Long weekend shorts.

To open with Slump update, it can't be just the movies, figures the Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson. Because the repertory houses are seeing a drop in attendance as well. While she listens to theater owners and programmers' ideas on what's keeping people at home - except when a festival, an event of some sort rolls into town - David Ehrenstein has been talking to distributors of foreign fare for a vital piece in the LA Weekly. And they're seeing more and more US premieres on DVD rather than in theaters. There are a lot of conflicting voices in this piece, but one of the more interesting is Dave Kehr's, who notes that even raves in the New York Times aren't causing the stir they used to. As the paper's video reviewer, he's seeing titles plop on his desk, such as The Story of Marie and Julien, that haven't had a theatrical run in the US at all: "'[S]traight-to-video' once meant 'not good enough to be shown in theaters.' Now it means 'too good to be shown in theaters.' That's the reality."

Also in the LA Weekly: Acquisitions execs goofed royally at Sundance, writes Scott Foundas with more than a little relish. They ignored the penguin movie and wrangled with each other to pick up Hustle & Flow, only to see it become "the latest victim of the so-called Sundance Syndrome, whereby mediocre films, greeted with overenthusiastic receptions by festival audiences, become the subjects of high-profile bidding wars that almost always end in buyer's remorse."

Stephen Holden:

This has been the summer in which mass culture, in its search for new commercial distractions, reached a dangerous tipping point. There is a sense of exhaustion in the air, as though the accumulation of cultural debris, celebrity worship and meaningless competitions had reached a critical mass.... Did reality television prepare the way for the new popularity of the documentary? Or is the increasing popularity of documentaries a response to the Orwellian political climate.

These ruminations on docs ("March of the Penguins may be a good film but Grizzly Man is a great one") then shift into a series of quick notes on the best films of the summer, narrative and doc alike.

Also in the New York Times:

• Dave Kehr: "More than 100 Japanese films are scheduled to be shown in New York in the coming weeks, with series at the Museum of Modern Art, Film Forum and the New York Film Festival. The confluence may be purely coincidental, but it does suggest a growing interest in one of the most addictive of national cinemas: the more one sees of Japanese film, the more one wants to see." Also: New DVDs, and quite a nice collection it is this week, too.

• John Rockwell, the paper's dance critic, revisits the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, "the purest form of escape from the woes of the Depression, a fantasy of the 1920s seen through the darker prism of the 30s.... They are popular art as elevated as any high art ever made."

• Joan Dupont talks to Takeshi Kitano about his entry in the Venice Film Festival, Takeshis, "the one made to stump everyone": "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, he added, 'are beautiful. Mine are not."

• With Brokeback Mountain launching into its round on the festival circuit, Karen Durbin profiles Ang Lee.

• AO Scott on Mind Game, which may be "too much for the eye or the mind to take in all at once," on A Sound of Thunder, "a scrap of late-summer damaged goods from Warner Brothers ostensibly based on [Ray] Bradbury's tale" (more from Robert Newton at Cinematical), and on Underclassman, which "plays like the longest episode of 21 Jump Street ever made."

• In Margaret Cho: The Assassin Tour, the performer "seeks out the bruises on American culture and gleefully applies pressure," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. More from Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times.

• Dana Stevens on Three Dancing Slaves, wherein the "vaguely arty setting provides as good an excuse as any for viewers interested in ogling attractive masculine flesh."

• Laura Kern reviews Transporter 2, which "surpasses its less focused predecessor on almost every level." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, and in the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas interviews director Louis Leterrier.

Jan Svankmajer, writes Travis Miles for Stop Smiling, "embodies one of the purest strains of modern cinema; he is absolutely dedicated to the detritus and cast-off objects of the human world. In his incredibly textured films, an absolute animism pervades the material world so that we are given the impression of viewing the secret life of objects."

Robert Beavers's "approach goes beyond that of standard noncommercial filmmaking," write Henriette Huldisch and Chrissie Iles in their introduction to their interview with him in Artforum, "and for the past forty years he has maintained strict control over the production, exhibition, and preservation of his films, which has resulted in one of the most distinctive - and yet underrecognized - bodies of work in cinema."

