October 6, 2003

Shorts, 6/10.

A new issue of Senses of Cinema is always a major bump in the road for any cinephiliac just out browsing around. You won't be just clicking along on your way any time soon. Each issue goes deep and broad, and fortunately, you've got two months to catch up before the next one thumps down at the site. This time around, as co-editor Jake Wilson notes, if there is any single overriding idea that permeates the whole issue (and there rarely is), it might be found in the several and various approaches to the question of "what is cinema and what is not."

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Vague enough, then, but it's not a bad point of orientation as you page through pieces ranging from Deleuze to Bowie, Crocodile Dundee to Chinese documentaries, video art to Manoel de Oliveira, plus festival reports, an expanded book review section, 15 new director profiles, annotations and so on and on and on.

Roger Avary proposes a well-intentioned but rather naive solution to the screeners problem: "What if the MPAA worked with a specific technology company (like, say, Apple) to create a specialized DVD player application that only played special DVD's of Academy films...?" But the question has generated several interesting comments in response, particularly those that begin to outline what all this would entail. The great tech cat-n-mouse chase has only just begun.

The latest film director to turn to opera is Pedro Almodóvar, reports Richard Eden. Also in the Observer:

  • Terry Jones, whose frequent criticisms of Tony Blair have always had a Pythonesque flair, isn't cracking as many jokes as before: "As someone who attacks his decision to invade a country that was no conceivable threat to Britain, I do now understand why Tony Blair took his decision. By his own account he took it for no good reason at all - other than the vacuous, incoherent ramblings of a demagogue."
  • What does "Pythonesque" actually mean, anyway? John Fortune attempts an explanation in his review of The Pythons Autobiography.
  • "She's a beautiful artist, but she's uncompromising. But now she's just my hero. I adore her. I love her." Andrew Anthony gets Meg Ryan to say nice things about the director of her latest movie, Jane Campion. Amazing, isn't it.
  • Real-life couples in movies? "It's only a celebrity sprinkle on suburban wife-porn," argues Victoria Coren.

    Peter Conrad on a new book coming out, A Day in the Life of Andy Warhol. The day is in 1965, the photos are by David McCabe and the "chatty, wacky but strikingly perceptive text" is by David Dalton, "who in 1961 became one of the juvenile, adoring hangers-on for whom The Factory was a psychological refuge and also a cultish, heterodox church."

    Via the Guardian's Film... section, I guess it is: "Republic Dogs."

    Matt Clayfield has uploaded Dogs and Hypercubes, a "comparative exploration of both Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Alex Garland's The Tesseract": "The best art is aware of itself. Cinema that knows where it comes in terms of cinematic history... The best art knows where it has come from, and it knows [though perhaps to a lesser extent] where it is going." On a related note, "Magic Machines: A History of the Moving Image from Antiqity to 1900," via cinema minima.

    "Mr. Moore plays to the camera even when he's doing it on the page." Fair enough. At least the New York Times is actually reviewing Dude, Where's My Country?; the paper ignored Stupid White Men even though it was right there, on its own bestseller list for 59 weeks, becoming last year's #1 nonfiction book. Meanwhile, the Guardian goes right on excerpting.

    NYFF Meanwhile, the New York Film Festival is on, so the NYT critics are filing almost daily. Even better, these are festival, not multiplex films: Elvis Mitchell on Lester James Peries's Mansion by the Lake; Stephen Holden on Jan Jakub Kolski's Pornography.

    In yesterday's NYT:

  • Marcelle Clements treks to the Loire Valley to visit Claude Chabrol. Some assignments are pretty tough, but getting the truth out to the people makes it all worthwhile.
  • Mim Udovitch chats with Tarantino. So does David Ansen for Newsweek, by the way.
  • Is this "new cinematic realism" Carlyn James is on about really all that new? It's as old as the movies, actually, but we are seeing more of it in the mainstream recently. Back to Newsweek for a moment: Jonathan Darman talks to James Carville about the most prominent example of the moment, K Street; and about Carville's next role in a remake of All the King's Men, with a screenplay by Steve Zaillian.
  • Elvis Mitchell again on Denzel Washington, again, this time on his role as a cop. Again.
  • Eryn Brown reports on Electronic Arts relocating from Silicon Valley to Hollywood.
  • Alan Riding on Jean Cocteau: "As one French critic said of him: 'Very well known, therefore unknown.'"
  • Steve Young explains how he cobbled together the screenplay for Saving Jessica Lynch.

    Screen Daily's Dan Fainaru files from Pusan with a review of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Doppelganger; Lee Marshall reviews Khyentse Norbu's Travellers & Magicians, "the first feature film to be shot entirely within the secret and reclusive Kingdom of Bhutan."

    Leftish Japanese fans of Ken Loach will be keeping an eye on his reaction to receiving an award from "the most right-wing people in Japan."

    CNN runs an AP story on just how pissed off Ravi Shankar and Norah Jones are over Dev Anand's Song of Life, a Bollywood flick set to tell their story, though it's not supposed to be their story really, though, of course, it is.

    Online viewing tip. Exquisitemtv.com, via Fimoculous.



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    Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2003 8:19 AM