Shorts, 8/23.

New York shines a spotlight on The Imaginary, All-True Leni Riefenstahl Show: "In this extremely ambitious, multimedia bio-drama - as vintage stills and captioned asides cover the backdrop - Jen Ryan and cohort Rik Sansone reenact real moments from the infamous filmmaker's life and take creative license by staging surreal scenes of pop culture superstardom with Leni Riefenstahl on The Match Game and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In."

Heavens. That's even wilder than Marleni, in which playwright and novelist Thea Dorn imagines a meeting between Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich in Dietrich's room in Paris on the night of her death. Do check the trailer.

Kenneth Anger is now 75, and we haven't heard much from him in the last several years. But he's currently working on three films and an exhibition of stills from his 1969 film Invocation of My Demon Brother will open in September at the London gallery Modern Art. For the Observer, Sanjiv Bhattacharya takes Anger to lunch and a stroll through the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, listening all the while to a few rattling stories that may or may not make it into Hollywood Babylon III and, in a few touching paragraphs at the end, worrying about him.

For more on Anger as a filmmaker, see Maximilian Le Cain's profile in Senses of Cinema: "Cinema, he claims, is an evil force. Its point is to exert control over people and events and his filmmaking is carried out with precisely that intention."

Back in November 2001, David del Valle told an eerie story in Films in Review about Anger, Keith Richards and 9/11.

Back to the Observer:

• Tim Adams interviews Peter Biskind: "I know I will run into Harvey eventually... I don't suppose he is going to drag me out in the street and break my legs. That would not be seen as a very cool thing to do. So, in a way, I'd rather get it over with."
• "During rehearsals, director Antonia Bird, [co-writer] Alice [Perman] and I encouraged the actors to try to imagine the world from the viewpoint of the characters they were playing." Screenwriter Ronan Bennett describes what the filmmakers behind Hamburg Cell were after.
• Mark Kermode: "Like most who reviewed The Shawshank Redemption when it was first released in 1994, I was impressed, but I had no idea just how important the film would become to some audiences."
• Peter Conrad savages For Ever Godard, the book documenting the symposium held three years ago at the Tate Modern: "[U]tterly unreadable."
• Bat Boy: The Musical, written by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, is on at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. Phil Logan: "I have been handpicked by The Observer as the man with the least dignity to lose from guesting with the chorus on the soundtrack."
• Philip French on Elmer Bernstein: "He looked back to the 1950s as 'the halcyon days of film scoring' and it is therefore rather wonderful that his last major score, featuring a plangent piano and soaring strings (which brought him his fourteenth Oscar nomination) should have been for Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, an affectionate pastiche of films from that decade directed by a young film-maker of whom he thought highly."

Genesis P-Orridge tells the Guardian's Tim Cumming how he salvaged the films William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Anthony Balch made in the 50s and 60s.

"It's my whole past memory that makes me choose the moments that I film." Logos runs film stills and a brief but powerful text by Jonas Mekas.

Newsweek's Sean Smith previews a highlight of the fall season: "Directed by Mike Nichols and adapted from the acclaimed play by Patrick Marber, Closer stars [Natalie] Portman, [Julia] Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen as strangers who fall in love and then proceed to destroy one another with cruelty, infidelity and narcissism."

George Fasel: "Italian films of the postwar years were an uncommonly faithful mirror held up not only to Italian, but to western European society in general from the end of the war into the early 1960s, in part, I think, because the severe social crisis demanded attention, and in part because many more filmmakers viewed the medium as a legitimate vehicle for social criticism and not merely entertainment."

The Boston Globe's Janice Page surveys the career of Zhang Yimou and calls up Miramax to ask why it's taken so long to get Hero in theaters. Via Movie City News, which also points to G Allen Johnson's piece on Zhang Ziyi in the San Francisco Chronicle. See also our new interviews.

Bubba reviews Takashi Miike's Black Society Trilogy at the Movie Blog: "Though each of the three crime films - Shinjuku Triad Society, Rainy Dog, Ley Lines - has its own distinct voice they all revolve around issues of racism, of people pushed to the absolute outer fringes of society due largely to their mixed, or outright foreign, ethnicity. This fixation on people on the fringes of society has marked Miike’s entire career but nowhere is the emphasis stronger than here."

Also: News that Terry Gilliam's Brothers Grimm has been delayed, a nifty trailer (for Yoji Yamada's Kakushiken and a disturbing poster (for Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital).

Fox Searchlight has bought the rights to Russia's "first homegrown blockbuster," Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor) and the sequel due next year, Day Watch. Michael Mainville reports for the Independent.

Variety's David Rooney scans the line-up for the New York Film Festival (October 1 through 17). Highlights: A tribute to Pedro Almodóvar, Ingmar Bergman's Saraband, Mike Leigh's Vera Drake, Ousmane Sembene's Moolade, Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumiere, Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent, Todd Solondz's Palindromes, David Gordon Green's Undertow, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, Jia Zhangke's The World and on and on...

That's via Movie City News, where Gary Dretzka responds to Nicole Laporte's piece in Variety on a souring of relations between critics and studios.

In the New York Times:

• The video game industry "has taken the playbook of the movie industry," reports Evelyn Nussenbaum.
• Deborah Solomon asks Vincent Gallo why he's a Republican.
• Warren St John talks to a few celebrity business managers, "the men and women with the thankless task of keeping stars from spending themselves blind."

Brandon Chalk will be blogging from the Copenhagen International Film Festival for Cinema Minima.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for The Guatemalan Handshake, via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Posted by dwhudson at August 23, 2004 6:01 AM