October 6, 2005
Shorts, 10/6.
"Like Robert Bresson's L'Argent (1983) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thief (1949), Rope is possibly one of the most disconcerting films ever made." Peter J Dellolio's canorous tour through one of Hitchcock's bests embarks from Flickhead.
The cinetrix tells the fascinating, sad yet ultimately inspiring story behind Julie Gustafson's Desire.
Fader: "To coincide with today's release of the 'Ultimate Director's Cut' of The Warriors on DVD, we're giving you a director's cut, web-exclusive version of the "Oral History Of The Warriors" piece by editor Eric Ducker, which originally ran last year in F26." Via Wiley Wiggins.
Andrew Solomon on Ballets Russes: "What turns out to be most compelling here... is how these senescent ballerinas and ballerinos achieve a poignant ecstasy as they recall the exploits of their youth." Also in the October issue of Artforum, but unfortunately, not online: James Quandt on Hou Hsiao-hsien.
For the Vue Weekly, Josef Braun talks with Atom Egoyan about Where the Truth Lies: "I could paint tableaus that I'd never be able to do [without his biggest budget yet], these period scenes and extravagant camera gestures with these cranes and crowds, these colours, that whole rhythm - it's something you need money to do... Remember, a lot of this is Lanny's version of history, and if he was filming this he wouldn't hire Atom Egoyan. He'd want Vincent Minnelli or somebody. So it was great to slip into that cinematic persona."
A contemporary corollary to Becket? Nick Davis didn't have to look far to find one.
Martha Fischer at Cinematical: "CSA: The Confederate States of a America is a mockumentary that presents what the US might have looked like had the South won the Civil War."
Nick Sigley at Twitch: "A huge success in Europe, but yet to be given a North American release, The Consequences of Love is possibly the best film to have been released in Britain this year." Also: Kurt on Cowards Bend the Knee.
"Why do I love Boring Art Films?" asks Darren Hughes.
"In Venezuela," reports Juan Forero in the New York Times, "Secuestro Express has smashed all box-office records for a home-grown production, and it is fast eclipsing Hollywood's biggest hits.... But the film has also been harshly criticized by Venezuela's populist government for its grim portrayal of life in Caracas."
Also in the NYT: "He arrives with a whole lot of money and the ambition to do nothing less than build the largest independent movie studio in the industry." Sharon Waxman profiles a character of potentially Harveyesque proportions, Philippe Martinez. And Dave Kehr on new DVDs.
After taking stock of the winners and losers among the indies and foreign titles of the year so far - in box office terms only, that is - Andrew O'Hehir introduces his latest "Beyond the Multiplex" column at Salon:
Dennis Gansel's acclaimed Nazi-era drama Before the Fall feels like a potential hit, which obviously means nothing. Wim Wenders's Land of Plenty is one of the director's best films in years, and may be the great 9/11 movie so far - and it doesn't even have a distributor. Two classics by the master of Gallic severity, Robert Bresson, are back in circulation in lustrous new prints, and then there's Zombie Honeymoon, which is more like a Bresson or Wenders movie than you might expect. Except that it's about zombies. On a honeymoon.
You may remember that Cameron Crowe recently spelled out his ideas on the role of a good song in a movie in the Los Angeles Times. For Simon Wood, writing in PopMatters, on Crowe's overall approach "serves a unique purpose in the pursuit of film as entertainment and any issue I take lies solely in his evaluation that full control of the audience is the ultimate goal of the filmmaker and, to paraphrase, the blending of the right scene with the right song is inarguably magical and artistic. To claim such is to imply that cinema is both incapable of generating deep emotion (or even any emotion independent of other mediums) and that the form itself is static."
Stuart Jeffries interviews David Cornwell, aka John Le Carré:
"I have been through the sheep dip with movies before but, like everybody else, I blame myself. I have written what I thought were very attractive books that have broken down badly for film. If they weren't satisfactory movies, I was part of the process that made them unsatisfactory. I don't feel that I was used or traduced, but many weren't very good. Some, though, were. The film of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was pretty good. Tinker Tailor was really good." He understandably forbears from naming those sheep-dip adaptations, but The Russia House, The Little Drummer Girl and The Tailor of Panama are surely contenders.
And now, in Cornwell's estimation, the adaptation of The Constant Gardener is really good, too.
