Shorts, 7/25.

There's a David Thomson double feature playing in the Independent today; in the first piece, he just sort of wonders out loud what'll become of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. The second piece is by far the more interesting one, the story of how he was called into edit and essentially finish Fan-Tan, a novel (it had started out as a film treatment) by Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell.

Yet another fascinating entry from Nick Rombes: "If the home movies of Mekas or Brakhage are considered avant-garde — while home movies by any number of amateurs from the same era are not — is this due, at least in some part, to the fact that these films of Mekas and Brakhage were discussed and promoted in the pages of a 'serious' journal like Film Culture, while the pages of a magazine like Better Movie Making promoted a different vision?" Chuck Tryon has a few initial thoughts in response.

Via Matt Clayfield, Jonathan Rosenbaum for Criterion:

It would be comforting to say my early appreciation of F for Fake included an adequate understanding of just how subversive it was (and is). But leaving aside the critique of the art world and its commodification via "experts" - which is far more radical in its implications than Citizen Kane's critique of William Randolph Hearst — it has only been in recent years, with the rewind and stop-frame capacities of video, that the sheer effrontery of many of Welles's more important tricks can be recognized, making this film more DVD-friendly than any of his others.

[...]

The key to Welles's fakery here, as it is throughout his work, is his audience's imagination and the active collaboration it performs — most often unknowingly — with his own designs, the kind of unconscious or semiconscious complicity that magicians and actors both rely on.

George Fasel's list of his top westerns peaks here: "the genre itself is pretty definitively eliminated with number ten, 1969's The Wild Bunch." And then, there's a coda.

Simon Callow in the Guardian:

Now that its influence has begun to wane, and it ceases to remind us of its imitations, we can again see the most influential play of the second half of the 20th century for what it is. Waiting for Godot has lost none of its power to astonish and to move, but it no longer seems self-consciously experimental or obscure. With unerring economy and surgical precision, the play puts the human animal on stage in all his naked loneliness. Like the absolute masterpiece it is, it seems to speak directly to us, to our lives, to our situation, while at the same time appearing to belong to a distant, perhaps a non-existent, past.

Also: Philip French on the Polanski case and a blush-inducing roundup of film-related blogs.

Logan Hill chats briefly with Junebug director Phil Morrison in New York.

Via Twitch: The official site for Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder, with Brad Dourif, and more sumptuous imagery: Info on The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, from the Brothers Quay and executive produced by Terry Gilliam.

Chuck Olsen explains why, when it comes to vlogs, Katie Dean gets it right in Wired News, while Sarah Boxer gets it all wrong in the New York Times.

Also in the NYT, Laura M Holson: "[W]hat has caught many investors by surprise is the number of blunders DreamWorks Animation has made since going public last October." And Allison Hope Weiner talks to Stephen Bocho about Over There, his new dramatic series on FX about the war in Iraq.

More on that one from Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker, where Lauren Collins talks to Deep Roy about playing all the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - and to Eugene Pidgeon about the implications - and Anthony Lane reviews Last Days, The Edukators and 9 Songs.

CNET's John Borland: "Sony is joining 20th Century Fox... in a new broadband experiment aimed at promoting movies with full-screen, near-DVD-quality video viewed straight off a viewer's hard drive."

As DVD sales become more interesting to watch than box office numbers, another ranking elbows its way into our attention span; p2pnet.net tracks the top ten file share downloads on two charts, "Global" and "USA." Via Cinema Minima.

"We at Film Threat consider Dan Mirvish a personal friend and a hero of independent film." The Slamdance co-founder has had a terrible accident; he'll recover, but FT is encouraging well-wishers to send along a few lines of support.

That was Outfest: A look back from Jonny Leahan, with generously captioned pix from Brian Brooks and Eugene Hernandez, at indieWIRE.

Between Just For Laughs and the Fantasia Festival, Matt Dentler's been having a grand time in Montreal and posting lots o' pix over the past several days.

Trevor Gensch previews the Brisbane International Film Festival (July 27 through August 8) at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Hollywood continues to invest heavily in the Chinese film industry, reports Zafar Anjum for the Asia Times: "How has the Indian cinema establishment responded to this Chinese challenge? Not impressively, so far at least. Even as Indian filmmakers have continued to celebrate their creative vacuity by churning out the run-of-the-mill formulaic flicks or rehashed versions of great oldies, their Chinese counterparts have made Hollywood not only sit up and take note of them but have also made the Tinseltown luminaries scurry to them with business offers." Also via Movie City News: Monkey Peaches on John Woo's The Battle of Red Cliff.

Online viewing tip. Sufjan Stevens on Morning Becomes Eclectic (scroll down). Via Darren Hughes.

Posted by dwhudson at July 25, 2005 9:37 AM