Shorts, 8/25.

Sean Spillane of Bitter Cinema has made a wonderful discovery. Radio France is running the series of interviews conducted in 1962 between François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock which eventually became the basis of Hitchcock-Truffaut, now of course, a standard text in many a film school.

Sean Spillane: "The series is beautifully bilingual, as Truffaut did not speak English, nor Hitchcock French; but both are ably assisted by the seamless translation skills of Helen Scott, who worked for the French Film Office in New York at the time. The entire series is archived here." Again: If you don't speak French, don't be put off by the first minute or so. The English comes swiftly and smoothly enough. Great stuff.

"A guide to the upcoming season's movie, music, art, theater, and dance highlights can't help but become a kind of cultural X ray." Johnny Ray Huston introduces the San Francisco Bay Guardian's fall arts preview with its nice-sized section on what we have to look forward to film-wise in the coming weeks: Huston and Cheryl Eddy pick a top ten that goes to eleven, then annotate a selection of 20 more. Then Eddy sorts out eight biopics - just men this year? - and Huston notes the hours and the times of the many, many upcoming local festivals.

Whether or not you'll be in or near Washington DC from September 16 through October 31, you'll want to click this: Korean Film Festival DC 2004. If you can make it, there's the schedule. If you can't, you'll still find at the site "A Short History of Korean Cinema," by Tom Vick, one of the programmers who also happens to maintain his very fine Asian Cinema Blog, and "Korean Cinema's Resurgence," by co-programmer Hyunjun Min.

Ah, new international film festival regulations. Charles Masters sifts through them: "The key changes, outlined in a summary given to The Hollywood Reporter, include scrapping the ban on films competing in more than one international festival, a revision of [the International Federation of Film Producers Associations'] festival classification to better reflect the status of each event and a more specific and tougher stance on piracy."

Speaking of which, digital technology makes it easier, but it doesn't necessarily make it new. Mike Sizemore has found a copy of Private Screenings, the "Film Pirate Issue," from the summer of 1975. Back when the pirates were copying films on film. Sizemore contextualizes the issue superbly and offers a six-page PDF file. Via Cinema Minima, where Brandon Chalk is still blogging away from the Copenhagen International Film Festival.

As festival freaks will know by now, the complete line-up for the Toronto International Film Festival (September 9 through 18) has been unveiled. But if you're planning to follow North America's premiere fest, either virtually or live, you'll also want to be following the torontoBLOG at indieWIRE, where you'll find more than just the line-up. The "Festival's Hot 400," for example. And for more news, iW's got its special section already set up as well.

IW's also looking ahead to the Venice International Film Festival, which, after all, happens earlier: September 1 through 11. Anthony Kaufman: "This year's line-up portends good things to come for [new director Marco] Mueller's tenure." Also: Nick Poppy asks Ross McElwee about his new one, Bright Leaves and the state of the doc in general.

Who is Nikke Finke? In case, like me, you've ever wondered, RJ Smith's got your profile in Los Angeles Magazine. Via Movie City News (which we'd bet Finke checks regularly). Good bit on the Graydon Carter affair: "Talk about a postmodern echo chamber. Just consider: Here was a journalist reporting on journalists who were reporting on a journalist whose journalism was being called into question." But as for Finke herself, she's "a kind of journalist rapidly going extinct in a wave of corporate buy-ups and human resources department memos. The obnoxious kind. Not to mention the fanatic, operatic, and unwieldy kind. With a stick."

Roger Avary, who would know: "It's Bogus. A lot of people have been emailing me about this alleged Quentin Tarantino Blog, which is obvious bullshit.... Still, it's kind of a fun read."

Oliver Assayas has programmed a series for BAM, "I Can Hear the Guitar." Now, even if your chances of catching it are nil, his loose and nostalgic chat about it, his attempt "to describe my own idiosyncratic relationship to rock music and how it connects with my idiosyncratic relationship to cinema," is a pleasant read, translated by David Ng for the Village Voice. On a tangentially related note, Tom Hall has just seen End of the Century: "Was the city that grim? Having lived here since 1997, I can only speculate as to what that New York was like." Tom, if you haven't seen it, either track down a copy of Downtown 81 or catch it on September 16 when it screens as part of Assayas's program at BAM.

Back to the Voice:

J Hoberman reviews The Brown Bunny. I'm tempted to pluck just this - "genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere" - and move on, but this is too good:

As Gallo's superbly eccentric first feature, Buffalo '66, rewrote and deflated Taxi Driver's portrait of loner alienation, so his second punctures the self-aggrandizing narcissism and self-conscious social psychodrama of Easy Rider right down to the lyrical light-struck footage and perverse literalization of the Peter Fonda character's petulant punchline: "We blew it!"

