Sunday shorts.

Mark Schwartz reviews Neil Jordan's novel Shade in the new issue of Bookforum: "In the opening pages, silent-film star Nina Hardy - or rather her ghost, her familiar, her shade - describes her murder at the hands of the nine-fingered man-child George. She then recounts the sequence of events, starting with her own birth, that led to this violent end."

Jaime Wolf certainly doesn't need to "sell" a long and long overdue piece in the New York Times Magazine on Wong Kar-wai, but if he did, here's the pitch:

The kind of person who might once have proclaimed Jules and Jim or Wings of Desire his or her favorite movie now rates Wong Kar-wai at the top of the list. Flirting with the conventions of genre (melodrama in Days of Being Wild; Chinese swordsman adventures in Ashes of Time; Hong Kong action movies in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels), his meditative, pop-savvy films home in on emotional tipping points in the lives of young city-dwellers - the moments that forever mark them and from which they cannot escape. Their witty invention, color-drenched visuals and romantic longing offer the kind of bittersweet satisfaction found in the fiction of Haruki Murakami or the photographs of William Gedney, about whose subjects John Cage once said, ''They seem to be doing happy things sadly, or maybe they're doing sad things happily.''

... Even if you have never seen a Wong Kar-wai film, you would recognize his style. For attentive fans, going to the movies has become a game of "spot the Wong Kar-wai tribute" (or rip-off), with a diverse list of directors explicitly recreating shots, scenes or musical cues from his work, including Spike Jonze in Adaptation, Cameron Crowe in Vanilla Sky and Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Amelie. Scorsese himself modeled the battle scenes in Gangs of New York after those in Wong's hallucinatory Ashes of Time, and even Sam Raimi in Spider-Man 2 sends Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst for a quick stroll through a Chinatown that manages to look more like Wong Kar-wai's Hong Kong than New York.

And in the paper, two pieces on reality TV. There was a slew of stories on Tanner on Tanner when Robert Altman and company were filming at the Democrats' convention in Boston, but now that the series is set to premiere on October 5 on the Sundance Channel, it's a fine time for Jill Abramson to file a backgrounder on the original HBO series, Tanner '88, and ask each of the major players what's motivated the sequel. It's telling that it seems to many asked that satirizing the political system as they did 16 years ago seems almost impossible now, but one subject does present itself as prime material: Documentary filmmaking.

"All I know is that I'm going to be famous," eight-year-old Frankie Evangelista tells Julie Salamon. Frankie, his mom, dad and sister star in HBO's new reality series, Family Bonds and Salamon asks around: Kids as reality TV: Good idea?

As Bono prepares to address Britain's Labour Party conference this week, Sean O'Hagan struggles to convince cynical Observer readers that the pop star's commitment to relieve Africa of AIDS and debt is for real: "Bono, and his group U2, were initially greeted by a degree of suspicion by the critical cognoscenti, who prefer their icons to be tarnished or, better still, dead.... In the past few years, Bono has met and won over two American Presidents, as well as the Pope, President Putin, multi-millionaire George Soros and UN Secretary Kofi Annan."

Also in the Observer:

• Where does this mythical, amusement park version of England that we see in Working Title pictures like Wimbledon come from, wonders Tim Adams. There are reasons for such surreality, he discovers, but fortunately, he can also point to relief: "[T]he recent British films that have apparently come closest to catching a flavour of home are those that have focused on the most recent arrivals here. Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things was one. The Polish-born Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort, an anarchic social realist film about Russian asylum seekers, was another."

And now, Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love.
• A horror film by the Chapman brothers? Now that's a scary proposition. Mark Kermode discovers they're not kidding and asks them about the films they'll be looking to for inspiration.

• In his remembrance of Russ Meyer, Philip French makes an inadvertent reference to Sean O'Hagan's profile of "the greatest novelist writing in English today" (Linda Grant) on a neighboring page: "The great pity is that he didn't direct the film he was born to make, a version of Philip Roth's Kafkaesque fable, The Breast, in which a man who came of age in the 1950s wakes up one day to discover he's a six-foot mammary gland." Related: Anthony Barnes reports in the Independent on "tantalising rumours [Meyer] has a secret heir to his fortune."

This is just barely film-related, but there's no way it should go unmentioned: Newsweek is running an excerpt from the first volume of Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles.

Via Movie City News:

• brandchannel.com's guide to product placement in current releases. Nice bit about Lord of the Rings: While no brands appear onscreen, "it could very easily be argued that the whole trilogy is a huge and very good placement for New Zealand."

• Well, for the New Zealand Herald, Rebecca Barry checks in on the next Kiwi epic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Special effects designer Howard Berger says this one's bigger: "LOTR had orcs and trolls; this has 23 species."

• Edward Guthmann interviews Amy Sedaris, "hands-down one of the funniest women in America," for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Online viewing tip. The "Balloon Man" movie, "meant to pique your interest in the Balloon Man CD, an impending SharpeWorld release."

Posted by dwhudson at September 26, 2004 7:58 AM