Shorts, 7/2.

"You have to be absolutely sure of what you want to do. Then not only make the film, but still want to do promotion and the rest afterwards. You keep company with a film a long time. But I can sense which stories have only a fleeting interest for me. Others hang around obsessively in my head." Erica Abeel interviews François Ozon in indieWIRE.

This time around, he's talking about Swimming Pool, starring Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier as, well, as Dennis Lim puts it in his Village Voice review, "the veddy English old maid and the ooh-la-la French slut." A. O. Scott also reviews the film today in the New York Times: "The two women, the handsome waiter, the hours of idleness, the swimming pool: it sounds like, and on one level is, a scenario worthy of Eric Rohmer. But Mr. Ozon is as perverse as he is resourceful, so he slyly turns his delicate study in generational and cross-cultural sexual rivalry into a suspense thriller."

And here, we can go straight to today's online viewing tip, the half a dozen clips from Swimming Pool currently viewable at François Ozon's official site.

The big, new issue of Midnight Eye opens with an interview with Yusuke Iseya and Takamasa Kameishi - not exactly household names yet, even among fans of Japanese cinema. But their new movie, Kakuto, sounds promising and was produced by the director of After Life and Maborosi, Hirokazu Kore-eda. Then there are reviews of Seijun Suzuki's Story of Sorrow and Sadness ("this long-overlooked work simply cries out for revival") and Hidenori Sugimori's Woman of Water ("cinema reduced to a moving picture book") and the whole is rounded out with a big special on Tom Mes's new book, Agitator - The Cinema of Takashi Miike. As it happens, we've just put up our own interview with Takashi Miike. Complementary reading, all around.

G. Beato at his excellent Soundbitten:

How would Arnold govern? I'm not really sure, but ideally the job would keep him too busy to make movies, and that would be good for California, good for the United States, good for the world. If Arnold served a full eight years, Hollywood could presumably invest $640 million (eight movies with a budget of $80 million each) in more interesting, more commercially viable products.

Richard Schickel, Johnny Depp and Geraldine Chaplin chime in in an AP story on the new Charlie Chaplin DVDs.

And with that, we are back in Hollywood, or rather, wherever Katharine Hepburn took a whole wide swath of its history. Rex Reed in the New York Observer:

Right up to her death last week at 96, millions of people still cared very much what she said and did because she represented precision, order, character, taste, standards, integrity and determination - qualities as rare as Christmas bluejays.... Audrey was the Hepburn women wanted to look like. Kate was the Hepburn they wanted to be like. Nobody really knows why, although whole books have tried to analyze her strange and powerful influence on her own time.

To wrap, the NYO's Transom column informs us what sort of chocolates Kate liked and passes on the last joke Buddy Hackett ever told.



Posted by dwhudson at July 2, 2003 7:33 AM