January 24, 2005

Shorts, 1/24.

After a hellacious move, there's some catching up to do, starting, of course, with Sundance.

IndieWIRE's Park City coverage has suddenly exploded, pretty much taking over iW's front page. Lots and lots and lots of coverage.

The Movie City News is on the case as well, having set up a special section with commentary and heavy linkage.

Sundance 05

Blogging from Park City:

Plenty Sundance at Ain't It Cool News, too, of course.

Following up on her preview, Heather Havrilesky files one of the more fun reports from Sundance and even manages to find "plenty of tasty Sundance offerings" on the tube.

Also in Salon: Dana Cook gathers decades' worth of memories of Johnny Carson from an expansively wide range of notables and Laura Miller interviews Terry Jones, whose cold and razor-sharp logic dissects the absurdity of our times: "What they should have done was get al-Qaida to attack Saddam Hussein."

In the Realms of the Unreal Eric D Snider's keeping a Sundance diary for Hollywood Bitchslap; also: Peter Sobczynski interviews In the Realms of the Unreal director Jessica Yu.

"To wail about Sundance renouncing its founding mission is to assume the festival had a profound mission to begin with," writes Bryan Curtis in his brief alternative history of the fest for Slate.

Sharon Waxman adds a dash of drama to the Sundance coverage in the New York Times: "Even in the annals of Sundance bidding hysteria, what was happening to Hustle and Flow into the wee hours of Sunday morning - a deal was finally made about 4 am - was writing a new chapter for the stakes, the hype and the players involved." MCN's David Poland argues that the film earns its buzz.

Also in the NYT:

  • "I see a lot of preternaturally swollen lips and un-furrowed brows as a film critic," writes Manohla Dargis (who also reviews Richard T Kelly's Sean Penn: His Life and Times). "I find plastic surgery neither morally nor politically objectionable; what bothers me are the aesthetics, the cavalcade of look-alike noses, stretched cheeks and bulbous breasts. And it is, I find, becoming increasingly difficult to see the actors - and the acting - for the plastic surgery."

  • Richard Rushfield: "Twenty years after the nonprofit Independent Film Project (IFP) started its low-key annual tribute to indie film, a then-neglected corner of the arts, the Spirits have grown into one of Hollywood's glitziest and quirkiest parties of the awards season." Meanwhile, Tom O'Neil's following the plain ol' Oscars.

  • AO Scott's got a name for the movies that come out of Indiewood: "midsize movies." He talks to several of the people who run the studios' specialty divisions.

  • James Ulmer: "Cornered by an opportunity he deemed "too good to pass up" and the gamble of untried terrain, [Stephen] Frears, a connoisseur of contradictions in his movies and his life finally said yes to another risky liaison. With a humble nod to the legendary Arthur Freed, the man behind MGM's golden chain of movie musicals, he began production last October on his first musical, Mrs. Henderson Presents."

  • Producers Michael Mann and Charles Evans, Jr are struggling over which of them can claim credit for The Aviator, reports Sharon Waxman.

  • Nick Madigan on Ridley and Tony Scott's penchant for working in television.

  • US culture has become so bland and acquiescent, conservatives seem to be running out of targets to shoot down. How 'bout SpongeBob SquarePants? David D Kirkpatrick reports and Maureen Dowd comments.

  • Lola Ogunnaike can't find anyone at ABC or the Academy who's all that nervous about Chris Rock hosting the Oscars.

  • The DVD format wars may matter even less than you already think, reports Michel Marriott: DivXNetworks co-founder Jordan Greenwall "wants high-definition DivX to be to video what the MP3 audio format was to music: a 'grass-roots movement that breaks above ground.'"