Also in the Guardian:
A new quarterly - on DVD: "It is the Journal of Short Film's intention to be short film's new venue, to introduce masses of independent filmmakers to the world, and to popularize short film. It is also interested in diversity: almost half of Volume 1's filmmakers are women, and a wide range of film is represented, including narrative, documentary and experimental work."
Good Night, and Good Luck is this week's featured film in the Village Voice. Michael Atkinson praises "[George] Clooney's brilliantly orchestrated and seriously respectful movie [which] can be seen as a grim shoulder tap, lamenting the social irresponsibility of what Gore Vidal likes to call the 'United States of Amnesia' - have the lessons of 1953 ever found a deep seat in our memory?" J Hoberman has a good long talk with the director: "It's very easy when you're a conservative to say 'good' and 'bad.' It's simple: evildoers, bad people. The job of a liberal is to see both sides. That makes us lousy debaters." For the NYP, Jennifer Merin also talks with Clooney.
Related: Clooney is updatiung Network for a production to be performed live on television. Lisa de Moraes reports in the Washington Post. David Poland doesn't like the idea, though.
And then there's David Ansen's Clooney profile in Newsweek.
More on Good Night from Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where you'll also find Susan Gerhard on Capote and Dennis Harvey on 24 Hours on Craigslist.
Back to the Voice:
Vince Keenan: "I should have known Cronenberg would never let me down. Violence is like a dinner in which the main course is undercooked, but the side dishes are divine."
Related:
Three thumbs up from the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE for The Squid and the Whale; there, too, Erica Abeel talks with Noah Baumbach. More from AO Scott in the NYT, David Edelstein in Slate, Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press and Karina Longworth at Cinematical. Related: Richard Corliss profiles Jeff Daniels in Time.
Peter Daniels at WSWS: "Occupation: Dreamland... is all the more powerful because it lets the camera and the soldiers tell the story, and the camera does not lie." More from Michael Tully. In the Austin Chronicle, Anne S Lewis talks with the filmmakers.
Dennis Cozzalio and Peter Gelderblom have a long, long talk about Brian De Palma's Body Double.
Jean Poole interview VJ and visual agitator Mia Makela at Sky Noise.
Kim Masters, author of The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everyone Else, shares a few notes from the exec - and recounts his fall. Also at Slate, Edward Jay Epstein explains why Pixar can't leave Disney, plus: David Edelstein on The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio and Eric Banks "narrates" a slide show devoted to the exhibition The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the end of the year.
Hopes are high at Disney that The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will nab fantasy fans, families and the Mel Gibson crowd, reports Elaine Dutka. So is there a Bushie connection? You bet. Cinematical's Martha Fischer points to details.
Also in the Los Angeles Times:
Video iPod on October 12? Probably not, but Slashdotters are suggesting a few other intriguing possibilities.
Even as the battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD rages on, China enters the arena with a hi-def format of its own. Grady Hendrix passes along a T3 report and comments: "Snicker if you will, but with 2/3 of the world's DVD players bearing the 'Made in China' stamp, you too may soon be familiar with the EVD (Enhanced Video Disc) format."
Saul Hansell in the NYT: "Video delivered over the Internet... is quickly shaping up as a way for smaller producers to reach an audience without having to cut deals with movie studios and the big networks that are the traditional gatekeepers of television." His first example: Blair Witch Project co-director Dan Myrick's The Strand of Venice. In a separate piece, Hansell talks to Jeremy Allaire about his new company, Brightcove, which aims to allow "all types of video producers, from media giants to anyone who has a camcorder, put their work on the Internet and make money if anyone watches it."
Writing for Poynter Online, Steve Outing notes that it "sounds like a shift is coming [at Google Video], where some chunk of its money could come from referral fees or commissions on content sales."
At Ditherati, Owen Thomas plucks a quote from a Reuters piece on Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning - "We took a conscious decision not to go to the theatres as the movie was done mostly on a voluntary basis" - and notes that it sums up "Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola, on giving away a product for free on the Internet that he'd never be able to charge for anyway."
Online viewing tip #1. Coudal Partners' short film on the spiritual home of their Museum of Online Museums, Mies van der Rohe's SR Crown Hall.
Online viewing tip #2. Joel Trussell's video for Jason Forrest's "War Photographer," with animation by Darin Bendall, