Weekend shorts.

Oops. Werner Herzog was scheduled to speak in Williamstown, Massachusetts, next year but popped up on Thursday. "These accidents sometimes have a special charm," he told his audience, as John E Mitchell reports for the North Adams Transcript. It was evidently quite a talk. Among the topics covered were his controversial methods of staging scenes in his docs to get at an "ecstatic truth," far deeper than the "accountant's truth" - in other words, mere facts.

It is a gift that you can develop and you can develop it by experiencing fundamental things like knowing what it means to be starving, what it means to be incarcerated, knowing what it means to raise children, knowing what it means to be shot at unsuccessfully. That's a deep experience, when people open fire at you and you aren't hit. You experience that and you develop into a human being who knows the human part, knows it better than others, and knowing the heart of men.

That's the sort of thing he'd teach at film school. First item on the agenda, though, would be lock-picking. Then maybe stealing cars.

Meantime, "Dudley Smith" offers a first glimpse of Herzog's Wild Blue Yonder, featuring Brad Dourif, at Ain't It Cool News.

That first story comes via Movie City Indie, where Ray Pride's also found:

• Kong Rithdee's report for the Bangkok Post from the set of what promises to be quite a production: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves has got Asano Tadanobu in front of the camera and Christopher Doyle behind it.

• Ed Siegel in the Boston Globe on the Harvard Film Archive series, "Tremors of Forgery: Filming Patricia Highsmith."

• A report on yet another talk by Wim Wenders (Colin Covert in the Star Tribune).

The series "In the Company of Anraud Desplechin" runs April 13 through 17 at the BAMcinématek in New York, peaking on the 15th with a Q&A session with the director while the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus launches its own retrospective on April 16, picking it up again every couple of days through the end of the month. AO Scott explains why he considers Desplechin "one of the most intriguing French filmmakers of his generation: those directors, mostly in their 40's, who came up in the long shadow of the new wave, too young to have participated in the tumult of the 1960's but too close to that decade to shake off its hangover."

Also in the New York Times:

• "This spring, Hollywood is releasing four films about Africa," notes Ed Leibowitz. "Business as usual," as Hotel Rwanda director Terry George puts it in Leibowitz's piece: "White leads, cuddly animals, dark continent backdrop, not really anything incisive about the politics." But Leibowitz suggests that there may be a slow, lumbering turn around afoot.

• Todd Solondz tells Ted Loos why he cast eight performers as Aviva in Palindromes. Related, via the IFC Blog: Devin Faraci also interviews Solondz for CHUD, but Jennifer Jason Leigh sits in as well.

• Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel explain to Charles McGrath the decisions they made on their way towards their adaptation of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. Review: Manohla Dargis.

"It's hard to believe that François Truffaut died 21 years ago, in 1984, at the age of 52," writes Gilbert Adair:

Since his death his reputation has been coloured by two tenacious myths. One, that he was perhaps the last true humanist of European cinema, a director whose work was infallibly "tender", "sensitive" and "compassionate", and whose aesthetic credo might have been "women and children first". And, two, that he ended by selling out to the system he had formerly attacked as a critic, an alleged capitulation to commercial imperatives for which he was to find himself vilified by more than a few fair-weather fans.

Adair sets out to debunk both. Also in the Guardian:

• "What happens to celebrities after they die?" asks Dan Glaister. "Well, for an increasing number of them, they are likely to end up endorsing a product they would never have imagined in their lifetime, will have their faces plastered over everything from credit cards to mouse pads, and will find their earnings outstripping their mortal returns."

• John Patterson on Anatomy of a Murder: "Forty-six years on, in our backward-looking, old-fashioned era, it's as modern as tomorrow morning."

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Disney's The Jungle Book.

• Chris Roberts: "At 56, Margot [Kidder]'s own story trumps any movie mythology for drama, and it's a relief to hear that despite her 1990s hell, it resolves itself with our leading lady as 'a grandmother with my dogs and nice friends here in the Rocky mountains. Ever see the movie A River Runs Through It? That's where I live.'"

"A reader asks: What happens to a director who's not in the guild?" Daniel Engber, Slate's explainer on this one, maps Robert Rodriguez's options.

Sydney Morning Herald readers - a lot of them - respond to the question David Dale posed on Thursday: "Is Nicole's time up?" Via Movie City News.

Roger Avary: "Neil Gaiman and I are currently hiding out in a hotel on the California coast feverishly executing change notes for Bobby Z. (our mob name for Robert Zemeckis, who occasionally calls our cells and says 'mush, mush!')."

How to review a friend/acquaintance's film? Straight-ahead honesty is the most helpful approach, as Matt Clayfield demonstrates. Flaws are noted, unflinchingly, but in the end: "Deadroom is one film by four directors, not four films by four directors, and that's at once both its greatest strength and the most subtle and effective of its charms."

The latest from Japan via Twitch: logboy passes along word from Nausicaa.net that the last film Hayao Miyazaki directs before he retires might be an adaptation of the Chinese book, Wo Diushile Wode Xiaonanhai (I Lost My Little Boy). Note well that it's the author of the book saying so, not Miyazaki. Also: The Gomorrahizer points to sites for Mitsuo Kurotsuchi's Semishigure and Izuru Narushima's Fly, Daddy, Fly.

Planet Bollywood: "Dismal! That's the word to describe the first quarter of the year 2005."

Dan Erdman has been covering the Wisconsin Film Festival for Film Threat: Days 1, 2, 3 and 4. Also: The American Cinemateque unveils a program of "movies not available on video."

Salon's Laura Miller interviews Ian McEwan.

Bear with me a moment: A Saul Bellow roundup:

• Ian McEwan in the NYT.

• James Wood in the Guardian.

• Elisabeth Sifton, his editor at Viking, in Slate, where culture editor Meghan O'Rourke has pulled together an amazing collection of reminiscences by novelists and critics invited "to offer a few thoughts on the nature of his influence, or to single out a book for comment," and Christopher Hitchens.

"The Ghostly Social Aspects of Cinema" is sort of an unusual name for a conference, but the program seems promising. April 14 through 16 at the Jan van Eyck Adademy in Maastricht.

Posted by dwhudson at April 9, 2005 8:50 AM