GreenCine Daily: Shorts, 10/3.

October 3, 2003

Shorts, 10/3.

"New waves of cinema have come and gone, from countries we should be learning more about (at least before we start bombing them), but rarely have we heard those foreign voices on the vast majority of American movie screens." One powerful antidote is the film festival, writes Joshua Rothkopf in In These Times. Hardly news, of course, but the piece is refreshing in that it focuses on films shown in Toronto that ITT readers are going to find most interesting: The Corporation, for example, "a landmark two-and-a-half hour excoriation of the titular subject."

Which also happens to be the highlight - besides the valuable brief reviews of the animated films he's taken in - of John Torvi's report from Calgary over at filmjourney.org: "It is arguably the most important film that I've seen this year." Editor Doug Cummings adds comments from Karen Neudorf who focuses on the Q&A with one of the directors, Mark Achbar: "He has been working for six years on The Corporation and figures he has one and a half years to go with promotions and festivals... He talked about making a 'kick-ass educational DVD' with a study guide to keep people engaged." That's what DVDs are for. Bravo, Mr. Achbar.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with a little fun to spice up your education as well. Quentin Tarantino's plans for the Kill Bill DVD sound almost overwhelming. He tells Empire that he plans separate releases for Vols. 1 and 2, loaded with extras, and then, a huge double-volume package with a whole new set of extras. In case you missed the notion that this is Tarantino's magnum opus the first time around.

Speaking of whom, in this week's Friday Review at the Guardian:

"You're making them laugh and then it's horrifying and they become a conspirator in your own sickness and that's really wonderful!" Yet another big fat Tarantino profile-slash-interview, this time around by Duncan Campbell.

Derek Malcolm previews a series of Krzysztof Kieslowski's films unreeling in London, focusing, naturally, on the Decalogue and Three Colors trilogy.

David Mamet: "For in American film the whites teach the blacks to play jazz; Oskar Schindler saves the Jews; in myriad films of the Pacific war, strapping GIs teach their little brown brothers, the Filipinos, to defeat the Japs."

Audiences are flocking to opera productions directed by Doris D�rrie, but the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's Eleonore B�ning - no surprise here - is not amused. Melanie Hannon, meanwhile, argues with her German friends about dubbing.

Rani Mukherjee and Ben Affleck, together at last? According to Planet Bollywood's Siddharth Srivastava, the movie may be Bombay California, to be directed by Dev Benegal, and yet another example of the sort of attempts at crossover hits we'll be seeing in the near future. But not in February, that is, not at the Oscars, reports the BBC's Zubair Ahmed.

About those Oscars. The "no-screeners" debacle rages on. IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez reports that UA prez Bingham Ray called reps from all Indiewood companies together for an "unprecedented" meeting on Wednesday to come up with a collective strategy for salvaging their films' shots at awards in the wake of Jack Valenti's assault. And Movie City News has set up a special page devoted to coverage of the mess.

"As the copyright battles get under way, Hollywood should keep its pants on," argues New York Times columnist David Pogue: "Illegal movie collecting will never become as casual or as rampant as illegal song collecting." Hm. I, too, am all for Hollywood keeping its pants on, but I'm not sure that argument will hold for long. Instead, we should point to what Napster and its clones were able to do a few years ago in creating an appetite for alternative music and demonstrate, if we can, that exposure to alternative cinema could have the same effect.

To read the Telegraph, you'll have to register - it's free - but it can be worth it at times. For one thing, the paper's unique conservative is great for laughs; for another, they occasionally nab an interesting contributor, such as Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn:

The presentation of Bright Young Things on our cinema screens this week is cause for national rejoicing, and for many reasons: gifted Stephen Fry - lost lamb no longer - has found his metier at last as a film director; at least two untested young actors (handsome Stephen Campbell Moore and comic Fenella Woolgar) will have launched successful careers for themselves on the back of it; Sir John Mills (95) can now retire with dignity on a high note - a cameo snorting cocaine - and the British film industry may now gaze down with pride upon the ashes from which it has only recently arisen.

Screen Daily reviews: Peter Brunette on Mikael Hafstrom's Evil, Sweden's nomination for the Best Foreign Language Oscar; Frank Hatherley on Jonathan Teplitzky's heist movie Gettin' Square; Jennifer Green on Iciar Bollain's Take My Eyes and Lee Marshall on Edoardo Winspeare's The Miracle.