Fests and shorts.

For Matt Clayfield, this year's edition of the Brisbane International Film Festival beat last year's and was, in fact, "one of the most pleasurable experiences I've yet had as a film watcher." Matt has a list, a top eight, and thoughts on each.

Locarno's Golden Leopard goes to Rodrigo García's Nine Lives; that film's ensemble, which includes Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, Sissy Spacek, Robin Wright Penn, Emily Mortimer and Molly Parker - collectively took the Best Actress award as well. Details from swissinfo's Isobel Leybold-Johnson, who also reports on the "mixed legacy" of departing festival director Irene Bignardi.

And, via Movie City Indie, Stephanie Bunbury's Locarno roundup in the Age, laced with quotes from Susan Sarandon and the "lethally outspoken" John Malkovich.

Festival coverage at indieWIRE: Eugene Hernandez previews Howl! (NYC, August 21 through 28), Brian Brooks looks ahead to National Geographic's All Roads Film Project (LA: September 22 through 25; DC: September 29 through October 2) and Wendy Mitchell's anticipating the Edinburgh International Film Festival (August 17 through 28). Also: Ellen Keohane takes a sneak peek at Film Forum's fall and winter lineup.

Brian's caught three films at the San Francisco Asian Film Festival (through August 21).

Armond White "makes some very good — and highly contentious — points" in his review of the Kino collection Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s, but Nick Rombes takes issue with one: "It's not that there is no avant-garde today, or that Hollywood commercialism is a natural enemy of the avant-garde imagination, but rather that the avant-garde has become so thoroughly familiar as a style, a gesture, a stance."

David Thomson on Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour: "'You saw nothing at Hiroshima' is the gentle, literal truth insisted on by this masterpiece, a film that only underlines the complete absence in this time of anything like a political cinema." Also in the Independent: Anthony Barnes reports that a DVD coming out in October will include rare footage of George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Leon Russell jamming out a version of the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash."

Filmbrain: "Just as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction gave rise to a slew of PoMo indie action-comedies with characters dropping pop-culture references every four minutes, there are now South Korean directors doing their damnedest to duplicate what Park Chan-wook did last year with Oldboy, the powerful, stylish neo-noir that appealed both to art house crowds (it won the Grand Prix at Cannes) as well as the average moviegoer. The first contender is A Bittersweet Life, a film that very badly wants to be deemed 'this year's Oldboy.'"

At Twitch, Max From Fearless reviews the screenplay for Richard Kelly's Southland Tales - possible spoilers, which is why I didn't read it myself - and X chooses the diary format for a review of Im Pil-Sung's Antarctic Journal.

Richard Schickel: "My most persistent thought as I read Living Dangerously, Mark Cotta Vaz's breathless, uncritical but deliciously readable biography of [King Kong-creator Merion C] Cooper, was how utterly unduplicable this life would be today." Also in the Los Angeles Times: Claudia Luther remembers John Bryson, a photographer "probably best known for earning the trust and affection of celebrities who allowed him to photograph them as they went about their daily lives." He died on Wednesday at the age of 81. Among his subjects: Hemingway, Dali, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, JFK and RFK.

Film Threat's Mike Bell talks to Stephen Statler about making The Breathing Show for around $15K. He pretty much found his cast via Craigslist; they were drawn to the project, he says, by the "chance to play fucked up people like themselves. I hope it was cathartic for them." Also: Michael Ferraro chats with Eric Fleming about making The Almost Guys.

A big indie roundup from the cinetrix: the "lovely if uneven" Junebug, the "devastating" Tony Takitani and, "[h]ighly recommended," The Aristocrats. More on that one from Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic.

ME Russell, a critic for the Oregonian, presents fuller versions of his reviews of The Skeleton Key, The Edukators and 5x2.

In Grizzly Man, Doug Cummings finds "a humane and multifaceted portrait of an individual whose emotional makeup probably wasn't all that different from the rest of us."

"[Steve] Carell's success is just the latest example of how widely the trademark mock-the-messenger aesthetic of The Daily Show has now spread," writes Joe Rhodes in the New York Times. Related: Via Fimoculous, Comedy Central's new blog, CC Insider.

Jason Solomons on Nick Love's The Business: "It's a bit Sexy Beast, a bit Goodfellas and a little bit Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels... but where it carves out a singular niche in British cinema is in its detailed reverence for the clothes and music of the hitherto little-examined eighties 'casual' subculture." And just barely film-related profiles in the Observer: Vanessa Thorpe on Julian Barnes and Sean O'Hagan on John Lennon.

Time's Richard Corliss considers Ralph Fiennes, whose "strength is revealing the power, and the danger, that reticence masks."

Martin Johnson profiles André Benjamin for New York.

Flak's James Norton interviews Daniel Clowes.

Daniel Robert Epstein's SuicideGirls interviews: Mark Wahlberg and David Mackenzie.

Tomorrow's (or Wednesday's) batch of shorts might be a whole lot shorter than your average Tuesday's; The Reeler has the latest on a possible meltdown at the Village Voice.

Ryan Kim reports in the San Francisco Chronicle on TiVo's probable cooperation with IFC and the implications of VOD via their box.

Online listening tip #1. NPR's John Kalish on Winter Soldier. Update: Chris Barsanti comments: "If one feels like scrolling through pages of right-wing invective, go to Free Republic where they posted my entire review of Winter Soldier. Good crazy fun."

Online listening tip #2. Scott Kirsner talks with John Eraklis and Max Howard of the Exodus Film Group. Related: Kirsner doesn't consider Roger Ebert's enthusiasm for Maxivision all that reasonable.

Online viewing tip #1. Coudal Partners' Copy Goes Here now has a trailer; no executive producer as yet, though and they're looking for more executive producers.

Online viewing tip #2. The South Will Rise Again, which, as Screenhead notes, is a "pretty funny trailer for a hillbilly Kung-Fu zombie movie which does not yet exist, presumably only because Billy Bob Thornton has yet to get wind of it."

Posted by dwhudson at August 15, 2005 9:58 AM