Shorts, 6/7.

"Susan Shin" is an animated portrait by Jeff Scher. If you've got a spare $25,000, you can go to the Maya Stendhal Gallery and arrange to have one done of yourself or someone else you love just as much or more. It may be the running fad for portraiture for some time, reports Dana Goodyear.

Also in the New Yorker: Anthony Lane on Film Forum's Ingmar Bergman retrospective. Two quotes, first: "We are left in no doubt, as man after man reveals himself to be a fool or a flounderer, that the world is electrified by the fervor of female intelligence." And then:

Like Wagner and Proust, Bergman suffers woefully from his admirers.... Is it possible to see so much in a film that you end up not seeing the film? Bergman is not a metaphysician, or an analyst; he chose celluloid, not paper, on which to inscribe his obsessions, and what is most neurotic in him is not the quality of his worrying, or even the throbbing of his node, but the intensity of his wish to register the world, plus a small throng of its inhabitants, through the force of physical impact.

Why have the epic poems Cypria and the Little Iliad gone missing? Probably because they failed in the same (and actually pretty interesting) way that Wolfgang Petersen's Troy does, argues Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books:

The notion of a deconstructed, anti-war Trojan War story, a grittily realistic story about men with cousins rather than codes of honor, a fable about the emptiness of heroic illusion, is of course one that the ancients themselves entertained - not, however, in epics, but in tragedies, such as The Trojan Women. The Greeks knew enough to realize that if you're making an epic, the potency and grandeur of the epic action, the magnificence and scope of the genre itself, would undercut any attempts to subvert it from within.

Nick Lowe has also seen Troy and, like Mendelsohn, finds the root of the film's problems in its screenplay. Lowe's is the lighter (and frankly, more fun, less pompous) read, so it's a little surprising to find it, as Perlentaucher has, in the Times Literary Supplement. And the fun really begins when he turns his attention to Gladiator: Film and History, an "invaluable collection of essays" edited by Martin M Winkler.

Sharon Waxman and Laura M Holson team up to amplify public speculation that Disney CEO Michael Eisner might agree to sell off Miramax after all. For Movie City News, Gary Dretzka looks at the bigger picture yet manages to recap the finer details of Disney's recent troubles as well. But back to the New York Times:

• Terrence Rafferty on The Leopard, "the film in which [Visconti's] ecstatic pictorial sense and his tragic historical consciousness finally made peace with one another."
• "While the prognosis may be uncertain, history suggests that The Stepford Wives isn't necessarily a lost cause."Nancy Griffin (Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood) outlines a few ways the movie might be saved. More on the contemporary context of the remake from Jessica Johnson in the Globe and Mail, via MCN.
• Stephen Holden reviews Bukowski: Born Into This while Dwight Garner focuses more on the writer himself.
• Troy again: "It is still too soon for a war film to achieve anything even remotely comparable with Iraq, but in its peculiar way, the current spear-and-sandal epic Troy certainly tries." Edward Rothstein then considers what Homer might have thought of the war.
• Bill Werde on Wizard People, Dear Reader.

The Guardian's John Patterson profiles Toni Collette; Peter Bradshaw reviews Japanese Story. And Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week? Robert Benton's Billy Bathgate.

In a piece on Control Room for the Village Voice about a month ago, Kareem Fahim wrote: "[Lieutenant Josh] Rushing "seems a breed apart from his fellow military press officers, a man increasingly at odds with his government's version of the world." Sure enough, as Scott Lamb reports in Salon, the Marines have forbidden Rushing to give any interviews related to the doc. And as a result, he plans to leave the military. As CR director Jehane Noujaim tells Lamb, it's the military's loss.

Also in Salon: Alessandro Camon on Abu Ghraib and The Passion of the Christ: "The two spectacles reveal disturbing truths about American politics, sexuality and spirituality."

Ray Pride's rich and varied offerings at MCN: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a "lush and scary treat"; Strayed, "a short-lived vision of worlds being created, of an idyll both erotic and familial, and ultimately, of hopes being quietly dashed"; Love Me If You Dare, "a perverse joy"; Carandiru, "raucous, brutal, comic"; Coffee and Cigarettes, "live[s] up to [Jarmusch's] reputation as one of our shaggiest shaggy-dog storytellers"; Alila, "an Altmanesque slab of sociology"; and The Day After Tomorrow, "in and of itself a disaster." That said, Renato Rendentor Constantino reminds us that climate change itself is no joke: "Is reality more frightening than Hollywood? With nature there are no special effects, only consequences."

More via MCN:

• Simon Sebag in the Telegraph on Stalin's "cinematocracy."
• Ingrid Peritz meets Denys Arcand: I won the Oscar. Now leave me in peace and let me have my fun."
• Neva Chonin on Baadasssss!. Also in the San Francisco Chronicle: Hugh Hart blurbs the top releases scheduled over the next three months.

Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring has won best picture at the Daejong Film Festival in South Korea, reports the Daily Chosun. Park Chan-wook's Old Boy picked up five awards. On a related note, Doug Cummings considers Take Care of My Cat, and more generally, the state of Korean cinema.

Shanghai Daily: "Some 1,000 film stars, directors and critics gathered in Shanghai Saturday night to kick off the Seventh Shanghai International Film Festival, a fiesta that was put off a year due to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003."

Sean Spillane points to a database of sample sources; turns out more tunes feature snippets of Blade Runner than of any other movie.

With a sudden fit of immodesty and appreciation, a pointer to Filmbrain guide to film-related blogs.

Via the Jump Cut Newsblog, word that Lars von Trier has decided that trying to realize his vision of Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth in 2006 "would clearly exceed his powers." So he's pulled out of the festival.

Dana Stevens previews Flops 101, a doc and a month-long series on the movies, TV shows and even products that, yes, flopped, running on Trio, "the channel for the thinking pop culture nut." Also in Slate:

• Daniel Gross: "[Mel] Karmazin parachutes away [from Viacom] with a severance agreement worth $30 million and an intact reputation as the ultimate antimogul."
• Bryan Curtis misses the old David Letterman.
• And David Edelstein, who suggested back in 2001 that Alfonso Cuarón direct the Harry Potter movies: "And look how much better [Azkaban] is than the first two installments! What a call! Should I ask for a finder's fee?"

LOTR: Return of the King, Uma Thurman and Johnny Depp lead the list of winners at the MTV Movie Awards.

Mae West is back, announces David Thomson, who also reviews De-Lovely for the Independent.

Online viewing tip #1. The Super-8 shorts of Shannon Plumb. Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker, where there's a new feature up: Robert Hawk's talk with Rick McKay, whose doc Broadway: The Golden Age opens June 11.

Online viewing tip #2. A clip from Ryan, via Wiley Wiggins, who writes, "I've been saying for a long time that it's a real shame that no one is using all this high-end CG for something abstract and wild, well... this looks like what I've been waiting for."

Online viewing tip #3. The trailer for Combover: The Movie.

Posted by dwhudson at June 7, 2004 8:23 AM