Shorts, 8/11.

Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee, shot between Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary and The Saddest Music in the World, opens today at the Film Forum in New York, and hopefully, this will be the beginning of a far-reaching tour. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes that Cowards "carries traces of its self-consciously racy peep show past, but the overall vibe is more naughty than nasty.... For all the flashes of occasional nudity and intimations of polymorphous pleasure, nothing in this film is as remotely perverse as love."

J Hoberman's take: "Although the layered, metaphoric combination of masochistic fantasy and blatant wish fulfillment that constitutes the movie's narrative is irresistible, Maddin's mise-en-scène is no less remarkable than his evocation of forbidden desire and monstrous repression.... But what's truly extraordinary about this movie - which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece - is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one." As for the masterpiece notion, the New York Press's Matt Zoller Seitz would concur with an equivocal "might be his masterwork."

But back to the Voice:

• "The number of indie movie directors discreetly infiltrating the cable TV world has reached saturation point," writes Joy Press in the Village Voice, and she's got a slew of examples to prove it as well as quotes from the likes of producer Christine Vachon and directors Mary Harron and Barry Levinson who explain how it's come to this.
• Elliot Stein seriously wants you to check out the series "Dark Streets and Vast Horizons: The American Vision of Anthony Mann" at the Walter Reade, August 11 - 29, if you're anywhere near the neighborhood; and if you aren't, his piece will surely have you adding titles to your to-see list regardless. More from Saul Austerlitz in the NYP.
• The Anthology will be screening two films from Stan Brakhage's "Vancouver Island Quartet," The Mammals of Victoria and The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him, from August 13 to 19. Ed Halter introduces the pair.
• Ed Park previews the New York Korean Film Festival, which "gleefully runs the gamut from thick schmaltz to brain-scrambling sci-fi."
• J Hoberman reviews We Don't Live Here Anymore ("spellbinding stuff") and Laura Sinagra meets Laura Dern.
• Dennis Lim struggles to interview Christopher Doyle as he swills a beer and encourages interruptions from Pen-ek Ratanaruang.
• Marc Holcomb on Danny Deckchair, "Weird, frivolous and impossible to dislike."
• "Tracking Shots": Sinagra on Tom Dowd & the Language of Music, Hoberman on The Leopard and Ben Kenigsberg on Little Black Book.
• Michael Atkinson on "[a]nother ingenious double bill from Criterion," Renoir's and Kurosawa's The Lower Depths.
• Michael Musto is as fun as always, but I particularly like the Sean Combs/Denzel Washington bit.

"Last weekend I took the bus from Singapore to Kuala Lumpar, about a five hour trip. The bus was not exactly a luxury coach, but it did have a couple of Panasonic TVs, and once we were over the border in Malaysia our driver-cum-film scheduler unveiled his collection of freshly bought pirate VCDs." Another splendid entry from Ben Slater.

Looking for something else, I found an article dating all the way back to June, practically the Dark Ages here in the blogdom. But Stefan Hammond's piece in the Asia Times on what sort of films Beijing doesn't want - no ghosts, please, or talking animals, for example - and how and why Hong Kong's filmmakers may accommodate the Chinese government is still very much an intriguing read.

In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann reviews Ken Wlaschin's Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen: A Guide to More Than 100 Years of Opera Films, Videos and DVDs:

Open this book anywhere and something arrests the eye - if only an instance of the fact that encyclopedias, like politics, make strange bedfellows. On one page stands the titanic Feodor Chaliapin, whose Don in Pabst's Don Quixote is a treasure; on the facing page is Charlie Chan at the Opera. Oh, well. For anyone who cares about opera and film, this book is a seduction.

Also: Chris Orr dislikes Kill Bill: Volume 2 every bit as much as Volume 1, but for entirely different reasons.

Farhad Manjoo in Salon: "Hollywood's nightmare scenario is that high-def TV will become 'Napsterized,' with shows available online to anyone, anytime, for free - which may sound, to some TV fans, less like a nightmare than a heavenly dream. And, indeed, despite Hollywood's efforts, it's a dream that in many ways is coming true."

Gus Van Sant has just completed shooting Last Days, an imagining of Kurt Cobain's slouch towards death, and MTV's Jennifer Vineyard asks him about it: "Now we've done it, and it's too late to be scared." Via Movie City News.

Marcus Baram knows why Reese Witherspoon is on the cover of Vanity Fair. On that same page in the New York Observer, Jake Brooks looks into the IFC's reality series, Film School.

Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "The nightmarish thought of a city without a Four Star - where owner Frank Lee programs new releases and krazy kung fu klassics with equal relish – makes supporting the theater's eighth annual Asian Film Festival of paramount importance." Johnny Ray Huston picks a few festival highlights.

Also in the SFBG: Dennis Harvey on Code 46 and Nickie Huang on My Mother Likes Women.

Kamera's Oliver Berry: "Looking back from the staid, cynical confines of the 21st century, it seems hard to believe that Britain was once at the rotten heart of the horror movie world."

In a single "uber-post," Matt Clayfield wraps up his sharp take on all he saw in Brisbane. Ryuichi Hiroki's Vibrator won the FIPRESCI Award, by the way, while Sabiha Sumar's Silent Waters was chosen unanimously for the 2004 Interfaith Award and Behrooz Afkhami's The River's End picked up the NETPAC Award for Asian Cinema.

Jim Knipfel in the New York Press: "If you're an allegedly intelligent, well-educated adult and you mention Godzilla in mixed company, people look at you like you've just admitted that you have syphilis. They immediately assume that you're one of those pathetic creeps who lives in his mom's basement, spends hours every day arguing Lost in Space minutiae in chat rooms and goes to conventions in New Jersey dressed like a Wookie.... I may be a loser geek, but there are apparently enough people out there like me to justify all the hubbub." Also: Armond White reviews Stander but concentrates on Thomas Jane and both offer their opinions on the DVDs they've seen recently. Of particular interest: Knipfel on Anchor Bay's Werner Herzog collection since, after all, he wrote most of the liner notes.

In the Guardian:

• The opening of Afterlife in the UK prompts Angela Neustatter to talk to parents of children with Downs Syndrome.
• Brian Logan is not amused by Nancy Cartwright's "zealous pro-Simpsons rally."
• The Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood has "bowed to pressure" and cancelled a screening of Birth of a Nation.
• Michael Freedland remembers composer David Raksin, 1912 - 2004.

DVDTalk's Francis Rizzo III discovers that director Richard Shepard is quite a fan of the medium.

Back in 1999, when the DVD was still news, the Jim Henson Company discovered that Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal were selling consistently well despite next to no promotion. Naturally, they started thinking about producing more fantasy pictures and, for CBR News, Jonah Weiland reports on one in the works written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean, MirrorMask. Via CS Daily.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Makoto Shinkai's The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Via the Movie Blog. And here's a translation into English, via the highly informative Makoto Shinkai Fan Web.

Posted by dwhudson at August 11, 2004 8:43 AM