October 27, 2004

Shorts, 10/27.

Real People Bush has galvanized the indie film community like never before, reports Jake Brooks in the New York Observer. In the final phase of the campaign, though, fundraisers and feature-length political docs are giving way to get-out-the-vote field trips and TV ads. Also: Bruce Feirstein's amusing preview of election night reporting.

But the for all the urgency permeating Brooks's piece, the one item of probably greatest interest to anyone surfing a film blog is the fate of those remarkable ads that Errol Morris has made: "Real People" who voted for Bush in 2000 explain why they're voting for Kerry this year. In an interview Ben Chappel conducts for the Gothamist (which several bloggers in the constellation you'll know pretty well by now are pointing to, but see in particular Greg Allen), Morris explains why he's "modified" a few of them: "To make them stronger." Not only is he still adding to the collection, you'll also find downloadable posters for getting word out.

Frederick Wasser picks up the "Passion vs Fahrenheit" version of the map of contemporary America and takes it interesting places. One reading: if consensus politics is dead, so, too, is the blockbuster. Also at Flow: Thomas Schatz, author of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era: "A half-century ago, the postwar emergence of commercial television left the Hollywood studio system in ruins and decimated its audience; now a resurgent movie industry and a revolutionary home-video technology threaten to exact their revenge."

On Friday, David Poland asked out loud, "What would I do if some studio handed me the keys to their wanna-be-old-Miramax tomorrow?" On Monday, he outlined the four foundational corners of his answer.

The critics just don't get it, argues Michael Atkinson. "The question is as old as Voltaire's wig powder: How close can you get to what you're satirizing before the line between target and vilifier all but disappears? ... Because [Team America: World Police] doesn't trust the average American citizen, it's a sharper election year prod than The Manchurian Candidate. Parker and Stone aren't the first satirists to underestimate their own aggression or be accused of selling what they're telling us not to buy." So... the movie is brilliant; its makers may not (or may) be. Maybe.

Also in the Village Voice:

Yes Nurse! No Nurse!

Jason Wood bills his interview with Pawel Pawlikowski a "brief chat," but not many papers would give it the breathing room Kamera does. Also:

Pocket Essentials: Hitchcock

David O Russell's "Soldier's Pay" is part of IFC's pre-election line-up, reports Shilpa Mankikar at indieWIRE, while, as Eugene Hernandez writes, Bush's Brain heads up the Sundance Channel's pre-election programming.

Also: Eugene presents a full account of the Hamptons International Film Festival and Brian Brooks parses this week's indieWIRE:BOT results.

In the New York Press:

Tanner on Tanner

"[W]orld-renowned filmmakers, highly conceptual sketches, and mixed results": Doug Cummings on Ten Minutes Older, the first batch, The Trumpet.

Wiley Wiggins has bad news for those who were looking forward to the live action adaptation of Akira.

Todd at Twitch has hopeful news of Takashi Miike's Big Spook War, "described by some as a Japanese to the Harry Potter phenomenon."

"In weird fusions of fiction and documentary like his Buddhist-surrealist meditation on storytelling, Mysterious Object at Noon, and the rash-infected erotic idyll Blissfully Yours, as well as in an ongoing series of gallery-bound videotapes such as a ruralized rethink of snooty urban soap operas, Haunted Houses, Apichatpong [Weerasethakul] is almost single-handedly inventing modern Thai independent and experimental cinema, even if he's better known in France than among multiplex audiences in Bangkok, who've only just begun to understand and embrace their controversial native son." And Chuck Stephens interviews him for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The occasion: the YCBA Artist-in-Residence series, November 5 through 7.

Also in the SFBG:

  • Johnny Ray Huston on Sideways ("[Virginia] Madsen transforms an excellent film into, at least briefly, a truly great one") and Undertow (as [it] gets curiouser and curiouser, it winds up a mere curiosity").
  • Cheryl Eddy on The Manson Family: "[O]ne starts to get the feeling that, yep, these are the kind of folks who'd be capable of tasting a pregnant woman's blood, or carving the word war in a dead man's stomach."
  • Dennis Harvey on Saw: "It's not just soulless; it keeps shoving you around and grinning like an idiot, assuming you're delighted, too."

Stuart Jeffries meets Eric Rohmer:

Triple Agent Triple Agent

"What I remember, more than anything else, was the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937 that seemed to reflect the political climate of the time. Each nation had a pavilion on the opposite side of the Seine to the Eiffel Tower." Very slowly, Rohmer pulls himself to his feet, comes round his desk and hobbles, hunchbacked, towards the film poster on the opposite wall so he can point out a detail. He is wearing worn Reeboks and jeans, with only the sartorial touch of a cravat to suggest a dignified Frenchman. "On the poster you can see on the left the German pavilion. On the right there is the Soviet one - two bombastic totalitarian powers facing each other."

Also in the Guardian:

  • An Ovitz vs Eisner update from David Teather.
  • Another consideration of the films and photography of Robert Frank, this time from Adrian Searle.
  • Lucy Atkins: "[Angelina] Jolie, of course, is not the first Hollywood megastar to join the Insta-mum Club, and despite all the sneering, she may well prove to be a great mother to Maddox and Gleb."
  • Musicians and DJs remember John Peel. A special report.

In the Independent:

In the New York Times:

  • A film version of A Confederacy of Dunces is probably "shelved until either somebody dies or everybody gets paid off," David Gordon Green tells Dave Kehr, but in the meantime, the director is "sinking roots in New Orleans."
  • Lola Ogunnaike previews what frankly sounds like a pretty grotesque exercise, AMC's reality series, Film Fakers, which "dupes out-of-work actors into believing they have landed plum movie roles, only to reveal later that the entire production, from the crazed director to the flimsy script, is a colossal hoax."
  • Caryn James: "Extreme weight loss and gain is today's most popular form of stunt acting, with movie stars ballooning up and down as if they've never heard of padding or special effects or just wearing black." Christian Bale's voluntary emaciation for The Machinist is half the reason for the piece; in Salon, Cintra Wilson explains at great length why she's convinced he's "a friggin' genius."
  • Kehr on a select set of new DVD releases.

Lots going on at Filmmaker:

"Sitting down with the three disc anniversary edition of Clerks this weekend, Cinecultist got to thinking about our long and tumultuous love affair with the films of Mr. Smith and generally the last ten years of indie films."

Filmbrain gets his desk in order: notes on the many films he's caught in the last several weeks.

Eminem: Mosh

Online viewing tip. Eminem's "Mosh." Director Ian Inaba: "This video was made possible by a team of artists who came together inspired by a song and video that might be able to effect the next four years of all of our lives."



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Posted by dwhudson at October 27, 2004 8:43 AM