Shorts, 9/27.

Alain Robbe-Grillet was feted at the 20th Alexandria Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, and an unbylined writer for Al Ahram Weekly was there to hear the fascinating Q&A. "'I'm not at all of your opinion,' he responds to an audience member who insists that the film and the novel belong to the same creative universe, 'but I don't have a monopoly on the truth.'" Even so, for Robbe-Grillet, this is not a trivial matter: The distinction lies at the heart of Freud's fundamental mistake, the belief that "the psyche could only express itself through words." Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

Greg Allen has done some digging and sorting and presents "a timeline of how... David O Russell's grand Iraq strategy went terribly, horribly astray."

Doug Cummings catches and reviews two films screened at the LA Korean International Film Festival: Kim Ki-duk's Samaritan Girl and Hong Sang-soo's Woman is the Future of Man. Filmbrain, a major Hong fan, writes of the second that he's "fallen under the spell of this wonderful enigmatic little film."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a refugee from Somalia now living in Amsterdam, a member of the Dutch Parliament and a filmmaker whose ten-minute short, "Submission," has been "at the center of a national uproar, which is exactly what the author wanted," writes Marlise Simons in the New York Times. "She turned to the power of images, she said, to focus attention on abuse, incest, forced marriages and the suicides of young immigrant women."

Also: A brief preview of the New York Film Festival (October 1 through 17) from Manohla Dargis and AO Scott. And for New York, Logan Hill picks a top five.

Festival previews at indieWIRE: Eugene Hernandez looks ahead to the Chicago International Film Festival (October 7 - 21), Brian Brooks to the Raindance Film Festival in London (September 30 - October 10).

The Guardian's Emma Brockes meets Mel Brooks:

"You could be my daughter - you never know - I've been around. Did your mother ever go to a bar in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow?"

No. So, Blazing Saddles -

"OK. Then you're probably not my daughter. You married?"

No.

"I have a son!" He pauses. "Blazing Saddles is definitely not PC. You couldn't say the word 'nigger' now. You just couldn't say it."

Also: Stuart Jeffries scopes out opinions on the prospects for Kevin Spacey's first season as artistic director at the Old Vic.

John Seabrook in the New Yorker: "Father Paul Robichaud, the former rector of the Church of St. Susanna, in Rome, said that he thinks it is 'slightly disingenuous' of the Vatican to maintain that the recent interest in [Catherine] Emmerich's writings, fuelled by [Mel] Gibson, wasn't a factor in her beatification."

"The conspiracist, the paranoiac, actually their antenna's often tuned to something that's a little closer to the real world."Wiley Wiggins points to John DeFore's brief but sweet interview with Richard Linklater in the San Antonio Current. Meanwhile, Matt Dentler is delighted to discover huge lines for an in-store appearance by Linklater in Austin: "You know, while most of the world makes a big fuss out of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, my mind is on Slacker. With its thread of election commentary taken from the first Bush's rise to office, there's a great timeliness in the apathetic yet motivated pursuits of the film's characters." Sort of related, in a very roundabout way: Eugene Hernandez comments on Michael Moore's "Slacker Uprising Tour."

Suge sends word to Cinemocracy from the screening of Alexandra Kerry's short, "The Last Full Measure," at LACMA a few nights ago: "The overall impression that I got from the short was that the similarities to Kerry’s real life were just too close to be coincidences. My opinion is that Kerry used the film to show her mixed emotions that come with having a war hero father in politics."

Over at Milk Plus, Lady Wakasa immerses herself in the world of Jean Cocteau.

Twitch presents its collective bottom line on 39 films screened at Toronto: Tight capsule reviews, ratings from one to ten. Also: Stills from Shinya Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet and a pointer to the trailer for Unleashed, which Todd believes will be "by far, the best western produced film Jet Li has ever been involved in. That's not saying so much, really, but I'll go one better and say that based on the footage I've seen so far it looks to be a very, very good film."

Matt Langdon offers an anatomy of a blurb.

Via Cinema Minima by way of a handful of other blogs, an AFP story whose headline got tweaked somewhere along the way; now it's perfect: "SMS Novel to be Made Into MMS Movie."

Online viewing tip. Documentation and a sample from Thomson & Craighead's "Short Films about Flying." Even if you don't have the time or the bandwidth to catch those at the moment, you've just got to read about the set-up. "The result is a coherent yet evocative combination of elements that produce an endlessly mutating edition of low-tech mini-movies that we call Template Cinema." I am such a sucker for this sort of thing. Currently on view at the Chelsea Art Museum. Via Net Art News.

Posted by dwhudson at September 27, 2004 7:43 AM