Friday Night Shorts

Brendan Bernhard interviews Bruce Wagner, "our premier 'Hollywood novelist,' part of a celebrated lineage that runs from F Scott Fitzgerald to Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, Michael Tolkin and other witty, jaded observers of LA's sun-dappled, soul-mottled, earthquake-rattled scene." Even though there were still a few months to go before his next novel, The Chrysanthemum Palace, would be published when they chatted, Bernhard readily admits that the occasion for the cover story in the LA Weekly is PR tour meant "to reacquaint booksellers and the public with his work." Well, good. It's a refreshingly sharp profile.

Also:

• A distant companion piece: Steven Mikulan on the Robert Blake trial, in which he points to Eric Leonard's "funniest and most trenchant observations."

• Nikki Finke blasts the Academy.

• Ella Taylor on the "vital and passionate" Head-On; I'm not sure director Fatih Akin, at least while working, remains as conscious of Fassbinder as many American reviewers assume, but in his conversation with David Ehrenstein, the name does come up - among those of Cassavetes, Wilder and Scorsese - as an influence.

• Scott Foundas on that "elegantly creepy mindfuck," Fear X.

• Robert Abele on HBO's Unscripted, which "is not about the nobility of acting. It's about the preposterous things actors need to do daily to make it."

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader on Notre Musique:

Even if one can deal with Godard's compulsive use of metaphor and abstraction and his Eurocentric perspective - all standard in much of his late work - there's something morose and emotionally remote about this film. Around a sense of futility, a disenchantment with the world, he builds a kind of poetics that's akin to some of the excesses associated with German romanticism. The issue isn't whether such despair is warranted, but what one does with it. Now in his mid-70s, Godard appears to have settled on a meditative view of contemporary history and seems disinclined to explore fresh tactics for addressing problems.

Alternet's Jon Frosch: "France's national cinema - once proudly associated with glamorous names like Bardot, Depardieu, and Deneuve, as well as wildly talented directors like Truffaut and Godard - has been gradually eroding as it struggles to compete with lucratively exported American films."

Lee Siegel in the Nation:

The question of film's influence on psyche and society is about as old as the movies themselves, and David Thomson is one of the handful of critics gifted enough to address it.... Today, he argues, we are in a moribund period for film, a moment when the stories of Hollywood's golden age, from the 1930s to the early 1950s, have been replaced by special effects and vapid characters.

I can't think of a major film critic over the past twenty-five years - the late Pauline Kael, or Andrew Sarris, or J Hoberman - who would argue with Thomson, but he seems more weary of contemporary movies than anyone else. And The Whole Equation is marred by its weariness.

[...]

To go from The Whole Equation to Thomson's classic Biographical Dictionary of Film is to experience two different categories of writing. The earlier book is magnificent and necessary. It's like a great novel about Hollywood; all it lacks is a plot.

Brian Libby writes an open letter to Martin Scorsese in Salon: "Reports have been circulating over the last several days that you and Robert De Niro are giving consideration to a Taxi Driver sequel.... Do you remember the opening scene from Robert Altman's scathing Hollywood satire The Player?"

That 70s trail: Fimoculous points to "Two Johnny Carson Clips You Won't See on CNN This Week," posted by the panopticist, who thanks Dan Radosh for encouraging him to get them online and who, in turn, points to Jay Millikan's piece on 70s-era conspiracy movies from a summer issue of Stylus.

Also via Fimoculous:

• Jason Silverman asks Hal Hartley about his DIY-all-the-way production and distribution plan for The Girl From Monday.

• Beck's "Hell Yes," directed by Shynola.

• The Hollywood Reporter's Andrew Wallenstein asks Lloyd Braun, head of the Yahoo! Media Group (more on what he's up to from Steve Rosenbaum), about the future of online entertainment: "Milton Berle - defining moment that showed what television can do. I Love Lucy - defining moment of what a situation comedy could be. We haven't really had our defining moment yet as to the big breakout event that really shows the world and the consumer, oh my god, look what this can be. But we will."

"If I told you that I've come across a low-budget little winner that capably combines solid horror fare with touching dramatic moments... capped off with a real sense of sincere human romance, you'd probably be a little bit skeptical," admits Scott Weinberg at Hollywood Bitchslap. "But if you found last year's Shaun of the Dead proof positive that an astute screenwriter can successfully combine any mixture of genres into an excellent movie (and it surely was), then you should have no trouble appreciating what Zombie Honeymoon has to offer." Also filed from Park City: MirrorMask, Pretty Persuasion and Grizzly Man.

Having found two films to recommend in Sundance's Frontier section, Scott Macaulay then turns to Tony Takitani, which is "not so much a film as a celluloid ode to [Haruki] Murakami and his oeuvre."

Via Movie City News:

• Emanuel Levy's take on the 16 films in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance: "I could detect very quickly two major discoveries: Miranda July's magical and unique Me and You and Everyone We Know, a truly independent film by any definition of this ambiguous and increasingly problematic terms, and Phil Morrison's subtle family drama Junebug."

• Anne Thompson on the "documentary-feature hybrids."