StayPuft at Reverseblog: "Privileged to catch a screening of Bennett Miller's Capote the other night. I cannot remember the last time I was so disconcertingly enthralled, so self-consciously immersed in a film."

At Cinematical, Kim Voynar has a terrific interview with Stewart Stern, whose screenwriting credits include Rebel Without a Cause. Part 2.

David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back on A Bell From Hell, "a subversive horror film about societal repression that was shot in Franco’s fascist Spain.... It's a thinking man's horror film - the Easy Rider of Spanish horror, if you will, complete with motorcycle-riding counter-culture protagonist."

JR Jones in the Chicago Reader: "El crimen perfecto is [Alex de la] Iglesia's most interesting examination of human oddity yet, revisiting the theme with the fervor of Mutant Action but expanding it into a satire of advertising and consumer culture - and all the while unreeling a tale of sex, lies, and homicide that recalls the classic noirs of the late 40s."

The Katrina disaster has David Lowery thinking of Michael Haneke's Le Temps Du Loup. "There was scarcely a drop of water in that film, and yet it was entirely about what has happened in New Orleans; in very specific details, yes, but more importantly in its portrayal of the way in which extreme circumstance gives rise to both the best and worst human nature has to offer."

For the Washington Post, Michael O'Sullivan calls up Andrew Bujalski.

Steve Erickson for Gay City News: "William Eggleston in the Real World and Paul Provenza's dirty joke anthology The Aristocrats have only one thing in common - both would have better served by being cut into a succinct short or a TV program. That's a quality shared by many recent documentaries."

"There was a period between the end of the Second World War and the mid-70s which was a tremendous time for filmmaking," recalls John Boorman in a conversation with Philip Horne about 8 ½. You had the Neo-Realist cinema in Italy, the French New Wave, the Czech films of the Prague Spring.... Then it became corporate and the auteur was squeezed out, denied the kind of budgets Fellini had. Those great auteur extravaganzas couldn't be done now."

Also in the Telegraph: David Gritten (who quite likes Good Night, and Good Luck) visits the set of The History Boys, based on the wildly successful play by Alan Bennett, and John Hiscock meets Keira Knightley.

Newspaper profiles of movie stars are a dime a dozen - make that a nickel - but John Patterson's on Donald Sutherland is a fine piece of work. And: "[W]hat exactly qualifies Martin Scorsese to be Bob Dylan's biographer? Well, plenty."

Also in the Guardian:

• Brian Logan asks several British comics what they think of The Aristocrats; opinions vary widely.

• Tim Dowling maps the possible futures for six British film stars; you can even download little PDF file of their "trajectories."

• Peter Bradshaw reviews Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun, "a mesmerisingly mad, brilliantly intuitive study of Emperor Hirohito and his Götterdämmerung in the days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

• The "DVD's greatest achievement has been to transform the nature of the memory of entertainment," writes Mark Lawson.

• Paul Kelso on the next soccer movie: "Wholesome, harmless and awash with Premiership stars, Goal! marks the coming together of Hollywood production values, the football establishment and corporate marketing clout."

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Brian G Hutton's Where Eagles Dare.

Charlotte Cripps talks with production designer Ken Adam about his work on Dr Strangelove. Other interviews in the Independent: Stephen Applebaum with Hooligans director Lexi Alexander, Elaine Lipworth with Russell Crowe and James Mottram with Natasha Richardson.

Gregg Kilday in the Hollywood Reporter: "[O]ne of the revelations of a new biography of Merian C Cooper, King Kong's creator, is that the movie, as fantastic as it is, was rooted in Cooper's real-life adventures."

Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Gus Van Sant for SuicideGirls.

Sonia Shah has just written a book on Big Pharma and, in the Nation, spells out what The Constant Gardener gets right - and wrong - about the business of testing experimental drugs in Africa and Asia.

Online listening tip. DVD Classics Corner broadcast on Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee. Via Glenn Erickson's review of the DVD and the film via, in turn, Martha Fischer at Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at September 3, 2005 2:49 PM