Shorts, 9/22.

Autumn's here, and, "Yes, we're atoning for our dog-day sins," writes Jake Brooks, "and we're doing it at the altar of the New York Film Festival [October 1 through 17].... Its boutique size, elitist philosophy and penchant for auteurism make it an anachronism. And we are all better off for it." Brooks checks in not only with the organizers but with the filmmakers as well, including Todd Solondz, Jonathan Caouette, Lodge Kerrigan, Alexander Payne and David Gordon Green.

Also in the New York Observer:

• Scott Eyman: "Peter Bogdanovich's Who the Hell's In It is an early Christmas present for movie lovers, a double Dutch chocolate cornucopia of delight, best ingested in small doses to prolong the pleasure." While we're on the subject of Bogdanovich, Ben Slater has again - finally, dammit! - picked up the exceedingly entertaining story of the making of Saint Jack.

• In Toronto, Rex Reed found Ladies in Lavender to be "the perfect antidote to all the pretentious drivel that preceded it."

• Andrew Sarris recalls the days he "began to regard [James] Toback as the curse of the auteur theory."

• DVDs: Mark Lotto on Star Wars: "[W]atching the trilogy again for the umpteenth time, I found that I just didn't care anymore about any of it. There were no human beings up on screen, just the full complement of my old Halloween costumes. Have I become everything Peter Pan warned Wendy about?" Also: Jake Brooks on Coffee and Cigarettes ("ups and downs are at the mercy of the pairings") and Jessica Joffe on Mean Girls: "The joys of the DVD are in the endless reels of deleted scenes, bloopers and quietly amusing commentary by [Tina] Fey, director Mark Waters and Saturday Night Live godfather/Dr. Evil Lorne Michaels, who becomes tangibly excited every time the girls really throw down."

"The cinetrix has a bittersweet Russ Meyer memory." And she'll share it with you after you read the wonderful appreciation by Roger Ebert she points to first.

Still rounding up Toronto:

• Darren Hughes is not only filing considered responses to the films he's seen, he's also broken down his experience of the fest by the numbers.
• And via Darren, Girish.
• Jason Morehead at Opus.
• Jessica Winter looks back in the City Pages, where Dylan Hicks looks ahead to the second annual Arab Film Festival at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis.
• Anthony Kaufman in indieWIRE: "While it's nearly impossible to make any definitive proclamations based on the mere 27 1/2 films I saw out of the available 328, allow me a few observations unique to the 29th Toronto film bonanza."

Also at iW, Wendy Mitchell conducts one interview each with Zak Penn and Werner Herzog. The subject at hand, of course, is Incident at Loch Ness, and all questions and answers are skewed so as to swerve wide and clear from possible spoilers.

There is, of course, room in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's sex issue for film and TV-related angles, including Johnny Ray Huston's talk with the creators of the up-n-coming gay porn soap, Wet Palms, and Lorraine Sanders's investigation of reality porn.

Also:

• Two letters from Toronto, both featuring Top 10s, one from Huston and one from B Ruby Rich.

• Cheryl Eddy on Shaun of the Dead, "the funniest zombie movie since Return of the Living Dead, not to mention the funniest movie period in recent memory."

• Susan Gerhard on Monster Road, a "fascinating merging of three of the more popular nonfiction types these days - artist profile, family excavation and sociological essay - [which] tells the story behind the appealingly eccentric, lo-fi work of claymation animator Bruce Bickford."

• Edward E Crouse interviews "Uncle" Watleela, producer of "the latest stateside salvo in the Thai film renaissance," Bang Rajan.
• Dennis Harvey finds John Waters's A Dirty Shame "just as much of a mess as Cecil B Demented was, and with fewer incidental laughs."

Billed as an interview with Wong Kar-wai, Howard Feinstein's piece in the Guardian is actually more of an outline of the stories told in 2046 and a backgrounder on its making. Todd at Twitch points to the new trailer and passes along news (rumors?) from Monkey Peaches that the Wong Kar-wai project with Nicole Kidman and Takeshi Kitano is shaping up after all.

Also in the Guardian, Amelia Gentleman follows up on Claude Lelouch's attempt to revive prospects for Les Parisiens after an all-round critical bashing by offering free screenings; it's not working.

Hype is killing Bollywood, argues Rakesh Budhu at Planet Bollywood.

Charles Taylor: "What may be most interesting about the Paltrow haters is this: Ask any one of them why they hate her and it's almost a sure bet that the quality of her acting will barely figure into it." Also at Salon: Dan Kois lists the top ten heirs to the legacy of Lenny Bruce.

In the Independent, David Thomson traces the roots of Disney's problems: "Walt Disney and nine guys changed the world of entertainment, more or less. And then they grew larger, more prosperous and bored."

Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice have already edited a book that came out of the "Cinema and the City" conference held in 1999; Why is a second, Screening the City, necessary? Writing for Film-Philosophy, Michele Braun explains: "Unlike its predecessor, this second volume tends toward film studies rather than sociology, more frequently reading the narrative of the film text in conjunction with the conditions of its production than the previous volume, making it a more tightly focused volume in many ways."