• Liam Lacey in the Globe and Mail: "So many of these Sundance movies are so tender-cute-quirky you find yourself wanting to go out and kick a sensitivity trainer and tear the word 'poignant' from the dictionary."

• Roger Ebert on nine Sundance films he likes, quirk or no quirk.

More Sundance wheat and chaff: Denis Seguin in the London Times and David Gritten in the Telegraph.

Anthony Kaufman's reflection on his run-in with the San Francisco Chronicle's Ruthe Stein at the fest is unsurprisingly civilized.

"All the TV time eaten up by the Inaugural froufrou - including 'the most boring parade in America,' as one network news producer covering it described it to me - would have been better spent broadcasting a true tribute to the American troops in Iraq: a new documentary titled Gunner Palace," writes Frank Rich. "This sweet yet utterly unsentimental movie synthesizes the contradictions of a war that is at once Vietnam redux and the un-Vietnam."

Also in the New York Times:

• "The festival officially wraps Sunday, when all the various prizes are doled out by the various juries, but in a real sense, Sundance was over on Monday." Even so, Manohla Dargis finds a few encouraging signs that the fest remains and will be more than "a weekend-getaway affair for industry heavy-hitters on the hunt for the next big thing."

• Virginia Heffernan reviews the Sundance Channel program for which you see a banner right over there in the upper right-hand corner.

• Reactions vary among filmmakers and the press to the glut of free phones, cameras, clothes and what not being thrown at them in Sundance, notes Sharon Waxman.

• Dana Stevens on Army of One, which "puts a bitterly ironic spin on the Army's best-known recruiting slogan, 'Be all that you can be.'"

• Once again, the street has found its own uses for things. Cheaper and handier film and video-making tools are leading to homemade commercials for products over which their makers have no control. And it's alarming more than a few of them, among them, Volkswagen, reports Nat Ives. In a similar vein, the Guardian's Stephen Brook reports on a legit remix for a VW ad featuring "Gene Kelly rapping and breakdancing to a club-mix of 'Singin' in the Rain.'" Don't miss the chance to watch it right there on the page; it's a little disturbing, actually.

• Julie Salamon keeps a straight face throughout her story on how a rabbit named Buster has joined SpongeBob SquarePants in conservative cross-hairs.

Charlotte Cripps previews the "Japanese Film After Mr Pink" series at London's ICA, February 5 through 11. The title is derived from a notion first put forward in the Japanese film journal, Kinema Junpo, that the generation following Shinji Aoyama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Nobuhiro Suwa might be dubbed the "post-Tarantino generation."

Also in the Independent:

• Roger Clarke on cinema's husband-and-wife teams.
• Leslie Felperin on the Oscar noms.
• Sammy Richman interviews Dustin Hoffman.
• And Matthew Sweet talks to Franka Potente: "There's a vast community of executives at studios who set up meetings with you not because they want to work with you but because they're bored out of their minds, and they want to tell people that they've had lunch with the girl from Run Lola Run."

In the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams talks to Bill Morrison about Decasia.

Clive Thompson in Slate: "The more video games become like movies, the worse they are as games." Also: David Edelstein on Hide and Seek: "[T]he next time I see an actor gingerly open a cupboard and get knocked back by an overamplified screeching cat, I'm walking."

The Guardian's Xan Brooks interviews Kevin Bacon:

[L]ife has taught me that if I am to have a satisfying career, I have to take three things out of the mix. The first is the size of my part. The second is the size of the budget. And the third is the size of my salary. Once you get rid of those things, your possibilities exponentially explode. You get to work with the directors who matter. You get to make movies like The Woodsman.

Also: John Irving on Tod Williams's "brilliant idea."

In the Austin Chronicle:

• Anne S Lewis talks to Ramona Diaz about Imelda.

• Marrit Ingman looks ahead to the Austin Jewish Film Festival, starting tomorrow and running through February 4.

• Shawn Badgley previews SXSW, March 11 - 19.

"With records, you can be one kind of way, and records show one slice of my personality I've chosen to make public. But with movies you have to open up." Ice Cube talks to PopMatters's Cynthia Fuchs.

Morgan Spurlock: "Holy crap! We're going to the Oscars!"

Katie Dean for Wired News: "A group of file-sharing activists is practicing a little civil disobedience of its own in order to bring the documentary series Eyes on the Prize to a wider audience....Downhill Battle enlisted the help of a group called Common Sense Releasers to digitize the series and convert it to MPEG-4 format for distribution on the internet. The group hopes people will organize community screenings of the series around the country." Via the SF IndieBlog.

Dario Argento fans will want to tune into logboy's news at Twitch.

In LA on Tuesday? Check the lineup for the RES Screening at the Egyptian.

Online browsing tip. Photos by George Hurrell, via Rashomon.

Online viewing tip. As a modest percentage of the critics, programmers, reps and so forth that deluged Park City last week now board their transatlantic flights, the Sundance brouhaha is about to segue over to coverage of Rotterdam, which opened on Wednesday and runs through February 6. The amusing trailer features Mark Borschardt of American Movie fame.

Posted by dwhudson at January 28, 2005 3:28 PM