Shorts, 11/23.

This week's one-plus-two review from indieWIRE and Reverse Shot: "The Old Man's Back Again." The occasion is Notre Musique; the writers are Jeff Reichert and, responding, Michael Koresky and Neal Block.

At any rate, yes, he's back, and again, too, but in the Village Voice, J Hoberman reminds us that Notre Musique "is the latest, but scarcely the least, of Jean-Luc Godard's elegies for 20th-century Europe, the cinema, and himself.... Too touchy-feely for some hardcore Godardians, Notre Musique is the most lucid of the master's recent films. More gnarly Godard may be found in Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma... another installation in Godard's long goodbye."

Meanwhile, the New York Press's Armond White finds a way into the film via Alexander: "Ptolemy's narration, pronounced from the Library of Alexandria, reflects Godard's modern image of a disused library in Sarajevo that is full of cast-off books (discarded thoughts) - the irrelevant works and dreams of a detached privileged class that is no longer directly in touch with war and ambition."

Now then, a related item. Ask Google to tell you about Stéphane Zagdanski, but in English, please, and you won't come up with much. Mostly references to his untranslated novels or articles. But by way of Perlentaucher's Magazinrundschau, I see that he's raised a ruckus in France with a new book-length essay, La mort dans l'oeil: Critique du cinéma comme vision, domination, falsification, éradication, fascination, manipulation, dévastation, usurpation. Or maybe just Mort for short.

As the Perlentauchers helpfully explain (in German), he's taken on cinema as an "avaricious industry" based on a "hypnotic and manipulative" ideology. He evidently comes down hard on everyone from the Lumieres to the Wachowskis, but especially hard on Godard. Spotting an obvious runner, Le Nouvel Observateur invited Zagdanski and Godard for a two-hour face-off. If you can read French, here's Aude Lancelin's edit; and you can listen to the two go at each other via France Culture. The Perlentauchers assure us they ended up the "best enemies" in the world. Fortunately, here comes a long weekend and Google does know how to translate.

Newish and online-only from Film Comment: Preston Gisch: "Minority Report's strengths illustrate I, Robot's shortcomings." And Amy Taubin interviews Mike Leigh: "In the opening shot of Naked, I said to Dick, 'you should put the camera on your shoulder and run straight toward them.' And he said you're crazy. But it worked."

Related to that recollection (go on, you'll see why): The Esoteric Rabbit / Ghostboy Letters. Two young, sharp and insightful filmmakers, Matthew Clayfield and David Lowery, exchange email, discussing just where they want to take their talents.

Tom Stoppard has told the Independent on Sunday's Malcolm Fitzwilliams that he's been shoved off the film adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy: "It is not a completely unprecedented situation where people say that this is all fine, well done, and thank you and then a great silence descends." Evidently, though no one involved has been polite enough to inform Stoppard, he's been replaced by Chris Weitz. Whom Pullman himself has met, evidently: "He won't make my film into another American Pie." A modest leap, but a leap of faith nonetheless.

A version of Advocate editor Bruce Steele's interview with Bill Condon is featured in the November issue, but the full-blown conversation - about Kinsey, yes, but also about the entire world of the film; this is one rich talk - is online.

If only just one or two of these articles were: index magazine's Fall Film Issue.

Antonio Pasolini has "A Quick Chat With Bruce LaBruce" about, among other things, "how to avoid the co-optive powers of the media and make a sexy insurgency without succumbing to the merely cosmetic realm of radical chic. Nonetheless..."

Also in Kamera:

• Michelle Le Blanc & Colin Odell on Joan Mellen's entry in the BFI Modern Classics series, In the Realm of the Senses, "a fascinating companion to a fascinating film."

• Adrian Gargett on Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Reader, edited by Sean Redmond and "an illuminating study."

• The second part of Metin Alsanjak's coverage of the London Film Festival.

For Film-Philosophy, Peter Ruppert reviews John Cunningham's Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex: "No other national cinema, Cunningham suggests, has had to endure the devastating impact of a fascist dictatorship, the complete destruction of its facilities, state control, and censorship, and a 'systems change' in 1989. And no other European film industry, with the possible exception of Germany, has had to contend with the periodic emigration of its most talented filmmakers (after 1919, in the late 30s, after World War II, in 1956 and after). And yet..."

It's that time of the year again: Film Threat presents its "Frigid 50: The Coldest People in Hollywood 2004." And number one with a bullet is... Michael Moore. Let the purges begin, looks like.

Masters of Cinema is now taking votes through December 23 for its annual "DVD of the Year Award."

