May 3, 2004

Shorts, 5/3.

Bobbing Arnold Brian Flemming has a new e-book out; he tells the story behind it in an open letter to Arnold Schwarzenegger's lawyer, Martin Singer, and in this link-laced entry.

Andrea Meyer had a terrific and meaty conversation with Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini at Sundance. Today, it appears in indieWIRE. Rossellini:

One of the things that fascinated me is that cinema still is looked at as a technology. It was presented 100 years ago in magic shows, like a trick, and they're still waiting for the new technologies. It's still promoted that way, the new cinemascope or the new special effect or the digital camera. It's always the new technology and what artists can do with the new technology, and all the technologies impose a certain storytelling that is forgotten as the technologies progressed. In Guy, you go back and look at all that.

In addition to grading the films he caught at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Jason Overbeck offers an annotated list of his top five right here.

The cinetrix caught a few good movies over the weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston.

The Film Festival of India in Atlanta sparks comments on Kannathil Muthamittal from George Thomas and commentary on selected films from director Mani Ratnam from Ramanand.

Via Steve Gallagher at Filmmaker: Media That Matters Fest #4 launches May 19; GLAAD's "'I Do' Contest." Submission deadline: June 1.

Gary Indiana in Artforum on Los Angeles Plays Itself: "[Thom] Andersen is far more obsessed with movies that "get it wrong" than with ones that get it right, and he's willing to split infinitesimal hairs to show how films ignore, misrepresent, banalize, and stigmatize the city he loves." The first half of that sentence, by the way, is an intriguing list of films Indiana clearly thinks get it right.

In the Guardian and Observer:

Performance

  • Suzie Mackenzie interviews Robert Altman. The occasion is the opening of The Company in the UK, but she begins with a great story about the filming of Gosford Park. As it happens, in this week's Review, Catherine Bennett reviews Snobs, the new novel by Gosford Park screenwriter Julian Fellowes: "For the novice climber, Fellowes's guide to the basics of social mountaineering should prove a godsend." Performance is being re-released in the UK on Friday and Michael Holden looks back almost in awe: "As remarkable as the film remains, the story of how it came into being and who was involved is more extraordinary still."
  • After a swift refresher course on the history of Cyprus, Fiachra Gibbons describes the "remarkable partnership" of Turkish-Cypriot director Dervish Zaim and Greek-Cypriot producer Panicos Chrysanthou.
  • Mark Kermode loathes Cannes; Jason Solomons loves it; and Solomons and Akin Ojumu sort through the lineup.
  • Reviewing Catherine Deneuve's collection of notebooks, A l'ombre de moi-même, Liz Hoggard wonders if the book is really worth getting all worked up about, at least to the extent the French intelligensia did last week.
  • John Patterson briefly profiles Val Kilmer, "a marvelous actor"; then again, "Maybe he's certifiably nuts."

Via Movie City News, Johanna Schneller in the Globe and Mail, talking with Julianne Moore, "a serious actress with a full set of eccentricities who is, charmingly, fully aware of them." And: Carl Swanson in New York on Elvis Mitchell's departure from the New York Times.

In the NYT itself:

  • Another interview with Morgan Spurlock. This time with Susan Dominus. Fortunately, he's a fun interviewee (he gets her to try a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese) and he knows what he's after: "I want people to walk out of this movie and be infuriated. I want them to walk out of this movie and say, 'What are my kids eating at school?'"
  • Nobel Prize-winner Harold Varmus: "The precedent for Adam No. 2, then, is not really Dolly, the most famous of clones, but Frankenstein's monster, the most famous of horrors. The monster of Godsend (which can be read as God's End as well as God Send) is a more modern amalgam, an assembly of genes rather than body parts, and its desirable outward appearance belies internal horrors, whereas in Mary Shelley's invention external horror concealed beneficence."
  • AO Scott: "Revenge has been a staple of American films for most of their history, but lately it has begun to seem like the only thing our movies (or perhaps our movie audiences) can understand." Also, a brief profile of Maya Sansa.
  • Terrence Rafferty on the restored Godzilla, "a surprisingly compelling pop-culture artifact: a picture of the strange forms nuclear anxiety took in an era that now feels nearly as remote as the Jurassic."
  • By cutting costs and getting its various entertainment divisions to let each other know what they're up to, Sony may be faring better, reports Laura M Holson; meanwhile, Andrew Ross Sorkin wonders if Kirk Kerkorian will ever let MGM go.

In Bad Subjects, Tamara Watkins explains the appeal of The Osbournes, particularly Ozzy: "He's just like all of our dads... except he's on MTV."

In the Independent:

Peter Sellers

Time plugs Time Warner's Troy by dramatizing the stakes: "[T]he odds of a movie of Troy's scope making money have never been longer," writes Josh Tyrangiel in his featurette-in-print, complete with a Brad Pitt sidebar; Richard Corliss previews the film in language that's somehow both boisterous and coy: "This is The Iliad as a WWE SmackDown: violent fights, snappy insults and a connoisseur's idolatry of beautiful brawn. (Who knew Greece had so many blonds?)"

For the Washington Post, Martha Sherrill reviews Maureen Orth's The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex.

Among the many questions Jennifer Barrett asks of Margaret Cho is the one about being invited to the White House: "No, I don't even RSVP. If there was a box that said 'As If,' I would check that." Also in Newsweek: Sean Smith: "Van Helsing is facing a foe far more nefarious than any on-screen villain: Bad Buzz."

Via RES:

Online viewing tips via Cinema Minima: Ze Frank's "Small World" and Video Link Japan.

And another one from Michael at SignalStation: "Amazing animation in this short film, even if the idea of programming bots to carry automatic weapons awakens every Frankenstein fear I've got, especially with as little as I trust the political decisions of our military industrial complex."



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Posted by dwhudson at May 3, 2004 7:19 AM