June 23, 2005

Shorts, 6/23.

Brand on the Brain! "Forty minutes of stills unfold. The gentle harp and strings echo between rooms, and throughout the piece, no one speaks, a word can't be heard, yet there is one constant strain, as if a troop of 165-pound mice were afoot." Ray Pride caught Guy Maddin's presentation of photos he's taken on the sets of his films at the Heaven Gallery in Chicago and writes up what sounds, oddly enough, like quite a romantic evening. Related: At Twitch, Todd posts a handful of lovely stills from Maddin's new one, The Brand Upon the Brain!, and Ed M Koziarski interviews Maddin for Reel Chicago.

Ray's also got a sudden slew of notable pointers at Movie City News:

  • For Channel NewsAsia, Mervin Tay and Yong Shu Chiang talk to Alan Mak and Andrew Lau about their live-action adaptation of Initial D.

  • Angela Pacienza in the National Post on "Cellywood": "While the mobile cinema market is in its infancy in North America, Canadians have a leg up thanks to a long history of making premium short films, says one mobile content producer."

  • Holly Wagner at Wired News: "Vivid Entertainment... has licensed a system that will let shoppers preview racy trailers on their camera phones just by scanning the bar code on the box."

The moment Wiley Wiggins posted, "This is a picture of [a feature-length] movie playing, full speed, full resolution (and I mean full resolution. It looks good) off the iPod Shuffle. This movie is playing over USB," I shot off an email to friends with the subject line, "I dunno, something about this feels big." A day later, it still does.

Darknet At Slashdot, droopus reviews Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, which "[rips] to shreds the entertainment cartel's claims that the locks they're putting into our digital devices are for our own good, their claims that this is a fight about theft and piracy, and other distortions that the author exposes to devastating effect."

At Twitch, John Fisk offers a first glimpse one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the New York Asian Film Festival, Late Bloomer.

When Toby Met Julie is the story of the meteoric rise and acrimonious fall of the Modern Review. The two antagonists, of course, are Toby Young and Julie Burchill. In the Guardian, director Mark Halliley recounts how he walked into a "hall of mirrors" (more like a minefield, it seems) and came out with a film.

"Rabelais would blush." Sharon Waxman has a terrific piece in the New York Times on the challenge of selling The Aristocrats.

In his "Beyond the Multiplex" column for Salon, Andrew O'Hehir takes on The World, "a dreamy romantic tragedy, staged with tremendous poignancy against the hypermodern desolation of contemporary Beijing," as well as Yes and Lila Says, both of which "try to create the haunted, magical space of cinema, which exists somewhere between the outside world and the innermost temple of our consciousness. They remind us, among other things, that while all movies are constructions, the best are closer to being cathedrals than airports."

Romero's Land of the Dead George Romero has been talking to Los Angelenos. In the LA Times, Robert Abele notes that he wrote Land of the Dead before 9/11, but "says he didn't have to tweak it much to reflect new fears of terrorism." To the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas, Romero remarks, "I'm not sure if you showed this movie at the White House that anybody would get it, except when the money burns at the end - then they might feel a little pang of sadness."

Also in the LAT: Kevin Crust on Pereira dos Santos's Rio 40 gráus (Rio 40 Degrees), a forerunner to Brazil's 60s-era Cinema Novo - and of course, the ongoing Los Angeles Film Festival blog.

And in the LAW:

  • Nikki Finke tells the rather harrowing tale of the disappearance of Anita Busch: "To refresh your memory, the long-time trade paper reporter-editor was newly hired as a contract writer by the Los Angeles Times when she was threatened while working on a story about has-been action star Steven Seagal's alleged ties to the mob. That's when Anita in LaLaland fell down the rabbit hole and never came out again."

  • Ella Taylor meets Miranda July and Foundas reviews Me and You and Everyone We Know; both quite like the film, too.

  • Holly Willis on Yes, "a visually impeccable and conceptually intriguing film that poses one of the most volatile questions of our time - can two fundamentally different cultures work through their historical biases to achieve a deep and mutual respect? - and optimistically answers in the affirmative."

  • Abele on Kirby Dick's Twist of Faith.

  • Not quite film-related, but still: Brendan Bernhard with Michel Houellebecq in the city.

Tracking the film meme: David Lowery and Nick Rombes.

In the Austin Chronicle, Marc Savlov talks to Zev Asher about his touchy doc, Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat. Also: Raoul Hernandez on Gary Cooper, "the Brad Pitt of his day."

Brothers "It's inevitable as the turning of the earth that we will, in due time, be introduced to a sub-genre of post-9/11 dramas," writes David Fellerath in the Independent Weekly. "But it says something about the timidity of American movie culture that the subject is being brought to our movie theaters courtesy of Denmark." And Susanne Bier, whose Brothers "is one of the first conventional Western dramas to directly explore the ways in which the actions of 19 hijackers affect a seemingly ordinary middle-class family."

When Andrew Bujalski mumbles, Michael Koresky hears "mumblecore" and the Boston Phoenix's Gerald Peary hears "the mumble corps." Both work, actually. Peary's point, though, is that "'mumble movies' rocked and reigned at this month's 6th Newport Film Festival.

More up-n-coming festivals of note:

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

At indieWIRE, Jonny Leahan discovers a running theme in the LA Film Fest Documentary Competition: A "survey of the eleven films offered reveal an emphasis on personal portraits, three of which follow very different stories that ultimately reveal the same underlying theme ­ the dysfunctional economic relationship between the US and Mexico and its drastic effect on individual lives."

Missed Robert Fisk's piece when it ran in the Independent, but it is definitely worth catching up with now at Selves and Others: "[W]hen I left the cinema after seeing [Ridley] Scott's extraordinary sand-and-sandals epic on the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, I was deeply moved - not so much by the film, but by the Muslim audience among whom I watched it in Beirut."

Noy Thrupkaew for the American Prospect: "It's been a bit of a disappointment that Western awareness of Miyazaki's films is on the rise just when the artist is beginning to lose a bit of the discipline that marked the storytelling of Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and the haunting, Hemingway-esque Scarlet Pig."

At Cinema Strikes Back, Blake has found a couple of items on Scorsese's The Departed and several on Land of the Dead.

From the Onion 2056: "Final Installment of Frogger Trilogy Poised to Sweep Oscars." Via Jared Moshe.

Harper's: June 05 Offline reading tip. "Bambi vs Godzilla: Why Art Loses in Hollywood." David Mamet in the June issue of Harper's. Via George Fasel.

Online viewing tips #1 through #3. Cameron Crowe breaks the Internet viral marketing mold (teaser poster, teaser trailer, on-set shots, first one-sheet, etc and so on) by cutting together a seven-plus-minute music video (in which Crowe reminds us again that there was once a time when Elton John could write himself a pretty solid song) and passing along this ode to a movie we haven't seen yet, Elizabethtown, to Harry Knowles and AICN.

And AICN's got more glimpses of movies to come: Superman Returns and "the tease for the tease" for King Kong. "Be the first to see the trailer..."? Yep.

Online viewing tip #4. Via Alternet, a 13-minute-plus "prototype" for Bottle Rocket.



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Posted by dwhudson at June 23, 2005 10:55 AM