Weekend shorts.

Sheldrake and Tim Robbins have a long, freewheeling and very fun talk at Ain't It Cool News, not just about Embedded, but also about The Power of Nightmares, Gore Vidal and the film and theater productions Robbins is working on now.

"When I first saw Paris Is Burning in Los Angeles in 1991 it blew me away." So now, with that doc headed for DVD later in the year and director Jennie Livingston's short, Who's the Top?, on the festival circuit, Eugene Hernandez has five questions for her. But she has far more than five answers, really; sharp stuff. Also at indieWIRE, another fine interview, Michael Koresky's with Junebug director Phil Morrison.

James Israel isn't the first to point out that two very different takes on the South are opening this weekend; he just does it very well. Chuck Tryon, in the meantime, previews another, Screen Door Jesus, which "elegantly weaves together several narratives set in the small east Texas town of Bethlehem, reflecting on race, class, and politics, particularly as they are inflected by religious belief and practice."

Joseph Epstein opens his review of David Thomson's The Whole Equation and and Edward Jay Epstein's The Big Picture in Commentary with a fun Hollywood anecdote of his own - before essentially agreeing with both authors' pessimistic outlook: "Globalism, whatever else may be said for it, also means lowest-common-denominatorism, and technology plays right into it." Via Arts & Letters Daily.

George Fasel: "Let us put aside for a moment that The Conformist (1970) is the most magnificently photographed, scored, choreographed, and costumed film made - ever, anywhere - because while those are not insignificant achievements, there is more to this work by Bernardo Bertolucci, who finished it when he was just short of thirty." More from La Depressionada, though the comments turn into a lively yet (reasonably) civil debate on Polanski.

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Saraband: "The performances are perfectly distilled, but the traits I dislike in Bergman are all here - self-pity, brutality, spiritual constipation, and an unwillingness to try to overcome these difficulties." And: "Like Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Broken Flowers can be read largely as a querulous lament for the 60s counterculture, for what it became."

For Slate's David Edelstein, "Broken Flowers is Jarmusch's most conventionally entertaining film, but it's still visually rigorous, swimming in pregnant silences, and un-filled-in in a way that's tantalizing," while for David Gilmour of the Globe and Mail, where Liam Lacey interviews Bill Murray, it's "a terrific performance piece for a handful of good actors, an engaging metaphor and a so-so piece of storytelling." More from Canfield at Twitch, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger and Ty Burr in the Boston Globe.

At Cinemarati, acquarello opens a thread on Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud, "a good step forward for the filmmaker in terms of evolving and maturing his familiar themes, but I honestly can't see this one as converting any Tsai detractors or gaining him exposure to a wider audience." There are no detractors in the thread as yet; they simply disagree on which previous film is superior, What Time Is It There? or Goodbye Dragon Inn.

Take a look at over 60 different people and a dog wearing Albert Maysles's glasses. Jess Search explains; via Movie City Indie, where Ray Pride argues - well - that the Los Angeles Times should have killed Mary McNamara's piece on Jarmusch before it ever saw print or pixels.

Also via MCI:

• Stanley Crouch in the Chicago Sun-Times on Hustle & Flow, "not only the latest update of blaxploitation and the most recent neo-minstrel development in black popular culture. It also represents a crisis of artistic consciousness..."

• Tsui Hark's Seven Swords has Brian Hu thinking in Asia Pacific Arts: "[H]ow would we describe the aesthetics of Hong Kong wuxia post 1997, after which the allegory model seems to break down?"

• Police raid pirates: A first-person report in China Daily.

There's a 2046 double feature in this weekend's New York Times. Karen Durbin, who noted that Tony Leung is an actor for Americans to keep an eye on earlier this year, serves up a full-fledged profile: "For all of Mr Leung's accomplishments elsewhere, his continuing collaboration with [Wong Kar-wai] is the spine of his career. Time and again, Mr Wong gets something invaluable from Mr Leung that no one else does: the power to surprise even himself, whether it's the furious gay lover in Happy Together (1997) - Mr Leung has never been so butch - or the fatalistic blind assassin in Ashes of Time (1994) with his grim, unshakable cool."

Just like us, Salon's Stephanie Zacharek couldn't think of a better title for her appreciation than "In the Mood for Leung." Mark Olsen also scores an interview for the LAT.

Manohla Dargis lauds both the film and its maker: "Memory turns finite moments into spaces - a hotel room, say - that we return to again and again. It gives us a glimpse of the eternal and, like art at its most sublime, like this film, a means for transcendence." Salon's Andrew O'Hehir essentially agrees, but, via Chris Barsanti, Slant's Ed Gonzales offers a contrary opinion: "Like a fucked-up commentary track for its predecessor, the film is both coyly self-reflexive and self-consciously detached, irritating even..."

