Our Japan thing, plus shorts.

Quite a bit of overlap in the film departments of the duelling NYC alt.weeklies this time around. And why not. After all, there's an Olivier Assayas retrospective in town, opening tomorrow, and his demonlover is, as Film Comment dubs it, the "movie of the moment." Can't ignore that.

But let's start with this, from the Village Voice's Michael Musto: "Last year, the big indie movie trend, for whatever reason, was Douglas Sirk homages, and a couple of seconds ago, it was kids mutilating themselves and/or each other (Thirteen, Zero Day, Home Room, Party Monster, and soon Elephant). Well, drop your rifles and pick up your sake glasses because now it's quirky romances with a rarefied Japanese twist." No kidding. Musto mentions Sue Brooks's Japanese Story and, of course, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.

But drop the quirky romance criterion and take a second look at the fall schedule. We've got Japan on the brain this season. Quentin Tarantino cross-dresses the samurai flick in Hong Kong action attire with Kill Bill, Assayas has his demonlovers chase after hentai, and let's not forget the Yasuziro Ozu retrospective next month. One could strain for some sort of explanation - the Japanese economy is finally on the mend, helping Japan to reclaim some of its former global mindshare or some such - but that'd be quite a stretch. It's more likely simply a confluence of individual interests and experience on the one hand - Coppola's lonely nights in Tokyo, Tarantino's grazing on, Assayas's long-term interest in pan-Asian modernity - happenstance in the release schedule on the other hand.

At the same time, there's something to what Assayas tells Dennis Lim in the Voice:

It scares me that independent films are not evolving fast enough. Mainstream films are at least somehow connected with a collective subconscious. They're collective works - there's a director, but ultimately no one made it, the machine created it. Without knowing it, they end up expressing pretty complex things about our fears and obsessions, even when they have the most primitive narratives. Something like Terminator 3 - on the one hand, it's a conventional third installment, but it's also a movie about how men are scared of the modernity of femininity. To me that film was saying that men are outdated, but girls are so connected, so much sharper, and a major threat.

Pop culture as the most telling set of symptoms of whatever's ailing us at the moment? Hardly a fresh idea, but it's expressed well and with a twist, a reminder that independent work might tell us something about the next five minutes, but it's far from reliable; whereas pop can only speak to the present moment, maybe the past five minutes, but is far more often right on the money.

Ok, but what about the film. Lim is impressed, though he does note that demonlover "start[s] to fissure somewhere around the halfway mark - a detonation that may at first seem Lynchian, akin to the rupture that splits Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive in two, though it's more of a terminal hemorrhage in this case." J. Hoberman more or less agrees, but over at the New York Press, Armond White isn't having any of it: "Problem is, like any Prada-wearing hipster, Assayas easily accepts moral defeat." While he's at it, he takes a swipe at David Cronenberg's Spider for good measure. It's left to Saul Austerlitz to recommend the retrospective anyway.

Also in the NYP: Matt Zoller Seitz's substantive and fair obit for Leni Riefenstahl: "One can no more imagine moving pictures without Riefenstahl than one can imagine the alphabet without the letter 'E.'" By comparison, it's difficult to know what Michael Atkinson is after with his two paragraphs other than maybe a prose poem. Then again, Voice critics have been leaking that, with the paper's new design, their word count has been considerably snipped.

Even so, besides the usual reviews, there's still room for:

Elliot Stein's preview of the John Frankenheimer retrospective.

Jessica Winter talks to Jörgen Leth about the hoops Lars von Trier made him jump through for The Five Obstructions.

John Giuffo interviews Neil Gaiman over breakfast.

Rick Perlstein dreams up some kickass TV spots for the Democrats.

And then there's Toronto. Yes, still. It may have wrapped on the weekend, but festivals are pretty intense and this one, already major, may have just become a little more major this year. Attendees are still working through what they've seen; some of them are:

J. Hoberman, placing emphasis on films by two Canadians, Guy Maddin and Neil Young; plus, an amusing footnote: What Toronto had but the New York Film Festival won't.

