June 11, 2003

Shorts, 6/11.

Harry Knowles "Well Moriarty certainly stirred up the shit yesterday didn't he?" He certainly did. Harry Knowles is talking about the rant that launched a thousand replies at Ain't It Cool News, the one by Drew McWeeny blasting the scores of people who have, weeks before the movie's premiere, posted pans of Ang Lee's The Hulk based on an unpolished work print circulating out there. The mystery of how it got out in the first place is the subject of a brief report in the Los Angeles Times, but for David Poland, the long-term story here - very long-term; his ruminations come in two parts - is the evolution of AICN, and by extension, the evolution of the film industry as it scrambles to simultaneously protect itself from, and of course, use online vortexes like AICN.

Meantime, there are festivals to keep up with and, for Leonard Klady in Movie City News, tomorrow's opening of the Los Angeles Film Festival is an opportunity to consider how the "surfeit of film festivals" in general has also prodded the evolution of the industry. Jessica Hundley, in the LAT, sticks closer to the LAFF itself, but though organizers are giving it their best shot, both writers agree that LA has a long way to go before it's got a major festival in the city.

But major may not always be better. There's a lot to be said for focus and a manageable schedule, for organizers and viewers alike. The San Francisco Black Film Festival, for example, begins today and runs for a modest five days (I get a few words in on it here) and the San Francisco Bay Guardian critics prep for their city's International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival with capsule reviews of highlights, Dennis Harvey's take on the state of camp ('It's a reverse elitism that understands how - with a little wishful thinking on the part of the viewer - the excesses, foibles, and clichés of 'normal' society can be seen to parody themselves") and Lynn Rapoport's piece on Barbara Teufel's Gallant Girls ("Part documentary, part drama, the film is an accounting of the years between 1987 and 1991 in the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg, as lived through by a group of anarchist punks battling the state, the press, and the International Monetary Fund").

Trouble in Paradise "Hedonism was never more nonchalant," enthuses J. Hoberman as he reintroduces Trouble in Paradise and provides a swift overview of the career of its director, Ernst Lubitsch, on the eve of a 34-film retro at NYC's Film Forum.

A relatively new issue of The Film Journal is up, with more on "Fringe Cinema," a talk with Gus Van Sant about Gerry and Elephant and pieces on digital filmmaking, New Queer Cinema, Caligari, Hal Hartley, Elizabeth, Groundhog Day and a healthy batch of reviews.

Stanley Kauffmann huffs and puffs and announces in the New Republic that he'll review serious science fiction but won't bother with any of the Matrix films. "Adolescent fodder," he snorts. I've always kind of liked Kauffmann, remember seeing him on Dick Cavett when I was a kid, but heavens, I'm afraid his age is beginning to show.

For Anime News Network, Jonathan Mays interviews Cindy Yamauchi, a key animator for Akira, Ranma ½, and Record of Lodoss War: "If you absolutely want to be anime animator, I suggest first learning Japanese. There's absolutely no way around that; you need to know the language. I don't care how creatively talented you are. It doesn't mean anything if you can't communicate."

In Salon, David Ng interviews Amir Naderi, "an Iranian-born director who, after revolutionizing cinema in his own country, moved to the United States in the early 1980s and has been working here ever since." I particularly like this comment: "New York for me is not America. It is its own country." Sometimes a foreigner's eyes see clearest.

The LAT's Lorenza Muñoz traces the various stops and starts as distributors try to nail that viable Spanish-language market in the US.

Samuel G. Freedman gathers some interesting reactions from black religious leaders on the casting of Morgan Freeman as God in Bruce Almighty. Also in the New York Times: Somini Sengupta files a report from Bunia, Congo, where boys and young men take a break from the ferocious war by watching "Congolese music videos and one shoot-'em-up movie after another."

Devilrobot Online viewing tip. The Tokyo-based creative collective Devilrobots has put together a DVD and called it Evil Gold with 26 segments, A to Z. Click there to see a sample, more or less divided into three parts, the third of which looks most interesting to me. But then, that's just me.

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Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2003 9:08 AM

Comments

"adolescent fodder" may be pushing it, but stanley kauffmann's got a point calling the matrix movies "aggrandized juvenilia."

even fodder might be okay, since he's probably using the word right, and it's not that bad a word, used right: "inferior or readily available material used to supply a heavy demand."

Posted by: "chirp" at June 11, 2003 10:01 AM

What surprises me, though, is that he doesn't seem to feel the slightest compulsion to address the movies as a cultural event (for immediate lack of a better word; there must be a better word than 'event'). Except to say that he's got a lot of mail about his ignoring it. Granted:

1. No film critic is obligated to write about anything;

2. There may not actually be a single fresh idea, cinematic, philosophical or otherwise in the Matrix movies, but few could argue that the way the brothers chose their ingredients and cooked them up didn't strike a nerve. Even if you can't help but turn up your nose at what's ultimately served, when you see everyone else at the party do double-flips over it, surely, you've got to wonder why. You've got to wonder what's in there that's got everyone so excited, that's got people claiming this story as the mythology of their time, etc., etc.

But then, Kauffmann doesn't really come from that school that feels obligated to cast every cultural trinket, great and small, within its broader and deeper context. I find that interesting. There's something very "New Critic" about him, as if his critical apparatus were formed in the first half of the 20th century and, while he can appreciate even films that wear their pomo cred on their sleeve, and maybe even write well and insightfully about them, the apparatus itself remains the same.

Posted by: David Hudson at June 11, 2003 11:35 AM