there will take you to wesanderson.org where you can also find Variety's brief story on the new film. But just look at that site. Isn't that precisely the way a site for Wes Anderson should look? The site that a dapper dresser, politely quirky director (as opposed to an aggressively quirky director, along the lines of, say, Todd Solondz) of movies populated with amusingly quirky characters (as opposed to the frighteningly quirky characters of, say, Happiness) deserves? Well done and a pleasure to browse, too.

Shift gears:

So after 3 hours, all the producers had left because I hadn't strung two sentences together, because I would actually faint and get dizzy. I wouldn't fall down but I would get so dizzy that I would start to faint, hyperventilating, fainting and Ang came over to me and all the producers were gone and I was on my haunches rocking back and forth and Ang said, "Do you think it's time to string two sentences together?"

Quite an interview with Nick Nolte Paul Fischer's got there in Moviehole.

"I'm telling you all this because I know you want to know. Everyone loves a true story, the stranger the better." That's actually how Paul Berczeller's oddly moving story in the Guardian ends, not how it begins. He set out to make a Chris Marker-like film about a Japanese woman who went searching for the million bucks she saw buried in Fargo. Funny, true, but it also turns sad, and yes, strange.

Also in the Guardian:

  • David Mamet's column, ostensibly about widescreen but also a quick primer on cinematic language;
  • Danny Leigh's talk with Jeff Goldblum;
  • Robert Gitt on what the recovered rushes - "more than 80,000ft of picture and sound trims of varying lengths, all confusingly wound together on dozens of interleaved rolls" - reveal about the making of Charles Laughton's classic The Night of the Hunter;
  • and Jonathan Rosenbaum, worrying at first that Tian Zhuangzhuang, "one of my favourite Chinese film-makers," would botch a remake of Fei Mu's Springtime in a Small Town, "a locus classicus of Chinese cinema whose discovery in the west is long overdue," and then discovering, to his pleasant surprise that, "The most remarkable thing about Tian's complex and wholly self-sufficient re-creation is how faithfully it honours its source without ever stooping to simple imitation or postmodernist 'homage'."

    Michael Sragow in the Los Angeles Times:

    Even today's most jaded moviegoers, suspicious of idealism or sentiment, will get snagged in this movie's web of personality and intrigue. For when set against The Great Escape< today's blockbusters are the comic-dramatic equivalents of starvation diets. This film contains a baker's dozen of distinct characters, all limned with clarity and color. Compare that accomplishment with the current box office champ, The Matrix Reloaded, which defines its heroes and villains mostly by couture.

    Also in the LAT: Barbara Taylor Bradford, the one-woman bodice-ripper factory, has shaken Bollywood by putting a stop to a 260-part TV series with a single lawsuit. Ramola Talwar Badam reports.

    "Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins can plead the case for saving the spotted owl, but Sinatra and his pals were instrumental in putting Kennedy into office. That's power." Tara Taghizadeh in PopMatters on the Rat Pack.

    Pixar is the next Disney, Chris Suellentrop argues in Slate, and that, he says, is both good and bad news.

    Briefly reviewed in the Austin Chronicle: W.C. Fields: A Biography by James Curtis and Sunkissed: Sunwear and the Hollywood Beauty 1930-1950 by, coincidentally, Joshua James Curtis (not the same guy).

    Online viewing tip. Edward the Less, via Craig P, who says, "It's a rollicking little online series voiced by the talents from Mystery Science Theater. Très funny in a Black Adder-ish sort of way, though the animation is less animated then comic book panels zoomed in and out on."

    Wattstax And another one. The trailer for Wattstax. The remixed and remastered special edition opens today in a handful of cities and will be rolling out over the summer.

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    Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2003 9:17 AM