Shorts, 1/11.

Ted Hope, a producer with a sort of co-founding-father status in the American independent film movement, compares and contrasts the moment of that movement's beginnings and the present in the Village Voice. A few choice cuts:

The indie production surge of the late 80s and early 90s was driven not only by a reaction to the Reagan-Bush agenda but also by the embrace of Gordon Gekko-esque greed... Innovative film will have a much harder time now than it did in the Reagan-Bush years... We can't rely on a voice to rise out of the darkness. We have to show up in huge numbers for those who dare say something different, or indie film, as a movement, will truly die this decade.

The soundbites don't really let on to what the piece is actually about. Go, read, see what you think. Is he overly pessimistic about prospects for the movies yet overly optimistic about prospects for, oh, the world as a whole? While you mull that over, you'll probably want to know more about ...Sometimes in April, too, so here.

Meantime, also in the Voice:

• J Hoberman decides Appleseed won't push anime any further into the mainstream on its own (and by the way, Navarre has acquired FUNimation, but I digress), and so, gives himself room for another line of thought: "How is it that outsider artist Henry Darger's innocently kinky Vivian Girls have never been given the anime treatment? The transposition of that enigmatic mythology might yield a bizarro world or a nursery school version of demonlover's anime porn."

• Two TV-related book reviews: Joy Press on Erik Barmack's The Virgin ("entertaining but disposable") and Mark Holcomb on Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Television ("in DeLillo territory"), Christine Acham's Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power ("an involving scholarly study") and Chris Turner's Planet Simpson ("a histrionic harangue").

• Ed Park finds "the initial spark of invention" snuffed in White Noise.

• "Tracking Shots" and other shortish bits: Joshua Land on About Baghdad, Chris Tamarri on Racing Stripes, Ben Kenigsberg on Les Choristes and Dennis Lim on The Yakuza Papers.

Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau" comes a pointer not too many of us will be able to get much out of; but interviews with Emir Kusturica aren't exactly a dime a dozen, so here's Barbara Hollender's in Plus-Minus - and in Polish. According to the Perlentauchers, though, the director, who freely admits preferring liberating fantasy to hope-robbing reality, is investing all his money in a utopian village named Kustendorf. This made me blink, so off I went to check it out. Sure enough, from Matthieu Dhennin's Kusturica site:

I lost my city [Sarajevo] during the war. This is why I wished to build my village. I gave it a German name: Kustendorf. I will organize there seminars for people who want to learn how to make cinema, concerts, ceramics, painting.... I dream of an open place open with cultural diversity and set up against globalization.

Kusturica's latest film, Life is a Miracle, is slowly, slowly rolling out across Europe and doesn't yet seem to have a distributor in the US.

Via Movie City News, Steven Kotler's thorough and engaging account for Variety of a conversation one morning between Gore Vidal and Kinsey director Bill Condon. In 1948, Kinsey actually sent Vidal a sort of fan letter after he'd read The City and the Pillar. "'His letter,' recounts Vidal, with a droll smile, 'thanked me for my work in the field.'"

George Fasel on Los Angeles Plays Itself: "I was a little surprised that it took so long for [Thom] Andersen to get to what I thought was his best point: it seems to be impossible to make a movie about Los Angeles without including the police."

Shola Lynch, director of Chisholm '72, comments on the passing of the Brooklyn congresswoman.

All three Reverse Shot writers angling in on Million Dollar Baby at indieWIRE find it sturdily likable.

Maisonneuve's Jonathan Keifer: "People who know or intuit what it means to jump the shark, and jealously or cynically figure it’s inevitable that [Wes] Anderson will."

"Godard's abiding movie faith is radical," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "The collective parts of Histoire(s) du Cinéma are like a semester of what universities used to call "Film Appreciation." Each chapter, about one hour in length, equates to a course in film study and orgiastic art consumption. Godard packs a lot of ideas and images into short episodes." And White unpacks a few of them. He's also finally unveiled his ten best list, with Vera Drake at the top of it.

Also in the NYP:

• Matt Zoller Seitz explains the thinking behind his own list, which ran two weeks ago: "I watch movies not to have my worldview confirmed and applauded, but to see what filmmakers and their collaborators are thinking and feeling, and to appreciate their willingness to take mad risks, whether grand or silly."

• DVDs: Jim Knipfel on Sssssss "there are several scenes that remain genuinely disturbing to this day") and White on The Letter ("a great, fully realized, melodramatic examination of colonialism").

• Saul Austerlitz previews the New York Jewish Film Festival (January 12 through 27; more); and so does Leslie Camhi in the Voice.

Lee Siegel is actually quite impressed with Soderbergh and Clooney's Unscripted: "By representing acting as a type of work, the show demystifies acting and, as a result, celebrity. At the same time, it dignifies the aspirations of people who want to become actors, and it achieves this without concealing their vanity or insecurity."

Also in the New Republic (or at the site): Stanley Kauffmann on The Aviator, which "suffers from its leading actor almost as much as Alexander does," and on Million Dollar Baby, which "fairly fills the theater with the odor of the mothballs in which the script has been stored." A whole generation of American filmmakers has disappointed us, sighs Christopher Orr, but "one could argue that [M Night] Shyamalan has disappointed the least."

Why do so many projects filmmakers are desperately passionate about fail? Citing, among others, the two most recent examples, Oliver Stone's Alexander and Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea, Caryn James finds at least two reasons: "Over the years, endless script revisions can drain the life and energy from a movie, which then staggers into the world as if emerging from decades in a dark attic, as withered and creaky as Miss Havisham. And the filmmaker's passion is often so blinding that he forgets to explain to the rest of us why Alexander was so great or Bobby Darin was such an idol in the Spacey household."

Also in the New York Times: Harold and Maude on stage? And a musical at that? Charles Isherwood confirms your suspicions; "It's impossible, unfortunately, to resist replaying the charms of the movie in your mind as you watch Tom Jones and Joseph Thalken's tepid stage adaptation." And Dave Kehr on new DVD releases.

Most of Zoe Williams's piece in the Guardian is conventional wisdom, i.e., remakes are usually dumb, but one point does slip through: "Hollywood gets more misogynist every year. Dialogue you'd see in a 50s film would be unthinkable in a mainstream film today, since it would necessitate the existence of a female who was intelligent yet not evil." Also: Richard Christiansen on Spamalot

Online viewing tip. "Over the last two weeks, Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi doctor turned filmmaker for Guardianfilms, has succeeded in making it into [Falluja] and the surrounding refugee camps. He discovered people had been shot in their beds, rabid dogs were feeding on corpses, and there was little to no water, electricity or sewage. A city of over 300,000 people had been destroyed and its inhabitants were homeless."

Posted by dwhudson at January 11, 2005 4:13 PM