Weekend shorts.

"Cassavetes didn't invent American independent filmmaking, but he did give it sex appeal, visibility and a plausible (if risky) model of how to live and work in the enveloping shadow of Hollywood," writes Manohla Dargis in a sort of primer on the director occasioned by that honking Criterion package released last week: "The hostility Cassavetes inspired has always puzzled me. Like Orson Welles, he didn't always play well with others and he didn't make all that much money for the movie industry. The other reason for the discomfort, I think, is that he called himself an artist."

Also in the New York Times:

• Julie Salamon profiles another by-any-means-necessary filmmaker, Jonathan Caouette. (Good heavens: Tarnation won't make it to Germany until February!)
• Terrence Rafferty previews the Shaw Brothers retrospective at the New York Film Festival. Related: The Shaw Brothers blog, via the filmtagebuch.
• Every film festival has its own history, of course, but nearly all of them, each in their own way, have had to deal with the dilemma Geoff Pingree describes in his report from San Sebastian, that is, the need "to balance tradition and innovation to survive financially while remaining a showcase for imaginative and challenging work."
• Bernard Weinraub asks, "Can HBO keep soaring?"
• Eric Pace: "Françoise Sagan, the rebellious French writer who achieved fame as a teenager with her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, a precocious tale of sexual disillusionment, but whose international reputation dimmed as literary tastes changed, died yesterday in Honfleur, in northern France. She was 69." Around two dozen films have been based on her work, and in 1977, she directed one herself, Les fougères bleues.
• Pete Hamill remembers a friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams: "The Pentagon image-mongers had learned from Vietnam that all great war photography is essentially antiwar photography."

"The cinetrix had nearly forgotten how delightful a cultural critic Barthes was."

Girish Shambu has introduced a thread at filmjourney.org on Charlie Chaplin that's flourishing splendidly.

The Globe and Mail's Alexandra Gill meets Velcrow Ripper, whose documentary ScaredSacred won a special jury prize in Toronto:

What kind of person spends five years travelling to the ground zeros of the planet - the minefields of Cambodia, war-torn Afghanistan, the toxic wasteland of Bhopal, as well as Bosnia, Hiroshima, Israel, Palestine and many more that didn't even make the final cut - sifting through the darkest moments of human history?

To quote Cornell West, the Princeton philosopher and renowned champion of racial justice, Ripper says he's a "prisoner of hope."

Also via Movie City News: With the Academy planning a centennial tribute to George Stevens on October 1, Emanuel Levy assesses a mixed career.

For LA CityBeat, Donna Perlmutter reviews the Los Angeles Opera production of Ariadne auf Naxos, staged by William Friedkin, whose "most brilliant conception comes in portraying the Major-Domo (Georg-Martin Bode) as a Hollywood-producer type - tall, casually self-important, white-haired, wearing shades, of course, and Armani while carrying a white miniature fluff of a dog under his arm." Also: Andy Klein on the fake doc September Tapes.

Flickhead Ray Young reviews Peter Bogdanovich's Who the Hell's In It.

Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week, Uli Edel's Last Exit to Brooklyn. Also in the Guardian: "With six movies awaiting release in the US this autumn, Jude Law seems determined to make himself over." The problem to be fixed, writes John Patterson in the Guardian, is that "Law still registers with American audiences as an actor rather than a star." In the London Times, Matt Wolf considers Law's prospects as well, but within the framework of Hollywood's ongoing love affair with British actors: "Perhaps the British, inadvertently or not, show up the limitations of that prevailing school of American acting that finds performer after performer essentially playing versions of themselves."

San Franciscans hoping to save the 4Star theater need to know about a Land Use Committee meeting on Monday, 3 pm.

Posted by dwhudson at September 25, 2004 9:02 AM