On with the bullet points:

• Hoberman also reviews Hero ("a virtuoso performance") and Bush's Brain ("Rove recognized Dubya as a potential Manchurian candidate").
• Marc Holcomb, Ed Halter and Grady Hendrix tackle the series "They Came From Toho: Godzilla and the Kaiju Eiga" at the Film Forum. Holcomb adds a footnote, too.
• Michael Atkinson on Bang Rajan ("a dismayingly ferocious portrait of pre-technological warfare"), Bright Leaves ("an utterly mundane miracle, a sampling of gentle insight and poetic retrospection quietly at odds with the exploitative culture around it") and Exorcist: The Beginning ("as shocking as a Dokken album cover").

• In one fell swoop, Joshua Land on three polidocs: The Fourth World War, This Ain't No Heartland and Brothers in Arms.
• "Tracking Shots": David Blaylock on Chooch, Kris Wilton on My Wife Maurice and Holcomb again, on Without a Paddle.
• Michael Musto mingles with Mira Nair and Stephen Fry.

The Passion of the Christ is going to be a big seller on DVD when it's released next week, but Fox is hitting up churches for bulk orders to ensure it'll be even bigger. Laura M Holson reports in the New York Times. Also:

• "As news of Mr. Griffin's replacement by Mr. Reiner spread, industry publications and Internet sites picked up the story." And now, so, too, has Anne Thompson.
• Andréa R Vaucher has a piece on Jerry Stahl, television writer and former heroin addict whose fictional memoir of Fatty Arbuckle has been optioned by Johnny Depp's production company.
• Dave Kehr on a few notable DVD releases this week.

There is a lot more than blurbs to Armond White's review of Hero, but if Miramax happens to be looking for any, they're here, too: "The most astonishing flow of visual imagery on the screen in years.... the year's richest movie." Also in the New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz claims The Brown Bunny and Bright Leaves are "technical, esthetic and spiritual kin" and David Freeland remembers Fay Wray.

In the Guardian:

• Stephen Frears is not only a reality TV fan, he's following up his own TV production (The Deal, about Tony Blair and money-minister/PM-wannabe Gordon Brown) with another about the royal family, set during the week between the death and funeral of Princess Di. John Plunkett basically asks him, What's all this, then?
• David Teather on Outfoxed: "[T]he tub-thumping documentary is succeeding at a time when the nation's most well-respected newspapers and some of the best-known TV anchors are admitting that they failed to ask the tough questions in the run-up to war in Iraq."
• Jonathan Jones: "It has been a summer of disenchantment. Not one but two epic films set out to retell great European myths - without the myth."
• Xan Brooks on the inaugural British Home Movie Day, "part peepshow, part archaeological dig."
• Brian Baxter remembers Donald Petrie, 1920 - 2004, who "worked with distinction in cinema and television for more than 50 years."

"Random notes from the Austin film scene..." From Matt Dentler.

NP Thompson previews the One Reel festival happening this coming Labor Day weekend in conjunction with Bumbershoot, the arts fest in Seattle.

The Joint Fires and Effects Trainer System, writes Steve Silberman in Wired , "is the product of an unprecedented level of cooperation among the Pentagon, film and gaming companies, and Silicon Valley - a synergy that Stanford history professor Tim Lenoir calls the military-entertainment complex." Or, as Cinemocracy puts it, it's "a frighteningly realistic war simulator."

"You won't find his credits on IMDb, but he was clearly a maverick and genuinely key figure in a hardly documented chapter of cinema history." Ben Slater on Albert Odell.

Three entries so far... Welsh director Marc Evans, who's taking his latest, Trauma to Toronto, is keeping an online diary for the BBC. That's via the Movie Blog, and so is this: a first peek at Danny Boyle's Millions.

Screenwriters: The cinetrix serves you one on a silver platter.

Two CNET stories: Ed Frauenheim on a new disc format that combies CD and DVD technology; and John Borland on the MPAA's latest moves to keep people from cracking DVDs open and copying them.

Anyone backing an indie film takes a chance, and that includes insurers. At Alternet, Scott Thill profiles one of the bravest, Dennis Rieff. Also: Denise Caruso on Deborah Koons Garcia's doc, The Future of Food, "an engaging and lucid presentation of not only the science of genetic engineering, but of the people and the politics behind what looks to be a pitched battle to control the global food supply," and Armond White, via Africana.com, on Browen Hughes's Stander with Thomas Jane.

The budget for Kevin Smith's next movie might be around, oh, $250K. Not because that's how far things have come post-Jersey Girl, but because that's what he wants to do. Geoffrey Kleinman asks him about it for DVD Talk.

Online viewing tip. Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart opens in Sweden on September 17 and will also be screened at the Toronto festival. Via Movie City News, the trailer.

Posted by dwhudson at August 25, 2004 1:35 PM