As David Edelstein has discovered, sorting through the mail he's received from readers, to parents and teachers, The Incredibles is not just a movie. It's also "reignited one of the oldest debates about child-rearing and society: competition versus coddling, excellence versus egalitarianism," writes John Tierney in a piece laced with colorful references to Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and Marx. Related: "Villany! Have politics hijacked 'toons?" David Sterritt in the Christian Science Monitor, via Metaphilm.

Also in the New York Times:

• Hilary de Vries talks to Robert Downey, Jr about his... album. The Futurist, it's called.

• Charles Isherwood reviews Woody Allen's "glum new play," A Second Hand Memory.

• AO Scott on that "two-minute distillation of the essence of Luhrmannism," the Chanel 5 commercial.

• Bruce Weber: "[Y]ou would be hard-pressed to find a better parody of Shakespearean reality - oozing with the frailties and failings of humankind - than that recalled by the testimony of Michael D. Eisner, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, in a Delaware courtroom last week."

• Sharon Waxman on "an unusual scramble for position among filmmakers and their usually low-profile media representatives" in the wake of the firing of publicist Leslee Dart.

• Dave Kehr on new DVDs.

In the Observer, Jason Burke explores ideas similar to those put forward by Michael Ignatieff last week in the NYT Magazine: "The terrorists have become auteurs, mini film directors."

Also:

• Liz Hoggard on the "Battle of the Biopics": "It's interesting how much biopics tell you about directors themselves."
• Gavin Edwards interviews Jamie Foxx.
• Adam Mars-Jones reviews Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: "[H]is grip is slacker on film than on books."
• Geraldine Bedell reads Who the Hell's In It? and decides, "I ended up feeling sorry for Bogdanovich."

The slow death of the VCR warrants a lead editorial in the Guardian. Mark Lawson takes a longer look back.

"Of the many films made during South Korea's 'Golden Age' of cinema, two that are referenced repeatedly are Yu Hyonmok's Aimless Bullet and Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid." Filmbrain considers the latter; more on the former on the way.

New review at Koreanfilm.org: Adam Hartzell on Im Kwon-taek's Adada.

What did Robert Towne, Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson and Hawk Koch say the other night at the 30th anniversary screening of Chinatown the other night? Matt Langdon was there. He'll tell you.

Hm, there's a book in the works about the "mythic, sprawling and influential Austin film scene," as Matt Dentler puts it. The author? Alison Macor.

Todd at Twitch admires the teaser poster for Terry Gilliam's Tideland.

Back to the Voice. Mentioned before here and highly anticipated elsewhere, in a few days, New York's Film Forum will launch a month-long series entitled "Essential Noir." Toni Schlesinger introduces the Voice's "Noir Genius Exam" to be completed only after seeing all the films on offer. Besides the films themselves, there are prizes on offer.

What else:

• Ed Park celebrates The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: "No Pixar? No problem!"

• Michael Atkinson on Alexander, "a festival of risible wiggery.... Monty Python has scorched this earth already so well." Related: Movie City News points to an AP piece on the parallels between the flick and Dubya's military adventures.

• Jessica Winter on A Very Long Engagement - "the movie gridlocks amid its crowds of characters, backstories, detours, and twists; the squealing gears of heavy plot machinery eventually drown out much else." More from Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "[W]hile the film is often delightful, occasionally moving and rarely less than inventive, it also confirms that Jeunet's style - and the contraptionist style in general - has pitfalls."

• Dennis Lim on Ae Fond Kiss..., "one of Loach's more forgettable films." (Hm, I still remember it.)

• Joshua Land previews the African Diaspora Film Festival, November 26 - December 12.

• "Tracking Shots": Park on National Treasure; Hoberman on Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst; and Ben Kenigsberg and Kris Wilton on Easy and Legacy of Faith, respectively.

Paris Review's interview with William Faulkner is now up. Read it all, but if you're a dead-set and single-minded cinephile, head for the middle and the biting story involving MGM and an exchange of countless telegrams.

Another online longish reading tip. Daniel Chandler's "Notes on 'The Gaze'," via the cinetrix's shout-out to David Edelstein.

Online viewing tip. Mahatma Gandhi speaks to the entire world in Spike Lee's ad for Telecom Italia (click here to go directly to the clip [Quicktime, 4.56 Mb]). That is Gandhi's voice, of course, taken from a recording of a speech delivered at the Inter-Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947. Via Perlentaucher.

Posted by dwhudson at November 23, 2004 4:09 PM