Shorts, 5/9.

Robert Gottlieb marvels at the resiliency of Tallulah Bankhead, "a star more than an actress, a personality more than a star, a celebrity before the phenomenon of celebrity had been identified":

Tallulah, with her signature "dah-ling"s and her notorious peccadilloes and her endlessly caricaturized baritonal gurgle of a voice - a voice that the actor-writer Emlyn Williams said was "steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning" - would be easy to dismiss as a joke if she hadn't also been a woman of outsize capacities. As it is, the story of her life reaches beyond gossip and approaches tragedy.

Also in the New Yorker: David Denby on Kings and Queen - "this movie, however incomplete and frustrating, is also fully alive and extraordinarily intelligent" - and Monster-in-Law, "commercial product, as squarely aimed at teen-age girls as an advertisement for pink cell phones. Still, the self-confident fatuity and condescension of the movie is offensive." And Malcolm Gladwell zeroes in on an important misconception about Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You: "Johnson wants to understand popular culture - not in the postmodern, academic sense of wondering what The Dukes of Hazzard tells us about Southern male alienation but in the very practical sense of wondering what watching something like The Dukes of Hazzard does to the way our minds work."

Damien McGuinness has seen Fatih Akin's Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul and offers his mostly favorable first impressions for Spiegel Online: "This is a city where medallioned homeboys rap in Turkish, DJ electronic club sets are underscored with Arabesque beats and the long-necked Lyre is used for Jazz improvisations. East not only meets West, but takes it on, tunes it up and spits it out."

Meanwhile, Alles auf Zucker has so far beat Downfall, ten nominations to three, in the race for the Deutscher Filmpreis. Erik Kirschbaum reports for Reuters. Via the indieWIRE Insider. More nominees.

Edmund Sanders in the Los Angeles Times: "After decades of government censorship and a two-year U.S. occupation, actors, filmmakers and television producers are embracing new artistic freedoms to tell stories about Iraqis - before and after Saddam Hussein's overthrow - for an increasingly housebound audience."

Look who's blogging at the Huffington Post: John Cusack, Ellen DeGeneres, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall, David Mamet, Mike Nichols and Harry Shearer. And that's just the showbiz folk, of course.

Via Movie City News, Roger Ebert, in an excerpt from his 1987 memoir, Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook, recalls the year Coppola was there with Apocalypse Now:

He had gambled five years and his personal fortune on a film that was now entered in the official competition at Cannes (which meant that it could come home as a loser). He was no doubt sitting out there even now, thinking what private thoughts no one could guess. By renting the yacht and anchoring it in solitary splendor at the end of everyone's view, he had dramatized his presence and his isolation.

Variety's got its Cannes special up and running. Via the cinetrix.

15 years since he first saw Koyaanisqatsi, Alex Steffen watches it again; his thoughts, focusing on the power of a single iconic image and posted at WorldChanging, spark a string of comments.

"Multimillion dollar productions by "tourist" directors, absurdly over-privileged and removed from the realities of the majority of Angelenos (less than 3% of whom actually work in the industry), continue to perpetuate myths about America's second largest city." Doug Cummings describes the ways Thom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself unravels them.

"A book has stirred debate over the most famous scene in Italian cinema history," reports John Hooper. Did Fellini lift the Trevi Fountain bit from a novel he'd read four years before he made La Dolce Vita? Also in the Guardian: Clare Longrigg, author of No Questions Asked: The Secret Life of Women in the Mob, notes the ways Paolo Sorrentino's Consequences of Love varies from previous depictions of the Mafia on Italian screens. Plus: The premiere Bose: The Forgotten Hero has been moved from Calcutta to Jaipur because its portrayal of Indian independence leader Subhash Chandra Bose has offended the party he founded, the Forward Bloc. For much more news of Indian cinema, turn to Wilfred Lobo at Cinema Minima.

Depending on where you are, it may be a while before you get a chance to see The Take, the doc by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein. In the meantime, there's Kim Phillips-Fein assessment of Klein's impact and relevancy for n+1.

