Fests and shorts.

Festival overviews, whether they're looking just ahead or back, can fall into two general categories. You scan what's on the menu at, say, Cannes or Toronto, and you know that, chances are, most of those plates are going to make the rounds. More than likely, you'll get your chance to savor the best dishes in one form or another, even if the order of the courses gets jumbled. But then there are the festivals serving up either local fare or the work of hopefuls with a long way to go and they've got items you suspect you may never even get to sample. Secondhand word just might be the closest you'll ever get. For the time being.

Koreanfilm.org has just posted two reports: Lee Eunhye writes up a wonderfully subjective take on last month's Gwangju International Film Festival and Darcy Paquet and Kyu Hyun Kim maintain the tone in their recollections of the Pusan International Film Festival, which wraps tomorrow.

The Austin Film Festival opens today and runs through October 21. Critics at the Austin Chronicle round up the shorts and present briefs on 14 features, beginning with Wells Dunbar's interview with Angela Shelton. I'd say scroll down and click through the rest, but some of these links I'll just toss in here for free are pretty click-worthy:

• James Renovitch on Robbing Peter, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover and Open House (more).
• Mark Fagan on Make 'Em Dance: The Hackberry Ramblers Story.
• Marc Savlov on WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception.
• Dunbar on Sheriff.
• Nora Ankrum on Tobacco Money Feeds My Family and Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties (more; and more), showing with David O Russell's Soldier's Pay.
• Jess Sauer on Rolling.
• Spencer Parsons on Chrystal, with Billy Bob Thornton, and Down to the Bone (more).
• Marritt Ingman on Cape of Good Hope.
• Josh Rosenblatt on The Hot Shoe.

Also in this issue, Marjorie Baumgarten visits Trey Parker and Matt Stone and meets Barry Tubb, who's just completed the "kids adventure movie," Grand Champion. Plus: Marc Savlov has the latest on Richard Linklater's past and future: That Dazed and Confused lawsuit might be going nowhere fast; but: Casting call for The Bad News Bears!

A note in passing: The Orange County Latino Film Festival runs from October 21 through 24.

At indieWIRE, another angle on the Vancouver International Film Festival from Sarah Keenlyside: "[A] lot of the filmmakers attending VIFF are making their first trips to a film festival outside of their home countries.... But what has remained most relevant year after year is the festival's commitment to fostering the filmmaking community, both in Vancouver and abroad." And Eugene Hernandez tells a unique story: "After playing for 43 weeks in a Grand Rapids, MI theater, Robert Shallcross's Uncle Nino has secured a deal to bring it to movie theaters around the country."

Filmmaker's Steve Gallagher notes that Pull My Daisy will be screening at the Allan Stone Gallery along with Alfred Leslie's first feature, The Cedar Bar, as part of the exhibition "Alfred Leslie 1951 - 1962: Expressing the Zeitgeist."

Doug Cummings on Star Spangled to Death: "Compulsively watchable even at its extraordinary length (with three built-in intermissions), Jacobs' film is a strident protest against corporate media and its popular illusions, with a special focus on racist stereotypes and religious mediocrity."

At Twitch, Canfield interviews Brad Anderson: "Obviously guilt plays a heavy part in that for characters in both Session 9 and The Machinist.... Let’s face it stories about guilty people are fascinating, what’s more profound than people wrestling with their conscience?"

Capturing the Friedmans is still an ongoing, open-ended story. Via Movie City News comes Alexandra Gill's story in the Globe and Mail on Jesse's Last Night, "a one-hour version of the 110-minute videotape shot by his older brother David the night before Jesse, then 19, was carted off to jail."

Patrick Rapa introduces the Philadelphia City Paper's special issue on music, video and music video: "We've been watching. Taking notes. Occasionally crashing and rebooting."

Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger: "Seattle is a city that watches movies - many, many movies.... We are not, however, a city that's known for making movies." But now that the Northwest Film Forum is moving into a big new space and generally revamping itself, that may slowly begin to change. Also: David O Russell has a grand old time with Sean Nelson but doesn't give him just a whole lot to write down. Nelson doesn't seem to mind, though. As for I ♥ Huckabees, Nelson finds it "a seemingly random blizzard of ideas blowing across the screen. Somewhere within that randomness lies a deep Zen belly laugh of a movie, but the laugh isn't free."

Well, look who's on the cover of another alt.weekly. But Scott Foundas finds a good way into his deep and wide profile of Jonathan Caouette: A recollection of a conversation with Abbas Kiarostami. There you go. Then: "Tarnation isn't merely the latest in do-it-yourself filmmaking, it's something of an apotheosis."

Also in the LA Weekly: Ella Taylor on Stage Beauty ("blows a fresh wind of disrespect, high drama and lush romanticism through that stolidly middlebrow subgenre, the period drama") and Shall We Dance? ("an unwieldy mess"); and Nikki Finke: "[T]he Republicans' nasty prosecution of the presidential campaign has now taken to stealing [Christopher] Reeve's legacy before the quadriplegic's body is even cold. They are turning his dream of bettering the lives of the 2 million Americans living with paralysis into a political football."

In the Guardian:

• Emma Brockes meets Julie Andrews: "I've never been able to figure out what makes a gay icon, because there are many different kinds. I don't think I have the image that say, Judy Garland has, or Bette Davis.... I honest to God don't know. It's very flattering, in a way."
• Fiachra Gibbons: "Inside I'm Dancing may be the first truly commercial movie to tackle disabled rights head on, but not everyone is happy."
• Wasn't it inevitable? Miami Vice: The Movie.

The film making waves in Germany at the moment is Oskar Roehler's Agnes und seine Brüder (Agnes and His Brothers). For those who want to dip into a few German reviews:

• Hans Schifferle in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
• Katja Nicodemus in Die Zeit (which is also featuring eight recollections of Derrida, a piece on Elfriede Jelinek [another slam; on Tuesday, Ina Hartwig wrote up an excellent retort to the grumblers in the Frankfurter Rundschau; the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung collects international opinions] and an interview with Bruce Nauman).
• tip is calling Roehler "The New Fassbinder"; he must have torn his hair out when he saw that cover. What's meant is that Roehler is an "actors' director," and what's more, one that tends to push his players to the edge of sanity to get great performances. In the Frankfurter Rundschau, Daniel Kothenschulte explains why there's no getting around the association, and in die taz, Bert Rebhandl even blames Roehler himself for the connection. No, that's hardly fair, especially in the case of a director as exhilarating and original as Roehler.

The Sinclair brouhaha:

• Molly Ivins at Alternet: "This is SO simple – how would you conservatives feel if NBC, CBS or ABC decided to pre-empt primetime programming a week before the election to air Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11? And then announced, 'But we've offered President Bush a chance to reply'?"
• Cinemocracy takes issue with the National Review.
• Eric Deggans in the St Petersburg Times: "[T]he overall message here - that you can flout the rules of election-time TV broadcasts as long as you own a news outlet - is serious business."

What do you say we follow that with some good news for a change: Chris Rock will host the Oscars in February. Yes.

Online listening tip. Greg Allen selects some interviews with directors for you.

Posted by dwhudson at October 14, 2004 4:11 PM