But back in the NYT:

• AO Scott not only reviews Broken Flowers, he also juxtaposes it with Wedding Crashers in search of a contemporary concept of bachelorhood. Also: The Dukes of Hazzard.

• Laura Kern: "The constant threat of violence and rape is difficult to endure, but the unpredictable Secuestro Express is more than just a dizzying thrill ride laced with small doses of pitch-black comic relief. It manages to raise awareness of frightening real-life class wars and deep-rooted corruption in a world where the cops are more treacherous than the crooks, and no one can be trusted." In the LAT, Kevin Thomas reviews the film, while Agustin Gurza listens to director Jonathan Jakubowicz tell how his own kidnapping sparked the project.

• Stephen Holden on the "desperately sentimental" Saint Ralph and My Date With Drew. Related: Emma Garman's interview with filmmaker Brian Herzlinger for Radar, via the cinetrix.

• Jeannette Catsoulis on Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision, "unfortunately, more disorienting than dazzling" and "an incomplete portrait of a complicated man."

• Sarah Boxer: "This week the Web site ifilm.com introduced a new 'channel' called WarZone with film clips from World War II, Vietnam, Israel and Iraq. Looking at the selection of videos about Iraq, it's hard to say which are scarier: the clips themselves or the advertisements that run with them."

• Caryn James "The Aristocrats is a lot of things: a triumph of marketing, and a movie that many people will find funny. But most of all, it's an exercise in nostalgia, a look backward to old-time show business when punch lines ruled." Related: Peter Keepnews on Andy Kindler's annual flirtation with "career suicide." And in the Guardian, John Patterson.

• Ned Martel on Queer as Folk: "It's too bad that pioneering productions don't know how to bow out gracefully, that hits often hang on too long. (Not true of the original British version, whose brief run is still revered for its élan and impact.)"

"The Rising is a historical epic complete with all the Bollywood trimmings." As Geoffrey Macnab reports, its subject is "the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857," about which little is actually known.

Also in the Guardian:

• Sally Vincent gets to meet the great, great Richard E Grant. The occasion: Having performed in over 60 films, Grant has written and directed his first, Wah-Wah, based in large part on his own childhood in Swaziland, and starring Gabriel Byrne, Emily Watson, Miranda Richardson, Nicholas Hoult and Julie Walters. It opens the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 17 before its theatrical run in the UK in November.

• Peter Bradshaw pans Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy, is disappointed with Arakimentari ("Travis Klose has made a lively, but frustratingly superficial and uncritical study of 63-year-old Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki"), but of course, highly recommends Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus. More on that one from James Christopher in the Times of London.

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Frank Perry's The Swimmer. Related: John Patterson: "[A]cknowledged literary masterpieces, by and large, make for terrible, terrible movies."

With London's National Film Theatre staging a Catherine Deneuve retrospective throughout September, Rhoda Koenig takes a critical look: "Deneuve, despite insisting on the importance of independence, is often a glorification of the woman who, as a 'sensible' wife, trades her looks for status and money."

Also in the Independent: Kaleem Aftab interviews Thomas Vinterberg:

In Dear Wendy, I think primarily it is about Lars [von Trier] and the white man feeling inferior to the black male... Lars is always talking about black men's genitals and the size of them and he is deeply fascinated and envious about it, and I do, too. In this way, the film treats America in the same way the film treats black men - something we're somehow inferior to, and attracted to at the same time. This is not a very precise answer. The more precise answer is that Lars does not want to be politically correct.

But Independent critic Anthony Quinn is as underwhelmed with the film as Bradshaw is. The Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu is more generous: "[F]or all its periodic moments of grace, and rapturous gun-fights, we finish the film a little puzzled: why does one of the most talented directors of his generation persist in standing in the shadows of Lars von Trier?"

Meanwhile, Tiffany Rose finds that Michael Keaton presses fewer hot buttons.

Back to the LAT:

• Does John W. Miner, head the LA County DA's medical-legal section when Marilyn Monroe died, know secrets she kept we haven't heard yet? Robert W Welkos looks into the possibility. More from David Usborne in the Independent.

• More Broken Flowers: Jeffrey Wright "manages to steal every scene he's in," writes Susan King.

• King on "Robert Hamer: The Shadow Side," a retrospective at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, "examining his pre-Kind Hearts career and his long-neglected films from the 1950s." August 12 through 25.

• Kenneth Turan on "Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone" at the Autry Center's Museum of the American West - but also on the sorry state of film museums around the world, a problem this exhibition seeks to address.

For the LA CityBeat, Perry Crowe writes an ode to the Vista Theatre while Andy Klein asks, "Has there been any other event in the last year – or even in the entire young millennium – as significant for Los Angeles film lovers as the opening of the American Cinematheque's second location, at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica?" Also: Klein on 2046 and Broken Flowers and Donnell Alexander on the joys of bootlegs.

