Shorts, 2/2.

So how's American independent film doing? Sundance has come and gone and with distance - a couple of days worth, anyway - comes perspective. In the Village Voice, Dennis Lim offers "three tentative diagnoses, culled from a sampling of the fiction films." Anthony Kaufman adds up the numbers: "Dollar for dollar, Sundance 2005 broke records - and broke them early." And Rob Nelson covers the docs.

Nelson's piece for the City Pages is actually a lot more amusing; while you're there, Sundance adventure and Michael Tortorello on Game Over: "[W]hat makes this documentary so involving is that Kasparov is not only human but a staunch humanist."

Wrapping Sundance at Movie City News are Emanuel Levy, who also pulls back for an establishing shot of the state of the American independent film: "My biggest disappointment with this year's Dramatic Competition is the lack of prominent new voices representing ethnic minorities and disenfranchised groups. Historically, the most important artistic and political role of indies has been in fostering the cinema of 'outsiders,' the cinema of the 'Other America.'" And Ray Pride: "While the zookeepers of culture do 'tracking' on projects in various stages of development, one of the little-commented facts of this whole film festival/indie biz is that, in effect, the filmmakers are subsidizing the film industry, working on 'spec' through the production process of creating a feature film, rather than, say, a screenplay or novel."

Dennis Harvey's take: "Genuine excitement of an artistic rather than acquisitional nature was way harder to catch than the flu." But there is hope to be found in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, namely in Cheryl Eddy's enthusiastic preview of the "multi-flavored and -textured" 7th annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival, opening tomorrow and running through February 15. Click over to the SF IndieBlog for confirmation that the buzz is simply buzzier.

Back in the Voice, J Hoberman reviews Oh! Uomo - "The underlying question, of course, is, will these sights turn people against war?" - as well as Aliens of the Deep and The Nomi Song, "better at evoking a particular bohemia than at getting inside its subject's head."

Scott Eyman reviews Steve Pond's The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards for the New York Observer: "What Theodore White was to the making of the President, Steve Pond is to Debbie Allen's choreography."

At indieWIRE, Howard Feinstein interviews Lost Embrace director Daniel Burman, Anthony Kaufman talks to Fear X director Nicholas Winding Refn and Eugene Hernandez reports that we'll have a good shot at seeing that rediscovered Gloria Swanson and Rudolf Valentino film, Beyond the Rocks; Milestone will be releasing it.

"There is a new generation emerging in Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt and the Gulf. Their cinema is all about escaping from old traditions armed only with the camera and the pen. These were the ideas that drove cinema in the 1950s, and now they are becoming a reality." Magda Wasif, author of One Hundred Years of Egyptian Cinema, interviewed by Samir Sobhi for Al-Ahram Weekly, via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

Doug Cummings considers Bresson's influence on "one of the key figures of the New Hindi Cinema of the late-60s and 70s," Mani Kaul.

In the New York Press:

• Armond White on Nobody Knows, "he intimate, inside view of a social statistic." More from Michael Atkinson in the Voice and Michael Koresky and two other Reverse Shooters at indieWIRE.

• For Matt Zoller Seitz, Hide and Seek and Alone in the Dark are merely symptoms: "Over the last 10 years, almost every remotely original horror movie that played in US theaters was made overseas." More in a similar vein from Craig Phillips.

• Saul Austerlitz offers a few cable viewing tips.

The International Buddhist Film Festival is underway in the San Francisco Bay Area; at Koreanfilm.org, Adam Hartzell reviews one of the films it's featuring, Chung Ji-young's Beyond the Mountain. Also: Two reasons Kim Ki-duk's 3-Iron leaves him unsatisfied.

"Ask Manohla" lives. Manohla Dargis is already back and taking questions at the New York Times:

Q. What are your thoughts about The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 being excluded from the Oscar nominations?
- William Hronis, Easton, Pa.

A. All my thoughts about the (relative) exclusion of these two wildly overexposed films are happy - I'm very, very happy that I don't have to think about them past the end of this sentence.

