Moonlit shorts.

Milestone Films is celebrating its 15th anniversary and, as far as the Village Voice's Michael Atkinson is concerned, the recent round of prestigious citations its garnered "couldn't have happened to a nicer or smaller family-run outfit; over the years, [founders] Dennis Doros and Amy Heller have put their faith in Mikhail Kalatozov, Lotte Reiniger, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Marion Davies, and Manoel de Oliveira when no one else would." Anthony Kaufman talks to them about how they thought twice and then thought ahead before releasing Winter Soldier: "[S]ays Heller, 'because the right is well funded and very litigious, it became clear that the best way to release it was to have a separate corporation that would protect the assets of Milestone just in case the Swift Boat Veterans want to make trouble.' Now under their new banner Milliarium Zero, Heller and Doros say they can take on riskier material."

Riskier? "Seldom has a film seen by so few caused so much consternation for so many years," writes David M Halbfinger in probably his best piece yet for the New York Times. He, too, talks to Heller and Doros, who emphasis the contemporary relevance and sheer prescience of this record of the three-day session at which Vietnam vets told of the crimes they'd seen or committed themselves; he notes the "extraordinary collective of 18 unknown but up-and-coming documentarians" behind it; and reminds us:

This was being filmed, it should be emphasized, before the advent of rap groups and the confessional culture, before people routinely unburdened themselves on television or an Oprah granted absolution every afternoon. And it was happening at a stage in the war when the invasion of Laos was still a secret, when Agent Orange was unheard of, and when the public was still struggling to make sense of My Lai.

Back to the Voice:

• Ed Halter: "No figure appears more firmly rooted in both the American avant-garde and downtown New York than Jonas Mekas: original film critic of The Village Voice; founder of the Film-Makers' Cooperative, Anthology Film Archives, and Film Culture; mentor to generations of experimental artists. Yet Lost Lost Lost, his newly restored three-hour diary collage, tells a very different story, one of exile, displacement, and longing."

• Dennis Lim: "The Century of the Self, an engrossing quartet of hour-long films by British documentarian Adam Curtis, doesn't so much challenge Freud's theories of the unconscious as shadow them through the corridors of corporate and political power. What emerges is nothing less than a history of 20th-century social control." Related: Nathan Deuel on three books mapping our current proximity to the old Wiener.

• Melissa Anderson: "A luscious, lysergic double bill of summer camp, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here and Robert Siodmak's Cobra Woman pair the Brazilian Bombshell (Carmen Miranda) with the Caribbean Cyclone (Maria Montez)."

• Jessica Winter on the latest from David Mackenzie: "For a film that comprises erotomania, psychosis, several types of unnatural death, and — horror of horrors—professional exile in northernmost Wales, Asylum is most shocking for its relentless enervation."

• Atkinson on Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog's "first authentic found-footage movie." Related: Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Herzog for Suicide Girls.

• "Tracking Shots": Joshua Land on The Goebbels Experiment and Chaos, Mark Holcomb on The Great Raid, Ed Park on A State of Mind, Winter on The Skeleton Key and Ben Kenigsberg on Pretty Persuasion.

Kino's release of its two-disc set Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s has generated a pleasantly surprising amount of interest and comment. One of the films in the collection, Even - As You and I (1937), happens to play right into Nick Rombes's current field of research and, for him, only confirms "how tenuous the line is between 'art' and mass culture is, and how context means everything."

At Movie City Indie, Ray Pride wonders out loud if Dave Kehr's speculation in the NYT as to why Pauline Kael would claim Dimitri Kirsanoff's 1926 Ménilmontant as her all-time favorite film is, well, "distasteful."

Charles McGrath's piece on The Constant Gardener is political rather than personal. Director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) had just been to Kenya ("more than a setting, in fact; it's practically a character") and tells McGrath, "[C]ompared to the slums in Kenya, the Brazilian ones are really Beverly Hills... It's the poorest place I've ever seen in my life."

Stephen Cooke: "If you've never read [Karl] Brown's Adventures With DW Griffith, it's a vital look behind the scenes at the early film master at work."

Michael Freedland, who's directed the radio documentary, Hollywood on Trial, describes the widely varying destinies of the blacklisted - once they got out of jail. Also in the Guardian: The only smokers on screen these days are bad guys, according to a recent study; Tim Radford reports.