One of the minor yet notable aspects of Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession is the need Xan Cassavetes obviously feels, in order to set the stage, to get a few of her older interviewees to conjure a world before HBO, before VCRs or any home video of any kind (and by the way, IFC's Andrea Meyer interviews her; a must-read). It wasn't that long ago, kids. And yet, back in those Dark Ages, as Nick Rombes reminds us, there were people like Jack Gould - not an academic, mind you, not a theorist, but a writer for the New York Times - who could see what was coming: "[I]n many of his articles Gould is almost McLuhan-esque," writes Nick and points to a 1967 piece that pretty much outlines the features we've come to love in the DVD.

It makes me wonder who now is as prescient about the future as Gould was then; I keep coming back to Charles Mann's "The Heavenly Jukebox," which appeared in the Atlantic nearly five years ago. Merely apply all he wrote about the standoff between musicians and listeners on the one side and the music industry on the other to their counterparts in the realm of film and video, and we'd have a sober reminder that the limits to attaining such heavenliness are not technological but legal. Ironically, that cover story, once free, is now available only to Atlantic subscribers.

George Fasel: "Broadly speaking, my views on John Wayne are not unlike those about [Errol] Flynn: he made something like 175 films (including the early silents in which he was essentially an extra), of which I find no more than a dozen watchable.  But in those twelve, where there was a highly fortunate and rare matchup of script, direction, and a commitment of interest by Wayne, he's as good as any action hero gets and better than many male leads of any sort."

"Looks like Welles, feels like Welles... but isn't Welles." Filmbrain on Journey Into Fear.

Let Ben Slater tell you about the half a dozen films he caught at the Singapore International Film Festival.

From Cassavetes to Daredevil? Mike Sterling's found an interesting shot of Ben Carruthers.

Two profiles via Movie City Indie: Miles Fielder in the Scotsman on producer Gillian Berrie, the link between Scottish filmmakers (e.g., David Mackenzie) and Danish filmmakers (the whole Dogme set, basically), and Joey Guerra in the Houston Chronicle on Damian Chapa who, because he has no PR budget to speak of, "has been doing local radio spots, making appearances at nightclubs and distributing fliers at gas stations" to promote El Padrino, a "gritty gangster flick, which stars Jennifer Tilly, Stacy Keach, Faye Dunaway, Gary Busey, Robert Wagner and Brad Dourif."

At the Artful Writer, Craig Mazin has a little advice for screenwriters on dealing with suits.

New York's guide to the movies of summer.

Online browsing tip. Annie Leibovitz's Star Wars photo album. Related: Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle on growing up watching, living and breathing these movies. You can also listen to Jason Calacanis rave about Sith. For quite a while, too.

Online viewing tip #1. "On Hyperlinkage and the Evolution of the Species." Matthew Clayfield's short video goes from zero to 100 in mere minutes. While the notion of information anxiety has been tackled by authors ranging from Robert Saul Wurman to David Shenk, Matt makes an interesting link to a supposed ADD/ADHD epidemic (and he's right to suggest that the jury is still out on this) and proposes that we consider the possibility that a whole new generation may be displaying symptoms of an adjustment that's far healthier than we realize. (And this idea is just a few doors down the hall from Steven Johnson's, actually.) My own hunch, though, is that, if information begins to pose an actual threat economically, we'll turn to technology to nip it in the bud far sooner than actual physical evolution ever could.

Online viewing tip #2. "Feeling out of place and ready to leave [Disney], [Tim] Burton was given the opportunity to direct Vincent, a six minute short based on a children’s story he had written. The film is a humorous look at a suburban boy named Vincent who reads Edgar Allen Poe and identifies with horror film star Vincent Price. The studio gave Burton the go ahead after Price read the story and agreed to do the voiceover. Price said later that the film 'was the most gratifying thing that ever happened. It was immortality - better than a star on Hollywood Boulevard.'" At Grey Lodge, via M Valdemar.

Online viewing tip #3. Andy Menconi's Flash animation, "If it ain't broke, don't privatize it!" Winner of the Bush in 30 Years contest. Via Craig Phillips.

Online viewing tip #4. "That guy was a homo as sure as you're alive." Michael Cortese points to video of Pat Robertson during a break in a CNN interview whispering his theory regarding the sexual orientation of all who disagree with him. Via Alternet's Peek.

Online viewing tip #5. "[Some] times you can't for life of you imagine what must have possessed the filmmaker to cut something. This is one of those times." A deleted scene from The Grudge, via Todd and logboy at Twitch (now with a new FAQ).

Posted by dwhudson at May 9, 2005 4:42 PM