"What's so interesting about the ocean?" Andrew C Revkin asks James Cameron, and the man has a damn good answer: "The deep ocean has the same surface area as all the continents of the planet put together. We've got five submersibles in the world that can reach those depths.... That's like exploring all the continents of the earth with five Jeeps." And that's just one of many solid reasons for boosting basic research into a vast frontier. Cameron's been going on about this for a few years now and the response has been, to put it mildly, inadequate. Perhaps Aliens of the Deep will spark more general interest.

Also in the NYT:

• Dave Kehr's round-up of new DVDs is particularly interesting this week because Universal's release of Ray is particularly interesting: "[P]ush one button and the film unfolds in the 152-minute form in which it played in theaters; push another, and a substantially different movie appears, incorporating 24 more minutes of material that adds considerably to the film's rhythm, dramatic depth and complex, ambivalent vision of its subject."

• Stephen Holden: "Once you've experienced Daybreak... it's unlikely you'll forget it." (More from Melissa Anderson in the Voice). Plus: "Assisted Living may be comedy, but its images of physical frailty are inescapably unsettling."

• Dana Stevens on the "courageous but disorganized" Freak Weather."

Via Alternet, Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman talks to Danny Schlechter about his doc, WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception).

ME Russell has a long talk with James L Brooks and learns that if Brooks could just get the rights to the songs, we may yet see not only the musical version of I'll Do Anything but also a doc about his experience making it.

"I drive a car now that, when you get in it, it smells like it's going to start." Rex Pickett, who wrote the novel Sideways, talks to Oliver Burkeman about how his life's changed "a little bit" since the movie.

Also in the Guardian:

• Tanya Gold is truly irked by Annie Leibovitz's cover shot for the March issue of Vanity Fair, calling it "an homage to the blowjob values of 1950s Hollywood."

• Sandra Smith offers - for free! - a guide to what to say about the Oscar noms.

• Peter Bradshaw tours London's West End: "Any fastidious qualms about adapting films into plays are groundless; my cine-snobbery has been quite upended."

In Vanity Fair itself, Jim Windolf lays the groundwork for the May release of Revenge of the Sith - darker and yet featuring more shots and more special effects per shot than all the other Stars Wars pictures - and finds George Lucas almost sounding like he's glad it'll all be over again relatively soon: "From now on, I'm going to make movies like THX that nobody wants to see, that aren't successful, and everybody will say I've lost my touch. I mean, I love doing Star Wars, and it's a fun adventure for me, but I'm ready to explore some of the things I was interested in exploring when I was in my late 20s."

Jeffrey Wells enjoys Sharon Waxman's Rebels on the Backlot.

Can't find a story in English on this, but a few German papers are reporting that Karen Bach (Baise-moi) commit suicide last week.

Groundhog Day? Sure, why not. Metaphilm's actually rounded up a fine set of appropriate ruminations.

You may have heard something about a class action suit against MGM regarding something about the aspect ratios of their DVDs and may even have hoped there's a bit of cash or a free DVD or two in it for you. Not so fast, warns Matt Langdon points to pieces in the Digital Bits and DVD File that'll lower your expectations darn quick.

How about another best-of-2004 list? Planet Bollywood's Aakash Gandhi rounds up the top 20 musical highlights.

"Why did actor Cameron Mitchell - who co-starred with Fredric March in Death of a Salesman (1951), Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry A Millionaire (1953) and Shirley Jones in Carousel (1956) - end up in Grade-Z horror movies like Frankenstein Island (1981), Demon Cop (1990) and Jack-O (1995)?" Harvey F Chartrand investigates for Horror-Wood.

Via The Crime in Your Coffee, Michael C LaBarbera's study, "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters."

"To go to the cinema in your pajamas, stretch out your feet as much as you want and snuggle down into your pillow? That's not a vision [sic] with RUF-Cinema, the first multimedia bed of the future, it's every evening's reality." Via Boing Boing.

Online viewing tip for German-speakers. A report on the RAF exhibit at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin, viewable at freshmilk.

Online viewing tip for everyone. "Evil," a video for Interpol by Charlie White, via Wiley Wiggins.

Posted by dwhudson at February 2, 2005 3:41 PM