So far, the adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the first novel in the His Dark Materials trilogy, has not gone smoothly. Following rumors that there'd be essential changes in the story, Chris Weitz up and left the director's chair. Now, Anand Tucker is keeping it warm again, as the BBC reports.

The cast for Ryan Murphy's adaptation of John Jeter's Watergate play Dirty Tricks is taking shape, as the BBC reports: Gwyneth Paltrow, Meryl Streep and Annette Bening.

As for Oliver Stone's 9/11 movie, it's already wrecking havoc on friendships: Jeff Jarvis, James Wolcott, David Weinberger... the casualties mount.

For IFC News, Andrea Meyer asks Maggie Cheung six questions. One of them: "Are there any directors you'd love to work with?" "In my wildest dreams, David Lynch.... When I watched Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts, God, I would die to play that part." As for 2046, Alison Willmore writes, "it's almost required to be a great success or an even greater failure, and I'm firmly with the first camp."

Chuck Tryon finds The Edukators to be "an intellectually compelling and emotionally moving reflection on political commitments."

Christopher Orr on the Thin Man series: "[T]hese days what is perhaps most striking about Nick and Nora is not their easy blend of comedy and drama or their balanced sexual dynamic, but rather their carefree booziness." Also for the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann's take on Last Days:

There is supposed to be an unbridgeable gap between the avant and the garde, but [Gus] Van Sant contravenes the dictum: he has a sizable public. Some of the reason, I'd say, is the dollops of implicit despair with which he can make his viewers feel existentially deep without having to think about it. And much of his appeal, I'd say, is related to rock - his soundtracks are in some degree where his films are located.

For the Independent, James Rampton listens to James Cameron talk about his love for the ocean - and, possibly, his next feature, "an almost insanely ambitious sci-fi blockbuster," Battle Angel: "'It's going to be a mega-budget film shot in 3-D,' Cameron enthuses."

Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle: "At some point between the breathtaking stop-motion animation in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in 1958 and the hit-and-miss Fantastic Four visuals in 2005, special effects appear to have become more of an arms race and less about supporting a story. And even as technology improves, most blockbuster special-effects movies are leaving audiences with more of a feeling of numbness than wonder." Via Adam Finley at Cinematical.

In the Los Angeles Times:

• Elaine Dutka on Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.

• Patrick Goldstein on DreamWorks: "[I]n Hollywood there remains a great puzzlement over the career arc of this unique company, whose many achievements have never seemed to free it from a nagging sense of unfulfilled promise."

• Richard Verrier and Kim Christensen: "A Delaware judge today ruled against Walt Disney Co. shareholders who had sued the company's directors for failing to properly monitor the hiring of former President Michael Ovitz and then granting him a $140 million severance package after only about a year on the job." Well, if anyone's worth over $380,000 a day, surely it's Michael Ovitz?

In the US, as the "window" between theatrical and DVD releases narrows, movie theaters wring their hands. In Germany, they're balling their hands into fists. Economically speaking. Following a boycott of Herbie: Fully Loaded by three major chains because the window for that one was less than six months (no, really), Cinemaxx, one of the three, is threatening to do it again to Sin City. Ernst Corinth reports in Telepolis (and in German). Via filmz.de.

Frankly, I sometimes wonder about those "new poster!" entries at various blogs I otherwise dearly love and admire... but this is something else.

Online listening tip. The Talk of the Nation Summer Movie Awards turn to teen movies. The clips make for a fun quarter of an hour.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for 10 mph. Two guys quit their jobs and Segway from coast to coast. Didn't they ever see Lost in America?

Online viewing tips, round #1. The 1989 memorial service for Graham Chapman. Also via Screenhead: Adam Philips's Taken, Tim Burton's ad for Hollywood gum and Andy Morahan's for Guess jeans, starring Harry Dean Stanton and Juliette Lewis.

Online viewing tips, round #2. Todd at Twitch has been trailer hunting: Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4, Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven, "Hungarian Joan of Arc Opera" Johanna, Christian Alvart's Antikörper and Paul Fox's The Dark Hours. Plus: Toronto's lineup is looking more and more enticing.

Posted by dwhudson at August 9, 2005 5:07 PM