In the New York Times:

• Stephen Holden on Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein's The Take, "a stirring, idealistic documentary that examines the grass-roots cooperative movement in financially devastated Argentina."
• Dave Kehr on Andrew Repasky McElhinney's Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye, "not a movie for passive consumption, but a film that bites back."
• Dennis McDougal: "In backing [Dan] Petrie for a one-year term as head of the Writers Guild of America West, members rejected a call by a challenger, Eric Hughes, for radical changes."

J Hoberman begins his look back at Toronto with a brief review of A Dirty Shame ("more rousing than arousing... Seen as Waters's contribution to the 2004 election, however, it's his most radical film in 25 years") and other libidos on parade, then moves on to I ♥ Huckabees ("too heavy to soar but too light to ever fall flat") and quick takes on My Summer of Love, Harvest Time and Cinévardaphoto.

Also in the Village Voice:

• Dennis Lim talks to Lodge Kerrigan about Keane ("a comeback... after a period of infrequent activity and miserable luck") and to Gregg Araki about Mysterious Skin: "The film is about deep childhood trauma and the last thing I wanted to do was traumatize a child."

• Ed Halter on The Take and The Yes Men ("tardy but spirited sprinters in the agit-doc marathon") and on The Raspberry Reich (a "lovingly overblown piece of terrorist-chic trashfilm") and George Bataille's Story of the Eye (art-school sophomoric, unwittingly cornball and counterrevolutionary").

• Speaking of which, Jessica Winter finds The Motorcycle Diaries "lovely to look at but insipid, a lavishly illustrated Rough Guide to white liberal self-affirmation."

• Mark Holcomb on The Forgotten ("banally indifferent to human loss").

• For Ed Park, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow "hardly heralds the cinema of the future - it's more like a welcome curiosity."

  

• "Tracking Shots": Melissa Anderson on Chisholm '72, Ben Kenigsberg on Mind the Gap, Nick Catucci on Moog, Michael Atkinson on Shaun of the Dead, Elliot Stein on Burn! and Leslie Camhi on Incantato.

• Kim Levin on the Pipilotti Rist show at Luhring Augustine: "The only objects this time - transparent plastic lids, funnels, and containers dangling from a large branch - become optical devices, 'instant crystals' casting shadowy reflections onto an oceanic wall projection."

• Michael Feingold on Basil Twist's "puppet rendering of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique [which] simply proves that willfulness is the artist's joy"; and on Karen Finley's George and Martha.

Attention musical-loving New Yorkers - and wouldn't that be all New Yorkers? - The New York Musical Theatre Festival's Movie Musical Screening Series runs September 27 - 30 and features -besides movies, of course - panels and Q&A's with the likes of John Cameron Mitchell and many more.

In the New York Press:

• Armond White recalls a "primal image" from Why Do Fools Fall in Love as a way of segueing into a review of Goodbye, Dragon Inn; then, there's an abrupt dismissal of The Motorcycle Diaries. White's DVDs this week: The two early Spielberg pictures, Duel ("a textbook example of how virtuosity can lift a b-movie into a new level") and The Sugarland Express ("belongs to the same lovers-on-the-lam genre as Bonnie & Clyde, Thieves Like Us and Badlands, but it is the most dynamic of the bunch").

• Matt Zoller Seitz compares Sky Captain with Tron "because both films are historically significant, visually striking and strangely cold." Then, that "Rubik's Cube of conceptual porn," Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye and: "[A]nyone looking to mount a defense of Sayles will have to wait for a better film than Silver City."

• Saul Austerlitz on Burn!, "a suitable companion to Pontecorvo's epochal The Battle of Algiers"; "one of [Visconti's] most effulgent works," The Leopard; and Michel Khleifi's Fertile Memory, "mostly forgettable, a first effort by a filmmaker whose later work, including Wedding in Galilee, would be a far richer mosaic of contemporary Palestinian life."

• Jim Knipfel on Videodrome - "Twenty years ago, it was just weird. Nowadays, it's a brilliant allegory" - and on Circle of Iron: "[I]t's been called one of the most pretentious kung-fu films ever made - a point I'm not going to argue."

• JR Taylor meets director Edgar Wright and, between quotes, mentions that Shaun of the Dead "takes the best 10 percent of most zombie movies and turns it into 90 percent of a feature."

• Mark Ames catches the trailer for Team America: "[T]heir nihilism balancing act... serves one purpose: to protect Stone/Parker from being sneered at by other sneerers."

Jeff Fleischer interviews David Robb, author of Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies.

Piracy's "dramatically" eating into DVD sales? Jason Kottke, who's just redesigned his "Movies" page, has a few words - and more importantly, a few numbers - for George Lucas.

Offline viewing tips. "Punk Film - Jammin' in the City" on Trio, tonight and tomorrow. And via Doug Cummings: "The films of Carl Dreyer are currently airing this month on TCM, and it's always fun to make new converts."

Online viewing tip. The preview for The Best of 16 Color on DVD. Via Wiley Wiggins, who's on a roll: HAL 9000 at eBay; and Richard Linklater lays out his position on Universal's botched release of Dazed and Confused on DVD.

Posted by dwhudson at September 22, 2004 3:10 PM