A week of weeklies.

Experience has now confirmed the suspicion that a week on the rocky Adriatic coast beats a week at the keyboard, but even so, it's always a blast to come back knowing full well there'll be at least a few surprises lurking behind the bookmarks...

Monday, day of the slicks:

• For the New Yorker, Michael Agger watches Robert Altman film a sequel of sorts to Tanner '88 in which Cynthia Nixon, playing Tanner's daughter, shoots a doc about her father that slices a tad close to the truth.
• Time's Richard Corliss: "Just now, grown-up horror is frightfully chic." Also: "What's Hollywood doing knocking off Japanese horror films?"
• Newsweek's Allison Samuels profiles Jamie Foxx.

Tuesday, NYC:

• In the New York Press, Armond White's very down on She Hate Me but gives Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle a pass (Eugene Hernandez, too, considers it "pretty damn funny"); Matt Zoller Seitz goes Japanese this week, reviewing Takashi Miike's Gozu (see Elizabeth Carmody's brief and sharp recommendation and Steve Erickson's interview with Miike in indieWIRE) and Takeshi Shimizu's Ju-On; Saul Austerlitz reviews Maryam Shahriar's Daughters of the Sun; Henry Flesh supposes, "With his role in A Home at the End of the World, Dallas Roberts may become a star."

• Anthony Kaufman argues in the Village Voice that the new Manchurian Candidate probably could have and should have been more controversial while J Hoberman takes on the review: "As an intelligent genre flick, the movie plays to his strengths... Candidate represents Demme's best dramatic filmmaking since The Silence of Lambs." He then turns to She Hate Me, Los Angeles Plays Itself (Benjamin Strong talks to director Thom Anderson) and Festival Express ("a trip worth taking," sez Robert Davis). And: Dennis Lim on Harold and Kumar and Gozu (Edward Crouse talks to Miike); Ed Park on Garden State; B Kite on a series of Columbia Pictures being restored by Sony Pictures Entertainment and showing at the Walter Reade; Janet Kim cringes at the puns worn out by reviewers of Catwoman; and five "Tracking Shots."

Wednesday, San Francisco: Cheryl Eddy on Manchurian, Johnny Ray Huston on Menahem Golan's The Apple and Nickie Huang on Harold and Kumar, all in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. And it's here where I blush appropriately.

Thursday, the three coasts:

• The LA Weekly serves up a generous excerpt from John Powers's new book, Sore Winners (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America, in which these sordid days of ours are placed within the context of, you know, American culture in general. Powers also files his take on Manchurian while Ella Taylor reviews Zach Braff's Garden State and Patrice Leconte's Intimate Strangers. Matt Langdon, by the way, presents generous snippets from a recent roundtable interview with Leconte and indieWIRE runs a full-blown interview with the director by Ryan Mottesheard.

• The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov gets in touch with Richard Elfman, director of the 80s cult classic, Forbidden Zone, and John Gray talks to Mike Woolf, director of "nice" docs like Something's Brewin' in Shiner.

• The Philadelphia City Paper's Sam Adams enjoys Warner's new Film Noir Classic Collection and meets Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.

Friday, and once again, the Nation allows only its subscribers to read Stuart Klawans.

Posted by dwhudson at July 31, 2004 3:40 PM