Manuscript: Beowulf Roger Avary posts an official announcement: "Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have joined forces with Steve Bing and Robert Zemeckis to bring the oldest written English language myth, Beowulf, to the big screen through the magic of performance capture." In his journal, Neil Gaiman, writes:

Lots of people wrote to tell me there's a live action Beowulf film being made already -- it's at http://www.beowulfandgrendel.com/ . I honestly don't see it as a problem. Our film won't be that one (which looks really cool). It's a big playing field. And other people wrote to ask if we were doing the whole story, and we are: as far as Roger and I were concerned, the last act of Beowulf, an old king at the end of the Age of Heroes, was the key to the whole story.

The Austin Chronicle takes a peek into the offices of Richard Linklater's Detour Film and Flat Black Films and discovers around 35 animators "working in teams and hunched over Wacom tablets connected to Power Mac G5 towers and oversized cinema display monitors," working on Linklater's adaptation of Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly "being brought to full paranoid life via Bob Sabiston's gloriously surreal software abilities, which, as in the team's previous Waking Life, utilizes hi-def filmmaking overlayed with a rich, rotoscope-inspired animation. Thirty-plus animators, and, here's the catch, so pay attention: They need more." Take a look at a few more stills and, if you're an animator, send in a resume.

Also:

  • More opportunities: If you make short films, John Hewlett and Ryan Long would very much like to screen them as part of their bi-monthly Screen Door program. Submissions are free, the venue's great and, if you can make it to Austin, the programmers try to ensure that you'll meet other filmmakers. James Renovitch explains.

  • Spencer Parsons files a longish catch-all piece on the Austinites that've ventured to Park City. Might their reception have an effect on the local scene? "John Pierson's take is that 'in terms of a vibrant independent film industry, Austin's got it above and beyond everyone else, but that doesn't mean that it's a stand-alone viable community that can do it without connection to the majors.'"

  • Marc Savlov talks to Niels Mueller about The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

Nicholas Rombes at CTheory, on how "the real has become the new avant-garde":

In what might be the supreme irony, it turns out that the re-emergence of realism in the cinema can be traced directly to a technological form that seems to represent a final break with the real. For doesn't the digital - in its very process of capturing reality - break with the old photographic process upon which classical cinema was built? Doesn't the digital remove us even deeper from the real world?

It would seem so. And yet...

Born Into Brothels Andrew Mann meets Zana Briski and hears the story behind Born Into Brothels - and beyond it: "That Briski and Kauffman - once romantic partners, now collaborators of another sort - have continued to advance the children’s interests certainly sets them apart from documentarians who parachute into a situation and then vanish in a vapor trail."

Also in the LA Weekly:

  • Ella Taylor on Jean-François Ríchet's remake of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13: "He means to up the ante on Carpenter and join his stylized formal elegance to a gritty realism that updates three decades of change in the modern cityscape, not to mention in the technology of carnage."

  • And on Takeshi Kitano's Dolls: "Kitano is never above winking at his audience, but I don't believe he’s doing that here."

  • Siran Babayan interviews Roseanne Barr, who appreciates other women comics, but "as far as a woman comic who's speaking for other women, they don't like any representation of the working class, women, people of color or anything anymore on TV. They only like models who can't get laid."

There's a tribute to Guy Maddin going on at the American Cinemateque in LA, which gives Andy Klein the opportunity to celebrate the director in the LA CityBEAT.

MS Smith on Susan Sontag:

For me, Sontag illuminated the work and significance of Godard like no one else ever has, both defining what I love most about his films and incisively analyzing his artistic achievements. She did this, in part, with her well-known penchant for aphorisms. She called Godard "a deliberate 'destroyer' of cinema." She argued that he created "a cinema that eats cinema." She wrote that "his work constitutes a formidable meditation on the possibilities of cinema." Aphoristic? Yes, but also incredibly accurate.

George Fasel on Akira Kurosawa: "[T]he 1950s were his greatest decade, and 1957 perhaps his most extraordinary year, the one in which he released both Throne of Blood and The Lower Depths."

Siân Stott: "For Theo Angelopoulos, L'Avventura may not be the film that most influenced him (that was Citizen Kane), but it is the one with which he has 'un rapport presque sentimental'." Also in the Telegraph: David Gritten on "the class of '99," i.e., David O Russell, Sofia Coppola, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson.

