GreenCine Daily: Weekend Shorts.

July 12, 2003

Weekend Shorts.

Let's start right off with the online viewing tip. The Utopia Project we mentioned last month - the one being curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, the one sending artists' posters out into the world from the Venice Biennale - has added another large group, and among them is this one, from Jonas Mekas.

Wonder if this works as a segue: Mekas's films are mostly silent, and hey, guess what? GreenCine is a sponsor of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival running two days only, this weekend. Not a particularly smooth segue. But along the same vein, many, many GreenCiners will be heading to San Diego later in the week for Comic-Con 2003 where the program for the International Independent Film Festival (CCI-IFF) is definitely worth a browse even if you can't actually be there.

An abrupt lurch: Martin Sheen, interviewed in The Progressive, via Long Pauses:

It is real clear to those of us who understand the Twelve Step program that these are very dysfunctional times. We live in a very dysfunctional society, and this is a very, very dysfunctional Administration. The proven way for this Administration to keep power is to keep us all in fear. As long as we are afraid of the unknown and afraid of each other, he, or anyone like him, can rule. It's like they will take responsibility for protecting us. It's when we take back the responsibility for protecting ourselves that they get scared.

Bruce Lee Steve Rose in the Guardian:

[Bruce] Lee may be one of the most famous Chinese people who ever lived, the figurehead of an enduring martial-arts cult, and the man Hong Kong's film industry has to thank for its now global reach, yet his memory has not been well preserved. In fact, as Hong Kong has built and rebuilt itself into a first-world city, any trace of Lee is rapidly being eradicated.

Also in the Guardian: Stuart Jeffries talks to Anne Parillaud, David Fickling on what Whale Rider means to Maori film and Geoffrey Macnab talks to Shekhar Kapur about The Four Feathers.

Which leads me back to one of my favorite film-related reads, The Phantom Empire by Geoffrey O'Brien:

The Sudanese question, or the very existence of Sudan: how likely is it you would even have a glimmer of them without the cultural accidents of The Four Feathers and Khartoum? Khartoum and Omdurman are old news events accidentally preserved in movie plots, like the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers caught in the La Brea tar pits. For that matter isn't the British Empire by now remembered chiefly as the occasion for Alexander Korda movies, for C. Aubrey Smith's impressions of blustery colonels and old India hands, for Sanders of the River and Gunga Din and The Charge of the Light Brigade?

George Thomas sets 'em straight regarding Kol Mil Gaya: "It's being billed as 'the first Sci-fi film in Hindi'. Well, we faithful viewers of all trash coming from Bollywood know very well that making scientific fiction (read: anything scientifically impossible) is second-nature for Bombay's film capital."

Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle is moving onto more cities, Austin and Seattle among them. The Stranger runs a trio of related items, a talk with artist, a how-to piece, as in how to watch it, and a breakdown of what to expect from the individual parts. Oh, and in the same issue, Sean Nelson has gone and made me laugh again. On The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: "First of all: DORIAN GRAY? What's he going to do, quip them to death?"

Congrats to Jeremy Harrison for wrapping his shoot.

In the Los Angeles Times:

It's Rowan Atkinson weekend at the LAT. One piece is a portrait, complete with a sidebar guide to British humor, and another is a backgrounder on the production of Atkinson's latest, Johnny English, noting that, even if American audiences ignore it when it opens Friday, it's already a hit.

Peter McQuaid catches up with Daryl Hannah.

Kenneth Turan on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art series La Belle Epoque on Film, but in particular, two films, Jacques Becker's Casque d'or and Max Ophuls's The Earrings of Madame de....

Steven Rosen on movies about bands.

A few tech notes. A company called DKP Effects Inc is betting that you want to determine the course of the plot when you watch a movie. That's a gamble that goes back, via the CD-ROM, to the pressure on Dickens to come up with happy endings to stories set in unhappy times. Myself, I wouldn't bet on the DVDn, but then, I'm not exactly rolling in it, so don't listen to me. Via Movie City News. And then, the Economist on the self-destructing DVD.