"Sex made a big comeback, and it was amazing how graphic it was," reports Rex Reed in the New York Observer. "Meg Ryan, Ewan McGregor, Mark Ruffalo, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts all turned up naked onscreen." But even that wasn't enough to keep Reed from bailing out early.

Johnny Ray Huston goes against the flow in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, championing Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny and Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms. And where others saw Toronto 2003 as a festival all but obsessed with sex, Huston saw "an event containing some angry responses to Stars and Stripes warmongering." Also in the SFBG: David Fear previews ¡Cine Latino! and Laurie Koh blurbs Resfest.

The indieWIRE team picks out a sort of Toronto top ten while Brandon Judell looks back to the Montreal World Film Festival, listing and annotating the winners.

David Poland lists the films he liked and the ones he has reservations about.

In Screen Daily, Allan Hunter reviews John Irvin's The Boys From County Clare and Lee Marshall is still digesting Venice, handing in a review for Jacques Doillon's Raja.

And in the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell zooms in on three films, The Five Obstructions, Mario Van Peebles's How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass and Afropunk: The Rock 'n' Roll Nigger Experience; Dave Kehr captures a moved Omar Sharif and grabs a few quotes from Denys Arcand.

Hey, looks who's on the cover of Filmmaker. You figure half an hour for most interviews, who knows what sort of access for the NYT Magazine, travel and so forth, and you're looking at one helluva campaign. She must be exhausted. But Anne Thompson doesn't have to try to sell a movie ticket or the brand "Sofia Coppola." She can assume the magazine's readers are more interested in the actual making of the film, which makes her piece, even after all the other Lost in Translation pieces strewn around out there, worthwhile.

By the way. A slightly tipsy Rex sez: "And dude, you've totally gotta see this Chemical Brothers video she starred in." True, true. So, is hubby Spike Jonze about to do something with Chuck Palahniuk? Could be, could be.

Also in the Fall issue of Filmmaker:

Nick Jarecki interviews Tom McCarthy, whose debut feature, The Station Agent, picked up a couple of awards at Sundance.

Peter Bowen on Shattered Glass.

Anne Thompson again: "This summer, indie counterprogramming worked like a charm."

Don Lenzer on shooting docs.

Mary Glucksman focuses on six genuine indies.

Jason McBride visits Guy Maddin.

Bari Pearlman checks in on the Flicker film festivals, little celebrations of Super 8 in ten towns here and there.

And then, 8 suggestions for further clicking.

Interviews at Moviehole: Joe Pantoliano and Diane Lane.

Some of us have read all the critical thrashing and heard all the nasty things there are to be said about Quentin Tarantino and yet remain... well, I'm no fan of the word "fan," but let's just say, supportive. And yet the trailers for Kill Bill leave some of us - me, anyway - a little antsy. Chris Suellentrop gives voice to our worries in Slate:

After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix movies, will yet another kung fu movie choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping seem tired? Given Tarantino's time in the wilderness and the middling box office gross for Jackie Brown, are there enough Tarantino fans left to make Kill Bill a big hit? How will it fare in the Oct. 10 critical face-off with the Coen brothers' Intolerable Cruelty? Is Tarantino becoming a cult director, or will he again achieve mass appeal? But the most interesting question has gone largely unasked: Will this movie finally put to rest the whispers that Tarantino can't write a screenplay by himself?

Speaking of The Matrix, if you're hardcore about it, your reading assignment for this evening is "Making the World Safe for Fashionable Philosophy!." Joe Milutis in CTheory. And yes, this will be on the final.

"How To Build Your Children's Self-Esteem Using the Wizard of Oz." It's a a 45-minute workshop in London. Pete May reports in the Guardian.

Online viewing tip. Michael at SignalStation points enthusiastically to the trailer and official site for Battlefield Baseball, "a Japanese horror-comedy that looks to be a surefire hit for fans of Shaolin Soccer and Versus. It's got nerds vs. zombies on the baseball diamond and if you missed it, the Midnight Eye review is still right here."

Posted by dwhudson at September 17, 2003 7:48 AM