Mio Figlio (My Son) isn't just your run-of-the-mill TV movie about a father coming to terms with his gay son. The father is played by Lando Buzzanca, star of 70s-era sex comedies and currently a member of the National Alliance, the second-largest party in Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's conservative government. Partly as a result, as John Hooper reports in the Guardian, seven million Italians tuned in: "Mio Figlio, said one media commentator, probably did more to change the attitudes of ordinary Italians than any number of gay rights campaigns."

Also:

9 Songs

"How can I possibly claim that one of the most distinctive formalists of cinema is an ethnographer, a witness to his shape-shifting culture?" Terri Sutton considers several approaches to Yasujiro Ozu in the City Pages. Also, Rob Nelson: "Speaking as one whose late adolescence included roughly 200 spins of Ice Cube's blistering rap on "Burn Hollywood Burn"... I'll admit it's a little odd to discover the artist some 15 years later playing the lead in a de facto remake of Adventures in Babysitting... But the bigger surprise is that Are We There Yet? ain't half-bad."

What's it like being a contestant on IFC's Ultimate Film Fanatic? Vince Keenan can tell you, and a great telling it is.

Reviews at Twitch:

And at Koreanfilm.org: Kyu Hyun Kim on Park Heung-shik's My Mother, My Mermaid - "The big draw is top star Jeon Do-yeon taking on a dual role for the first time, paired with Park Hae-il (hot from Memories of Murder)" - and Adam Hartzell on Kim Du-yeong's Clementine: "It didn't need to be this way..."

Vogue: Sofia Coppola Over at Movie Poop Shoot, DK Holm has been extraordinarily busy this week. Scroll down for reviews of Conversations with John le Carré; Joshua Clover's entry in the BFI Modern Classics series, The Matrix; Projections 13; the December issue of Paris Vogue, edited by Sofia Coppola and including a vintage interview with John Milius conducted by Quentin Tarantino; and a healthy batch of new DVD releases.

As the Berlinale continues to take shape, you can't help but wish you could be in three or four spots all over Potsdamer Platz all at once from February 10 through 20. On Friday, the 39 features and docs making up the 35th International Forum of New Cinema were unveiled; and today it was announced that Im Kwon-Taek will be the center of focus in the Berlinale Showcase this year.

As Sheila Johnston reports, the Thai's had their reasons for not canceling the Bangkok International Film Festival in the wake of the tsunami (more from Wendy Ide in the London Times). Also in the Independent: Leslie Felperin on awards season, David Thompson wonders why Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro can't be more like Clint Eastwood and the interviews: Tiffany Rose with John Travolta and John C Reilly.

The Observer pulls a panel together - two directors and two journalists - to predict Oscar winners.

The Economist reports on potential Hollywood strike that could wreak a little more havoc than it might at first seem.

Metaphilm's put out a call for submissions. There may be a book in the works.

Sundance Online Film Festival Online viewing tip #1. The Sundance Online Film Festival, of course.

Online viewing tip #2. The Guardian's Kate Stables has seven of them for you.

Online viewing tip #3. Steve Rosenbaum: "Over the next few weeks - I'm going to share some of the User-Video's from the past work I've done on MTV UNfiltered, CBS Class of 2000, and Free Speech (syndicated by Studio's USA in 1999)."

Online viewing tip #4. The trailer for Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela.

Online viewing tip #5. The trailer for Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.

Online viewing tip #6. Four Variety critics chat about 2004, the year in film. Via the cinetrix.

They all hate Napoleon Dynamite, so here's online viewing tip #7. Jared Hess's video for The Postal Service's "We Will Become Silhouettes." Via many, many channels.

Online viewing tip #8. The trailer for Tony Takitani. Via Twitch.

Online viewing tip #9. The trailer for the SF Indie Fest, February 3 through 15.



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Posted by dwhudson at January 24, 2005 12:55 PM