August 3, 2004

Shorts, 8/3.

Stranger Than Paradise Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, who recently screened his Last Life in the Universe for Jim Jarmusch and friends, tells the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu what captivated him when he originally saw Stranger Than Paradise: "I couldn't believe cinema could be about something so small, so unimportant, so lazy and yet so funny and moving and so unpretentious. It was a very special feeling. I didn't want to go anywhere after the film finished. I just wanted to go sit somewhere and smoke cigarettes." Via Movie City News.

Whatever you think of its sequels, The Matrix remains one of the great and quintessential films of the 90s. Besides the Matrix itself, what most people came out of the theater talking about back in 1999, were the visual effects - but a highly significant factor in the punch they packed lay in the invisible effects, the sound design. In the August issue of Digizine, sound designer and editor Dane A Davis, who won an Oscar for his work on The Matrix, writes about what it is exactly that he does, how his work exerts the most subliminal pull in our experience of a film (and he's had a hand in more than a few, too).

One of the six indie productions Mary Glucksman checks up on in the current issue of Filmmaker is the unique collaborative effort, Deadroom. David Lowery is one of the four filmmakers working on the project and he's currently blogging about the experience - and others, such as working on the music video for The New Year's "Disease." Yen Tan, another Deadroom collaborator, is also blogging, and seems to have been quite moved by A Home at the End of the World.

In his monthly "Beyond the Multiplex" column, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir writes about enjoying Zatoichi, about not forgetting the final sequences of Gozu for quite a while, and about being impressed by Howard Zinn and Catalina Sandino Moreno.

Just about across the board, reviews for Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me have been good. Writing in January Magazine, NP Thompson aims to put a stop to all that.

If You Were Me San Francisco's 8th Annual Asian Film Festival (August 12 - 23) not only has a pretty nifty site, it's got a terrific lineup as well, bookended by Takashi Shimizu's two versions of the same story: Ju-On, the original, opens the fest, while his remake, The Grudge, closes it. In between are nine US premieres:



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Posted by dwhudson at August 3, 2004 6:33 AM

Comments

Men Suddenly in Black is not a U.S. Premiere in SF. It was just shown at the NY Asian American Intl Film Festival here in NYC.

Posted by: Josh at August 3, 2004 8:57 AM

Ah! Thanks for that...

Posted by: David Hudson at August 3, 2004 11:30 AM

While always pleased to see Filipino films at festivals abroad (hailing from the Philippines myself) it would be rather unethical for me NOT to tell you to avoid those Gil Portes movies like the plague. Homecoming was one of the worst movies I saw last year. I hope people don't take this as a representation of Philippine cinema, we have so much more interesting, less exploitative, truly great works coming from our country than this. Portes and his films get around, in my opinion, because of connections and his own personal marketing, and not the quality of his work. For a quick scan of Philippine cinema last year, if you're interested, you can check out an article I wrote for Indiefilipino.com -- http://film.indiefilipino.com/item.php?id=130

Posted by: Alexis Tioseco at August 3, 2004 8:23 PM

Alexis, I could have sworn I added IndieFilipino.com to the permalinks months ago... I don't know what happened, but finally, and long overdue, and in appreciation of what you guys are doing at that site, there you are. Whew.

And thanks, too, for those recommendations. I wonder why at least one of these films isn't available on DVD... frustrating.

Posted by: David Hudson at August 4, 2004 10:14 AM

hi. i co-wrote "homecoming". while i respect alexis' opinion, i still hope people will still go and check out our film. it has garnered best picture, acting, and screenplay nominations from award-giving bodies this year and was shown at the moscow int'l filmfest last june. i do not believe that filmfest programmers will choose to screen gil portes' films on "personal marketing skills" and "connections" alone. i think that is such a cruel thing to say!!! in any case, i hope to meet alexis at the PAMANA Awards or the Sine-sine screenings of "Homecoming" on Aug 12 and 13 . That would be nice!

Oh by the way, our first collaboration, "Small Voices" won acclaim in Brisbane, Toronto, Moscow, Palm Springs, Bangkok, and the Palm Beach Intl Film Festival where it won Best Picture/Screenplay/Director prizes, aside from winning 3 out of the four Best Picture awards last year (except for the Film Academy which chose "Lapu Laupu for best pic!)...

So there...how about Alexis? What has he done with his life to be so hateful of gil portes' films?

Posted by: Senedy at August 6, 2004 9:34 AM

Whatever makes you sleep at night Senedy.

Posted by: Luis at August 8, 2004 9:34 AM

Y'all should start your own Filipino Film Flame Wars blog. Seems like a hot topic! ;-)

Posted by: Craig P at August 9, 2004 12:16 PM

the only flame going on is the burning sensation from ___'s _ss

Posted by: luis at August 12, 2004 8:09 AM