December 6, 2004

Shorts, 12/6.

In the New Yorker, Woody Allen imagines Mickey Mouse in the witness stand: "Dumbo felt that Donald Duck should talk to Mr. Eisner about our concerns because Mr. Eisner always seemed to listen to Donald. As he put it, Donald was 'one of the deepest ducks he'd ever met.' The two spent a lot of time together in Donald's pond."

Mickey Mouse: A Star

While "there is no doubt that the realm of accepted theories in film studies is already so crowded and broad as to be almost unmanageable," writes Brian E Butler, reviewing Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland's Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis for Film-Philosophy (and his breathless list of ongoing theories is [probably intentionally] hilarious if read in the right frame of mind),

in film theory there is one line of thought specifically developed in reference to American film that appears to be amazingly consistent and held across many of the otherwise divergent theories. As put in Studying Contemporary American Film, there is a "broad underlying assumption" of many, if not all, theories and methods of film analysis, and this has been an agreement that "the purpose of Hollywood story-telling is to disguise the ideological contradictions of contemporary capitalist society and to enforce patriarchal values in the form of normative heterosexuality."

Robert Margolis At the Gothamist, Mindy Bond and Raphie Frank interview Robert Margolis, whose new film, The Definition of Insanity, is a pseudo-doc about a fictional character, an actor wannabe, whose name also happens to be Robert Margolis. Bond and Frank note that, although the film has won awards at two of the three festivals it's entered, it hasn't made it into the Sundance lineup. Margolis is sanguine about it, though:

It's the marketing platform for films in the US and as it grows it becomes much more market-driven, not unlike the rest of our culture. So you can't exactly blame them.... Smaller films like ours have to rely more on a grass roots/guerilla marketing campaign & word-of-mouth.

Indeed; we need to be cultivating new seeding grounds. At any rate, that's via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Coming soon to the Lyric Opera in Chicago (where, by the way, the Festival of New French Cinema is running through December 12): A Wedding, directed by Robert Altman and based, of course, on the comedy I remember fondly (though it's been years). The local papers are all over it. Via Movie City Indie, Paul Engleman's piece in the Chicago Tribune, and via Movie City News, Roger Ebert's in the Chicago Sun-Times.

By the way, the latest addition to Ebert's "Great Movies" collection: Fanny and Alexander. In his most recent column for Movie Poop Shoot, DK Holm, an especially strong one, what with that section on Welles, he reminds readers of Ebert's positive, populist qualities: "[H]e is always on the side of the viewer in his causes."

Anyway, via MCN, news that the New York Press has found the rest of Armond White's cover feature after all, his version of "Film 101: A Syllabus for Life, complete with recommended readings."

Film is "a medium that's never quite known what to do with unmarried characters other than marry them off. Or kill them," writes Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe. Via the cinetrix.

Good stuff via Twitch: A trailer for the Tetsujin-28 feature (known stateside as Gigantor), a new site for Beowulf & Grendel, shot on remote locations along the southern coast of Iceland, and the first pix from Memoirs of a Geisha.

Flying Boys New at Koreanfilm.org: Darcy Paquet on The Coachman, "the first Korean film to win a major overseas award, taking home the Silver Bear (Special Jury Prize) from the 1961 Berlin International Film Festival," and on Flying Boys (site), the new film from Byun Young-joo with which she "commits herself further to making genre films that are audience-oriented, while refusing to compromise her personal ideals." And Adam Hartzell reviews another film from a woman director, Kim Eun-sook's first feature, Ice Rain.

"Gedogen" - "The word translates as a kind of pragmatic tolerance - legislating to put up with something - which is probably a necessary outlook when you live, as it were, in your neighbour's face." Despite the undeniable contributions of the concept/policy, in one form or another, to the flourishing of both the culture and economy of the Netherlands over centuries, maintaining it may simply no longer be feasible. Andrew Anthony surveys the Dutch political and social landscape in the wake of the murder of Theo van Gogh.

Also in the Observer:

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events Newsweek's Sean Smith charts the bumpy road that eventually led to the making of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Also, wondering out loud what the point of making Beyond the Sea could be, David Ansen spars lightly with Kevin Spacey.

Then, Ansen again: "Ocean's Twelve is busier, messier and thinner than its predecessor, and while it looks like the cast is having a blast and a half, the studied hipness can get so pleased with itself it borders on the smug." And for Time, Joel Stein admires George Clooney, who'll be making Good Night and Good Luck, pitting Edward R Murrow against Joseph McCarthy.

In the run-up to the release of Joel Schumacher's Phantom of the Opera, the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries interviews Andrew Lloyd Webber.

New York's Logan Hill chats with Willem Dafoe.

Wendy Mitchell's piece on the Thessaloniki International Film Festival is now up at indieWIRE.

Roger Avary describes what sounds like a terrificly fun movie; what's more: "I'm a film purist, but when I see what Robert [Brinkmann] was able to achieve for pocket change, and how good it looked, I was taken aback. Digital projection has come of age, and when these projectors go mainstream, and are in your local multiplex... well, I think the writing is on the wall."

Online viewing tip. Brian Flemming introduces it best: "A short called 'Stories Untold," which shows doc filmmakers explaining in their own words what it is like to attempt to make films about our culture when that culture is owned - and the owners are, by turns, capricious, extortionate or unavailable."

Posted by dwhudson at December 6, 2004 8:12 AM