August 30, 2003
Weekend Shorts.
"Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival yesterday was palpable."
That'd be Thursday, but still. Good news, the kind that can counter the effect of a headline like, "Is it all over for Woody Allen?" And the good news comes from Fiachra Gibbons, who also reports, among other nuggets, that, while Tarantino didn't get Kill Bill ready this time around, either, "Venice is replete with big budget American films which failed to make the deadline for Cannes."
But before Woody fans break out the champagne, it should be noted that indieWIRE's Leslie Felperin is calling the response to Anything Else "mixed," while Screen Daily's Dan Fainaru pans it outright: "[U]ltimately this may well be Allen's saddest picture in years, a personal re-evaluation of his work seen in the light of the present, reaching a verdict that is less than flattering." Oh, dear.
Meantime, "the festival has already had its first minor scandal," writes Felperin. Seems that since she's only 15, Hana Makhmalbaf couldn't get accreditation - meaning, of course, she wouldn't have been allowed to see even her own film if the glitch hadn't been ironed out. Also in indieWIRE: the Telluride lineup.
The long, leisurely read for the weekend has to be Lynn Hirschberg's profile of Sofia Coppola in the New York Times Magazine. In the paper, Stephen Holden rounds up the good movies of the summer and Anita Gates, in anticipation of The Runaway Jury, compiles a list of court-room dramas.
Back to the Guardian:
"It makes us to know what already we are knowing," is a remark typical of the European assessments of Bowling for Columbine that The Stranger's Sean Nelson kept running into this summer. And it troubles him. Excellent, brief piece.
Loving cities and loving movies as I do, thrilling whenever the two overlap thematically somehow, I'm naturally drawn to a pair of pieces Ray Pride as done for New City Chicago:
The weather is miserable: that is one of the key truths about why there has never been a filmmaking culture here the way there is in New York City, or Los Angeles, or the Bay Area. A historical disdain for filmmaking under the rule of the first Mayor Daley, and an allegedly corrupt production system have also prevented the talented from staying in a city they might love, but one that cannot pay them a living wage for what they want to do with their lives.
The second piece is cheerier than that first one. It's a run-down of "Chicago movie milestones." Via Pride's current column at Movie City News.
Marc Savlov's Austin Chronicle article on the Austin Film Society series, "Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film" sent me to the AFS site. Nice. You can, for example, download a PDF copy of their newly relaunched magazine, P.o.V., which can be a little Chamber-of-Commerce-y, but also has a longish piece in there on that Dazed and Confused reunion a while back.
Christian De Sica will be playing his father, Vittorio, in a film depicting the making of La Porta del Cielo (The Door of the Heavens) for which the elder De Sica "used 300 Jews and anti-fascists as bit players to save them from the Nazis and fascists who dominated Rome." The Age has the story.
Philosophy prof Mark T. Conrad, co-editor of The Simpsons and Philosophy and Woody Allen and Philosophy, has revised an essay on Pulp Fiction for Metaphilm.
If you don't get time to read The Human Stain before the movie opens, you still might want to read Matthew Norman's profile of Philip Roth in the Independent.
Interviews:
Looking for the next Tom Tykwer: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports on the First Steps awards and program.
Also: the "grand old dame of movie theaters in Germany, the Lichtburg in Essen.
How cool is it that Flak Magazine is promoting their new print version with package deals that include audio commentaries for Big Lebowski and Mulholland Drive?
Oh, a piece on Ashton Kutcher. I almost made the mistake of clicking on elsewhere before I caught site of the byline: Heather Havrilesky. You know it's going to be about a lot more than Ashton Kutcher.
The Economist sums up the current state of the battle between Hollywood and digital pirates. No real news here, but if you haven't been paying attention, the piece works fine as a quick run-down.
The same could be said of Tobias Seamon's Morning News article on The Passion.
Listen, Greg Allen is looking for movie recommendations. Help the guy out, would you?
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