October 2, 2004

Weekend shorts.

"In British cinema history, Chris Petit's gloomily beautiful road movie Radio On stands alone. There is no other movie like it in the national canon." In a sense, John Patterson's excellent piece in the Guardian looks down a road not taken, a potential pathway already mapped out by Wim Wenders and the New German Cinema of the late 70s and early 80s but also one the Brits chose to ignore. In the same issue of this week's Review, by the way, Petit himself reviews Empire of the Wolves, a novel by Jean-Christophe Grangé which "starts in the vein of Hitchcock's disciple Brian de Palma, with the combination of a woman in jeopardy and scientific mystery, executed in the literary equivalent of De Palma's sinuous Steadicam style."

Also in the Guardian:

Artforum: Pop After Pop

  • In the 20th century, there was "a dramatic struggle between the beauty of provocation and the beauty of consumption," argues Umberto Eco, but the gap between the two has narrowed to the point that now, should an alien visitor drop in on us, he would "have to surrender before the orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and absolute and unstoppable polytheism of beauty." And the catalyst the brought about the change? Eco is certainly not alone in unequivocally pinpointing Pop. Eco's piece skims far and wide, but for drilling into that specific vortex, see Artforum's robust special issue, "Pop After Pop." Guest editor Jack Bankowsky: "'Is there life after Warhol, and if so, what does it look like?' we asked the roundtable. Jeff Wall answers in the affirmative, but suggests that he doesn't necessarily like what he sees; we need not live our lives or make our art at the mercy of every 'flicker of meaning emitted by Hollywood.'"

  • Joe Queenan gets to "thinking about motion pictures that depicted certain cities and countries in such an electrifyingly repugnant fashion that I made a decision to scratch them off my list of desirable destinations forever."

  • John Robinson has a bit of proving point by point that Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is actually a remake of Spinal Tap.

  • John Ezard reports that John Fraser's autobiography, Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales, "though intelligently generous about his contemporaries, is also exceptionally open in portraying some of the celebrities he worked with."

  • The paper runs an excerpt from Joel Bakan's book, The Corporation. For an exceptionally fine review of the film, by the way, see Godfrey Cheshire's in the Independent Weekly.

  • Andrew Pulver's adapation of the week: The Company of Wolves, "part of a mid-1980s resurgence of British art cinema," which bring us full circle Guardian-wise.

Matt Clayfield conducts a "tumultuous" interview with Phillip Noyce. Among the highlights: A great story about finally meeting Christopher Doyle and Noyce's assessment of the current state of Australian cinema. It's "sick" at the moment, he says, but there is reason for hope.

"Violence should be portrayed as painful, not as beautiful." The Telegraph's SF Said interviews Chan-wook Park. Via Twitch.

Girish Shambu finds a note of warning Jonas Mekas sent to "a rotten, no-good, stinking, cowardly, snickering, stupid, squirming, yellow bastard" of a projectionist by way of the Village Voice in 1969.

In the New York Times:

  • Kinsey promises to amplify the controversy already surrounding its subject, writes Caleb Crain.

  • John Canemaker looks ahead to The Incredibles: "If to err is human, to animate humans is to err almost every time.... But now Pixar is gambling for the first time on a film anchored by humans."

  • How many movies are too many? Can (and should) the NYT really review over 500 a year? AO Scott raises a few questions... and there they hang.

  • Paul Berman reviews Philip Roth's The Plot Against America: "The novel is sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible." Also: Roth himself on the novel, the first chapter and the NYT's special section on the author.

NYFF 42

If you're in Minneapolis, Chuck Olsen'll point you to a few highlights of the ongoing Sound Unseen festival (through October 10).

Analysis of the first Bush-Kerry debate continues to erupt unheeded, unchecked and often unwanted from every nook and cranny, but Cinemocracy has found two items of particular interest to cinephiles. For Mother Jones, Tom Engelhardt introduces a piece by Ira Chernus. Engelhardt on Bush: "The flamboyant enemies he's preferred - Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and now Abu Musad al-Zarqawi - have themselves been fascinated by our image-making skills and have been into making their own images and fictions in imitation of the Hollywood that turned out Predator, Alien, and any number of catastrophe films." Chernus to Kerry: "Never underestimate the power of a grand story."

The second item: NPR's Robert Siegel discusses the ultimate effect of the format and style of the debates with Alan Schroeder, author of Televised Presidential Debates: 40 Years of High-Risk TV.

Vince Keenan: "James Toback files a Dispatches column for Hollywood Elsewhere that's as brazen as you might expect. Who else would call Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum 'a sexually dessicated fool'?"

Mirrormask

Online viewing tip. A short trailer's been posted at the official site for Mirrormask. Via Neil Gaiman, who writes, "The music's not actually music from the film, and the trailer's just moving images really, with no sense of the story (or even that there is a story), but it's the first moving anything that's been seen on the web so far... Still, it's Dave McKean's images, and they move."

Online listening tip. KPCC's Film Week, complete with archives and transcripts. Via Cinema Minima.

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2004 2:03 PM