Bollywood, Wenders and shorts.

The Hindi film industry is experiencing a new heady surge of adrenaline... As ideas and techniques and styles and formats clash and coalesce, a new Bollywood is birthing. Let's call it Convergent Cinema. A cinema where, in the grand and gentle tradition of India, heritage and modernity, the East and the West, the seer and the upstart converge and collude.

From there, it's onto articles on the new stars, directors and screenwriters; Bollywood style and grace, finance and tech, music and sizzle, and then, two seemingly opposing views: Screenwriter and director Anurag Kashyap isn't buying all this hype but throws out a thin line of hope right at the end of his piece nonetheless; whereas Santosh Desai offers a bit more: "Above all, let us not forget that Bollywood is a key ingredient in realising India's ambitions to be an economic superpower. Take away Hollywood, and the supremacy of American brands worldwide crumbles."

Via Perlentaucher, Cesare Balbo's piece in L'espresso (and so, in Italian, naturally) looking ahead to Wim Wenders's The Land of Plenty, a film highly critical of the US. It's all the rage these days, you know. But I hadn't known about this one, so I went Googling and found Susan Vahabzadeh's May 4 interview with the director in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Here's what he has to say about it:

I wrote the story in three days. And - working with Michael Meredith - I did indeed complete the screenplay version in three weeks. And we also shot the film in three weeks. It's a story about a political climate in America - about two people who undergo an exemplary experience of this America, an America where fear and paranoia are dealt with on a daily basis, a country where great poverty reigns. A city like Los Angeles - where I live - has, among other titles, "The Hunger Capital of America." I wanted to know what that meant, how excess and need fit together. I don't think I've ever made a film that's dared to approach political topics so explicitly. But I felt a burning need to articulate this uneasiness in America.

You certainly don't have to be anti-American to lean to the left (and of course, Wenders is probably the least anti-American German filmmaker, making his next project all the more intriguing), and if you do, Michael Atkinson's got a list for you. Fifty films, in chronological order, from Zero de Conduite to The Fog of War, "the best left movies ever made [to] keep the flags of discontent flying."

Wong Kar-wai watch: It looks like the story of Bruce Lee and his master, set in the 50s, is next, reports China View. Here's the funny thing: Tony Leung Chiu-wai "looked visibly relieved" at Cannes, Manohla Dargis reported recently, when Wong announced that 2046 had probably wrapped; and yet, word is, he's signed on to play the master. Meanwhile, the world awaits Eros, with segments by Wong, Antonioni and Soderbergh.

DA Pennebaker: "The jump from what you can show in your studio as a complete film to what you hand over to a distributor who'll run it all over the world is huge. And that's the point that nobody is really able to do alone." But the actual focus of Tony Phillips's talk in indieWIRE with the legendary docmaker and his just-as-legendary partner, Chris Hegedus, is their HBO project, Elaine Stritch at Liberty. As for the hottest doc of the year, Eugene Hernandez summarizes what's known publicly about the deal that'll get Fahrenheit 9/11 in theaters almost exactly one month from now.

Filmbrain: "At nearly the mid-year mark, the film at the top of Filmbrain's 2004 list is Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe."

In his column for the Independent, David Thomson offers background for a retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London: "Victor Sjöström (1879 - 1960), only four years younger than Griffith, a poet compared with the American barnstormer, and a man whose own life would make a great movie. So adopt a new principle, if you will: the father of cinema... Victor Sjöström."

Thanks to Mark Landler, the New York Times finally catches up with the Stanley Kubrick exhibition in Frankfurt. Also in the NYT: Eric A Taub on the battle to set the industry standard for digital projection. Seems to be Sony vs Texas Instruments at the moment, with Sony well ahead.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for The Ister.

Posted by dwhudson at June 1, 2004 7:56 AM