December 18, 2004

Weekend shorts.

Paste: Wes Anderson "Deliciously warped," is Jay Sweet's initial reaction to The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Wes Anderson, it turns out, when he interviews him for Paste, isn't (despite low culture's guy sharp decoding of the director's new look), and in fact, explains that every time he thinks he's being "fantastical," someone points out that real life is already a step or two ahead of him.

In an earlier issue, by the way, Tim Porter revisits the age-old question, "What is indie?"

Dan Harris in Written By: "Partly in reaction to the rebirth of teen movies that I couldn't identify with (and with the notion that, if lucky, a cheap film would allow me to attach myself as director), I set out to write what would ultimately cover years of therapy: a script called Imaginary Heroes."

Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews "An engrossing document of a unique career, Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews depicts its subject as an artist, manipulator, child-man, spendthrift, multimillionaire, glutton, late-twentieth-century Pre-Raphaelite, someone hoping his phone service won't be disconnected for unpaid bills." To hear Ray Young tell it, it's a terrific read, too. Also in Flickhead, Young reviews White Thunder, a doc by Victoria King chronicling the literally disastrous shoot of The Viking, also part of the Milestone DVD release; and David Thomson's The Whole Equation. Then... Richard Armstrong holds onto the film in his head: Barefoot in the Park.

Charles McGrath reminds New York Times readers that house critic AO Scott has called Million Dollar Baby "the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year," and then looks back on what "used to be a grand Hollywood tradition," the boxing movie.

Also in the NYT:

  • MG Lord explains what a professional art service like Film Art LA actually does for a movie; fascinating stuff.

  • Catherine Billey tells how director Terry George got his the rating for his Hotel Rwanda notched down to a PG-13 from an R without changing his film. Very good news, and yet the argument is... interesting: You didn't actually see what I wanted you to think you were seeing.

  • Nathan Lee goes shopping for pirated DVDs. Finding them, of course, is easy; interpreting them is something else: "[B]ootlegged pseudo-movies reframe the art form in interesting ways."

  • David Carr visits Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, a couple of "workhorse actors," as Bacon puts it, whose lives actually sound a lot more enviable that the lives of most A-list stars.

  • Batman Begins, the first Batman movie in ages that actually looks maybe-just-maybe promising, "will arrive as the product of a startlingly British alignment of talent and location," writes David Gritten.

  • Stephanie Zacharek reviews The Whole Equation, which "includes brilliant flashes of insight and patches of lovely writing.... But to get to them, you have to wade through pages of gassy digressions: Thomson is loquacious to the point of reader numbness."

  • Greg Allen (yes, that Greg Allen) lists the five "most frequently borrowed titles from E-flux Video Rental, which rents tapes by video artists."

Throne of Blood In a relatively recent issue of Film International, Daniel Gronsky examines non-English adaptations of Shakespeare, focusing "primarily on the resonance of the plays with the directors Kozintsev and Kurosawa and the ways in which they subsequently translate the plays' language into a system of their own."

Steve Trautlein in Metropolis: "There are several compelling reasons to doubt that Godzilla: Final Wars will, in fact, be the monster's swan song."

Jonathan Watts reports from Beijing: House of Flying Daggers may have western critics swooning, but in China, it's been given "a resounding raspberry."

Also in the Guardian:

The Oscar race so far: David Poland and Newsweek's Devin Gordon

Online chuckle. A menagerie of posters at Worth1000, via Movie City News.



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Posted by dwhudson at December 18, 2004 12:06 PM