Back to theaters for a moment: Scott Kirsner, who recently had a forward-looking chat with Mark Urman, head of distribution at THINKfilm, points to a piece Jenn Abelson had in the Boston Globe a couple of weeks ago on Cinema de Lux, which "may represent the future of movie theaters."

David Lowery files a dispatch from the Dallas Video Festival, "the oldest video festival in the country."

Matthew Clayfield takes the Brisbane International Film Festival to task for not featuring "Australian shorts and features that haven't had exposure elsewhere (as opposed to merely screening a number of Australian films that have either already premiered somewhere else or which are about to get theatrical release anyhow) with a mind to push the boundaries of the film culture at large."

Peter Chan's Perhaps Love, "[b]illing itself as the first movie musical to be shot in China in 40 years," as Gregg Kilday writes in the Hollywood Reporter, will be closing the Venice Film Festival next month. Kilday talks with producer Andre Morgan about the rush to get it completed in time.

Charlie at Cinema Strikes Back on The Rider Named Death: "It won't knock your socks off, but this recent Russian film succeeds in probing the question of 'What motivates a terrorist?' by looking at an early 1900s Russian revolutionary."

"[T]here were so many ways in which [Welcome to] Dongmakgol could have gone wrong." But according to Kyu Hyun Kim, it doesn't. Also at Koreanfilm.org: Adam Hartzell on Kim Sang-jin's Ghost House, "not a brilliant film, just a good one."

Criterion will be releasing Mike Leigh's Naked in September. For Ed Champion, "this film's ballsy magnificence, multilayered characters and deceptively fragmented narrative cannot be overpraised."

Rumor has it that People on Sunday is headed to a Region 1 DVD release at some point; in the meantime, you can see reviews of two Region 2 versions at DVD Beaver. Matt Langdon recently caught the 1929 film "made by Robert Siodmak, Curt Siodmak, Edgar G Ulmer, written by Billy Wilder and shot by Eugen Schüfften and Fred Zinnemann" which "captures the exuberance of youth and the general nature of human beings on a weekend in Berlin in the 1920s."

Nicola Christie talks to Green Street director Lexi Alexander (and in case you're wondering, the film is known as Hooligans stateside).

Also in the Telegraph:

• In a piece on sound design, Robert Colvile reserves special praise for Richard King (Master and Commander), Stefan Busch (Downfall) and poor Alan Splet: Peter Weir says that when Splet was working on David Lynch's Blue Velvet, he "became ill from the sounds he was creating. He couldn't finish the film, they were so eerie and so awful."

• Sheila Johston hears Robert Guédiguian explain the impression Jean Renoir's Toni made on him when he was 13: "I was shocked, in the good sense of the word, and also touched that people like my neighbors and family could be in a film."

• David Gritten: "Films that are improvised to varying degrees are becoming what David Thompson, head of BBC Films, describes as a 'mini-brand' for the corporation. 'It's a very different kind of filmmaking,' he says. 'And we hope to energise the British film industry with it.'"

• Interviews: Richard Grant with Matt Dillon and Chris Sullivan with Thandie Newton.

Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus turned 70 yesterday and filmtagebuch writer Thomas Groh has rounded up several related German-language reading and listening tips.

Swiss Interior Minister Pascal Couchepin has "pledged to step up efforts to boost domestic cinema," reports the Neue Zürcher Zeitung - in English.

Jack Malvern: "The British internet Broadcasting Company (BiBC), a film download company, says that it is in negotiations with the holder of the rights to movies including Fahrenheit 9/11 and 9 Songs." Also in the Times of London: Marianne MacDonald chats with Ewan McGregor.

Online browsing tip. Posters for all the movies shown in the Mystery Science Theater 3000. Via Opus.

Online listening tip #1. The very strange and periodic podcasts from and about the production of Spike Lee's current project, Inside Man.

Online listening tip #2. NPR's Reese Erlich on how censorship imposes limits on filmmakers in Iran and the creative means they find to work around them. We also get an audial glimpse of Jafar Panahi's next film. Via Cinematical's Adam Finley.

Online viewing tips #1 through #6. Clips from landmark avant works, part of the seven-disc set due from the Anthology Film Archives in October, Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894 - 1941. Doug Cummings recommends that you get that set and Kino's Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s.

Online viewing tip #7. Tom Hall on an online solid gold standard: "The Residents have always held a special place in my heart... I haven't seen them in years, but over the past few months, via a series of web animations, I think I have found their heir: Weebl."

Online viewing tips, two more rounds. Short works by Bryan Boyce via the DVblog, also pointing to loops from the X(818) Video Project.

Posted by dwhudson at August 6, 2005 2:45 PM