Shorts, 6/15.

I've pointed to reviews of both these books before, but this is a very fine pair in today's Los Angeles Times Book Review: Jonathan Kirsch on Leslie Epstein's San Remo Drive: A Novel From Memory and Michael Frank on Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. From the first:

The neighbor whose Doberman pinscher frightens the Jacobi boys is Thomas Mann, living in exile in the Palisades, and the family friend who sets up a movie screen in the Jacobi living room to show "an early cut of Sunset Boulevard" is Billy Wilder:

"'You're dead!' shouted Bartie, addressing the floating corpse of Bill Holden. 'Shut up, shut up, shut up! You can't be talking!'"

And from the second:

Ah, California: Using Muybridge as her conduit, Solnit builds a case for the state having produced an alternative modernism, a kind of balancing pendant to the artistic and literary modernism that emerged in Paris in the 19th century. California's modern experience, she argues, is an "amalgamation of technology, entertainment, and what gets called lifestyle." She even goes so far as to nominate the moment when the railroad baron Leland Stanford engaged the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to see if he could make an image of a horse in motion as a creation story behind California's two significant transformations of the world, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Claire Danes broke with California at a young age only to return quite suddenly and in a big way: "So the script was sent over and within hours I had to decide whether I was going to commit myself to a film with the largest budget of all time." Garth Pearce interviews her in the Sunday Times. Another young "veteran" interviewed in a British paper: Kieran Culkin in the Guardian.

"Up with Down With Love," insists Peter Merholz. Earlier: "Should couples feel compelled to see every movie together? Seeing a film alone is not a signal of the end of your love - it's just a reflection of different tastes. In fact, it can be very liberating." Say Amen, somebody.

Two appreciations of Gregory Peck: David Thomson in the LAT and Philip French in the Observer.

Patrick McGilligan, biographer of Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Robert Altman, George Cukor, Fritz Lang and the list goes on, talks with LeRoy Collins, who starred in Oscar Micheaux's last film, The Betrayal.

"This 10 day festival will be, simply put, the biggest, most thorough set of screenings ever done anywhere in the world, of stereoscopic films from the 1950's." The World 3-D Film Expo is to be staged at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood in September. Also coming down the pipe: A 3-D children's film from Bollywood with Anupam Kher.

Francis Ford Coppola has helped bring the most expensive and most successful movie ever made in Thailand to the screen, reports Sheila Johnston in the New York Daily News. The Legend of Suriyothai, says Coppola, is "the story of these extraordinary queens manipulating power with all the tools at their disposal: sex and betrayal and poison." Via Movie City News.

In the New York Times:

Tony Scott on Ernst Lubitsch;

Jon Pareles on Neil Young's Greendale;

Stephen Kotkin on a film that sounds fun - really! - Tycoon: A New Russian, recently trashed in the Village Voice;

Terrence Rafferty on "Dumb Comedy: The Hardest Kind";

Amy Wallace on the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants: "'I tell Mack, "Daddy's not famous. SpongeBob is,"' Mr. Kenny said. So far, it seems, Mack isn't buying it";

"Usually, I avoid remakes," writes Maureen Dowd on the editorial page of the arguably the most important newspaper in the world. Having run out of puns on the names of the key figures of the Bush administration, maybe, she continues, "But I'm intrigued to see what the director Frank Oz and the screenwriter Paul Rudnick do with their new version of the 1975 cult thriller and ingenious spoof on male fear of female assertion, The Stepford Wives, a William Goldman screenplay from an Ira Levin novel.

Adrian Martin is a fine critic and he's got quite an assertion to make in the introduction to his new book, The Mad Max Movies:

No other Australian films have influenced world cinema and popular culture as widely and lastingly as George Miller's Mad Max movies. From a horde of trashy Italian exploitation films to the hip homage by the Coen brothers' Raising Arizona; from a low-budget, leftist allegory like Diesel to a grandiose Hollywood epic like Waterworld; from Australian rock videos by John Paul Young, Rose Tattoo and the Angels to the delirious, supernatural or sci-fi fantasy-thrillers of Tsui Hark in Hong Kong, Luc Besson in France and Guillermo del Toro in Mexico; from post-punk fashion to cyberpunk fiction - the trace of Max is everywhere.

Peter Barton keeps one helluvan exhaustive and up-to-date site on them as well, right here.

Joseph Connolly watches his novel of the English seaside become the "funny, swift, sexy - and very, very French" film, Summer Things.

"The latest trend from the movers and shakers of the film world is a return to 1930s-style on-screen modesty," reports Edward Helmore in the Observer. The blame gets spread all over, but two of the prime culprits, evidently, are Washington, and of course, the Internet.

In USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna lists a few of the new scenes we can look forward to in the extendedspecialdeluxealmighty 4-DVD edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers released on November 18.

Online viewing tips. The 3rd Annual Media That Matters Film Festival is up and running. Also, the word from Fimoculous: "Radiohead.tv has launched. Awesome."



Posted by dwhudson at June 15, 2003 9:09 AM