Shorts, 2/24.

Res magazine's Holly Willis (see her brief intro to what's unfortunately a print-only piece on Thumbsucker in the current issue) has a must-read feature in the LA Weekly, taking stock of the current vogue for "motion graphics" or "broadcast design" and tracing its history from the credit sequences of Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro, through that of print renegade David Carson and titles designer Kyle Cooper to the more recent work of Mike Mills, Geoff McFetridge, Jeremy Blake and "small, relatively new shops such as Stardust, Colourmovie, Logan, Brand New School, Tomorrow's Brightest Minds, Blind, Traktor, twothousandstrong, Fuel, Belief, bangbangstudio and... Motion Theory.... For these new companies, the last five or so years have been an intense period of self-definition and discovery that has allowed for the freedom to re-define not only the world of commercial moving images, but the notion of work itself."

Related:

• Doug Harvey on "Visual Music," a "spectacular new show co-mounted by LA's Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and currently on view at MOCA Grand," which "takes on the enormous task of covering 'the charged and profoundly generative relationship between art and music over the last 100 years.'"

• "Cinema du Dots," Willis's profile of James and John Whitney.

• Greg Burk introduces "a series of live sight & sound knockdowns called 'See Hear Now'" at REDCAT.

Also in the LA Weekly:

• Dave Shulman finds Tommy Chong remarkably resilient, considering all the crap he's been put through.

• Nikki Finke previews Chris Rock's Oscar Night standup act. Related: In the New York Times, Frank Rich explains "why the people bringing you the Oscars have done everything possible to imply that Sunday's show will be so indecent that even the winner of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award may let loose with a Dick Cheney expletive."

• Erin Aubry Kaplan on Diary of a Mad Black Woman: "It's official: The Chitlin Circuit, that modern road show of gospel plays made by black people for black people, has gone mainstream."

• Ella Taylor on Downfall, which "assiduously shuns fresh interpretation, as if an imaginative or non-realist reading were somehow unholy or off-limits."

• Remembering Hunter S Thompson: Finke, Marc Cooper and Steven Kotler.

For Alternet, Ed Rampell talks to Donald Bogle about his new book, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood, a history of what some have called "Harlem-wood": "When I first started writing about African Americans in the movies, I didn't have a really full sense of Black Hollywood as a place that's both mythic and real.... African Americans were really not free to live wherever they wanted to in LA. There were restrictive covenants that prevented homes from being sold to people of color. There was the East Side where blacks lived, and part of the West Side, and they kept moving further west. So, it's a real community that people had." Bogle also offers his take on this record year for Oscar-nominated African Americans.

Christopher Orr in Salon: "[Clint] Eastwood is the rare artist who has gone from being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the left to being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the right.... But while it's true that Eastwood's work, as an actor and especially as a director, has espoused a vague political philosophy - and one that has evolved over time - it has never been nearly as programmatic as either his admirers or his detractors imagine."

March in Austin? SXSW, of course. But this year, March'll also be Miike month as the Austin Film Society stages its "Bloodbath and Beyond: The Extreme Cinema of Takashi Miike" series. "With seven diverse films showing the director's fascination with the absurd, the grotesque, and recurring themes of obligation and brotherhood," writes Wells Dunbar in the Austin Chronicle, "the Alamo Drafthouse is also on board, highlighting eight of Miike's smaller features."

Also:

• Joe O'Connell on a unique series, "Cinema for Everyone," at the Palace Theatre in Seguin (March 3 - 6), that, while tailored for deaf audiences, highlights unique aspects of purely cinematic language.

• Spencer Parsons talks to the creators of "#1 Fan: A Darkomentary."

• It's theater rather than film, but still: Barry Pineo talks to Brian Jones about playing a very misunderstood man in Howard Zinn's Marx in Soho.

• Ok, books, not movies, but again: Louis Black talks to John Irving about Until I Find You, the book he's been working on for six years. Also: Jess Sauer saw Don DeLillo.

Aaron Dobbs introduces the fourth in a series of interviews for the Gothamist with film programmers: "Today we stay east of the East River, heading from Astoria, Queens to Fort Greene, Brooklyn and a visit to BAM and the BAMcinématek for a little chat with Florence Almozini."

At Bitter Cinema, Sean Spillane finds a "very interesting (and technical) piece on the restoration and imminent DVD release of the classic BBC productions of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass teleplays."

George Fasel remembers Simone Simon (more from Sean Spillane and the Cinecultist). Also: "The Film Comment Selects series closed yesterday with a terrific wind-up, Memories of Murder... In my judgment, the best new films that I caught in the series were all South Korean."

Which brings us to Koreanfilm.org:

• Adam Hartzell on Kim Hong-joon's Jungle Story, a film that works if you're not expecting a generic rock movie.

• Kyu Hyun Kim on screenwriter Kong Su-chang's directorial debut, R-Point, "an unabashedly political commentary on the suppressed history of Korean involvement in global armed conflicts, including the current entanglement in Iraq."

• News, both very sad and very glad, via Darcy Paquet: Lee Eun-ju has committed suicide; four Korean films made between 1938 and 1941 have been rediscovered.

For the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams interviews Born Into Brothels co-director Zana Briski. Cindy Fuchs takes on the review, alongside Adams's for Godard's Notre Musique.

George Thomas on "the Sins of Vinod Pande."

Today's Tsai Ming-liang update comes via the indieWIRE Insider. The AP is reporting that he won't have The Wayward Cloud released in Taiwan if censors insist on editing it.

All Filmmaker's Steve Gallagher set out to do was alert us to the "Take No Prisoners: The Bold Vision of Kira Muratova" series at the Walter Reade in New York; but the entry turned into quite a story.

Oscars:

• Elbert Ventura for the New Republic: "The problem, of course, isn't that the Oscars are meaningless - we already knew that. The problem is that they matter."

• "The Envelope" collects all related coverage in the Los Angeles Times.

• "Awards Watch" at Movie City News.

• The Guardian's special section and its two quizzes.

• jp at low culture: "And the best actor who overcame career embarrassment is..."

Speaking of which. Jeffrey Wells anticipates the maturation of two careers: Ben Affleck and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Palladio is "an interactive movie about lust, greed, art and advertising" by composer Ben Neill and media artist Bill Jones adapted from Jonathan Dee's book and experienceable on March 4 and 5 at Symphony Space in New York.

Online viewing tip. ZZalger0n's "10 Ways to Install a Better Dad."

Posted by dwhudson at February 24, 2005 1:10 PM