Shorts, 19/11.

Chris Marker

Well, he's wowed again: "[S]imply saying Sans soleil marks the apogee and outer limits of the essay film - in which images are assembled according more to themes and clusters of ideas than to personalities and narratives longer than a moment or so in duration - is a little like saying Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is a book with a lot of big words." After a piece as fine as Stephens's, you might want to explore a Chris Marker site.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Annalee Newitz: "While one should never underestimate the lure of spectacular CGI and Keanu's ass, the appeal of these films clearly goes beyond eye candy. The Matrix trilogy fascinates people across the globe because it manages, gloriously and terrifyingly, to capture turn-of-the-century paranoia about corporate control of our culture."

And in the SF Weekly, Noa Jones catches the world premiere of Blood Money, a film by "Tony Tarantino, Quentin's father, a bit actor doused in Grecian Formula, and writer-director Jim Meyer, an ex-used-car-salesman who hosts a public access TV show in Marin County."

Back in September, we worried about too much of a good thing going on all at once for Sofia Coppola. Would Lost in Translation "peak" too early, i.e., before awards season (for whatever that might be worth)? Would there be a backlash against Coppola herself? Two telling signs today that the curtain may have indeed begun to rise on that very worst-case scenario: Alexandra Wolfe's item #3 in the New York Observer's "Transom" column dares to suggest that Sofia's "nonchalant Oscar attitude" is... are you sitting down?... a put-on!

And then there's Matthew Wilder in the City Pages praising hubby Spike Jonze's "unique genius for aping a discredited or sheerly cruddy pop-culture form and simultaneously sending it up, writing it a love letter, and giving it a 100-percent original spin" (no argument here) but only as a way to set up Sofia for the fall: "Me, I'd be afraid to go anywhere near the poker-faced abstainers of Lost in Translation. I might order them the wrong vodka and never hear the end of it." Pow! As if that alone weren't enough damage inflicted, someone's gone and given poor Mr. Wilder a headline that has absolutely nothing to do with his piece: "Spike and Sofia on the Skids?"

Back to the NYO for a moment: Ron Rosenbaum was infuriating to read during the Bushies' year-or-more-long PR campaign building up to the war in Iraq, but he isn't always wrong. He's got a thought-provoking piece this week on, among other things, Martin Amis's Yellow Dog and Bruce Wagner's "brilliant" Still Holding; what's Wagner "getting at"? "Hollywood is our nation's head injury, the source of our spiritual retardation."

Meanwhile, Neil LaBute. Not only is he currently writing a diary in Slate, he recently entertained an audience (note the frequent "[Laughter]" breaks) during one of those long Guardian/NFT interviews. Also in Slate, by the way: How stars get their stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In Salon: Amy Reiter talks to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Rebecca Traister rides the Middle-earth Shuttle.

In the Guardian: Geoffrey Macnab on Alexander Sokurov, Ronald Bergan's obit for Ken Gampu, "the first black South African film star," and Martin Wainwright on the Salford Film Festival: "With real panache, Manchester's grubby kid sister is revisiting its truly remarkable silver screen past - and putting it to service in urban regeneration."

"Dennis Potter is twitching back into life," writes Johann Hari rather morbidly in the Independent.

A nice pair, particularly in the immediate wake of the release on DVD of Once Upon a Time in the West: J. Hoberman's review and notes on Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker which, he writes, "belongs with the crazy left-wing westerns that mark the post-'60s wreck of revolutionary dreams: Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's near unwatchable Wind From the East"; and Mark Peranson's review of Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and The Mythology of the Sixties, which "[charts] America's plunge down the post-hegemonic sewer with typical wit and vigor. This subjective popular history crackles with you-are-there-ness."

In the New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz meets Robert Drew and Armond White on Isaac Julien, whose "Baltimore and Paradise Omeros revive cinema outside of cinema. Movies may have a future after all."

Matt Langdon wraps up his final blurbs on the films he caught at the AFI Film Fest.

Online viewing tip. The Flash intro and subsequent "pages" at the site for Teriha, which is to be a man-made island in Hakata Bay with 1500 houses over 400 hectares, all inspired by sketches by Hayao Miyazaki. Via Anime News Network and News of the Dead.

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2003 9:05 AM