Shorts, 6/24.

A Cock and Bull Story is Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and it isn't due on screens until the fall. But Winterbottom decided to throw a benefit screening in Shandy Hall, the house in Coxwold where Sterne wrote the novel that out-postmods most 20th and 21st century postmods.

Christina Patterson was there:

There's not much in the way of plot, of course. Tristram eventually gets born, but in the meantime we have glimpses (fictional, presumably) of the film's production processes: scenes in wardrobe, chats with the director and screenings to funders. Stephen Fry plays [curator] Patrick Wildgust in a scene at Shandy Hall. Gillian Anderson plays a Widow Wadman who is cast but never appears.... It's a wonderfully playful mix, wittily self-referential and very funny.

Also in the Independent:

• The National Film Theatre's Carole Lombard season runs from July 4 through 31. Rhoda Koenig offers an appreciation.

• The exhibition Stubbs and the Horse opens June 29 at London's National Gallery and, until it closes in late September, there'll be equine-themed movies screened each Saturday. How do you program such a series? Charlotte Cripps asks Lee Riley.

• Roger Clarke interviews Matthew Macfadyen.

Crime Scene 2005 looks like another snappy little fest running at the National Film Theatre from June 30 through July 3, and the London Times has quite a package of related stories. The way into it is definitely via Alison Willmore's excellent entry at the IFC Blog, where she's mapped out the highlights.

"Downfall is not about Hitler, human or otherwise, not about Nazism and evil," argues Michael B Oren in the New Republic. "It is about letting Germany off the hook."

"Nothing pleases my ego more, than to be thought of as a European filmmaker." Helene Zuber interviews Woody Allen for Der Spiegel.

For Film-Philosophy, Robert Sinnerbrink takes a long hard look at Mulholland Drive: "[David] Lynch, I want to suggest, can be regarded as a cinematic philosopher-artist, presenting thought through sound and image ('ideas', to use Lynch's term).... In a manner recalling Kant's 'aesthetic ideas', Lynch's cinematic Ideas are presentations of the imagination that exceed conceptual determination and linguistic expression. They are inexhaustible imaginative representations open to infinite interpretation."

"'Sex is Confusing' could serve as an alternate title to these three movies, all high-profile film festival prizewinners." Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader on Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, Keren Yedaya's Or and Kim Ki-duk's Samaritan Girl.

Filmbrain lauds the "original and beautiful" Survive Style 5+, "a black comedy that is justifiably uplifting."

Miramax, Fine Line, Warner Independent, Fox Searchlight, Newmarket, Paramount Classics and DreamWorks all took a serious look at Brian Herzlinger's debut feature, My Date With Drew, shot on video for $1100, but all eventually passed, despite the awards and the raves it'd garnered. Now, as Anne Thompson writes for the Hollywood Reporter, it's finally been picked up by DEJ Productions: "DEJ president Andrew Reimer is risking some $300,000 on clearing music rights, blowing up the movie to 35mm and creating prints and an ad campaign."

"The biggest danger with clearances is when they interfere with documenting real life." That's Mad Hot Ballroom producer and writer Amy Sewell talking to Stay Free!'s Carrie McLaren about bending over backwards to, as McLaren puts it, "survive the copyright cartel... by limiting music that played in classrooms, haggling over clearance fees, and cutting out a scene." It's an infuriating read by way of Greg Allen. Be sure to catch the comments, particularly Steve Lambert's, and the follow-up post (and consider that an online viewing tip as well).

"Journalistically, we might offer this as the last interview; but in a way it is also the first interview, because [Geoffrey] Jones - a pioneering documentary maker in the 1960s - had been virtually forgotten and had not made a film for 25 years." Stephen Moss gathers other voices as well on the "singular artistic voice" who passed away just days ago.

Also in the Guardian:

• John Patterson has just read "David E James's majestic new book, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, which upsets many previously held notions of the primacy of the East Village as ground zero for radical film-making, and establishes LA - home of Machine Hollywood, satanic TV production, and the San Fernando flesh-factories - as a major and pioneering locale for dissident film-making of every stripe."

• Steve Rose interviews Maggie Cheung.

• How to be a villain? Leo Benedictus has a few pointers. Right from the top: "Be British."

"[T]here are a number of [screen]writers out there who might want to make occasional postings, but don't really have the inclination to maintain a regular blog," notes Jacob Weinstein. "For writers like that, there's now a site called The Blank Page, a group blog with posting privileges open to any member of the WGA." Via Cinema Minima.

"And then there's Glenn Close. Man alive, what a performance." Andrew Wright's thumb is up in the Stranger for Heights.

"Superheroes aren't heroes any more," laments Matthew Sweet in the New Statesman. "They are cases. Their private miseries have eclipsed their acts of derring-do."

Land of the Dead is "an excellent freakout of a movie," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "One thing that has always distinguished Mr. Romero's films, not only from the horror-genre pack but from so many action flicks, is that the director knows killing is killing." And Jim Tudor at Twitch: "From the get-go, I knew Romero hadn’t lost his touch."

Posted by dwhudson at June 24, 2005 7:54 AM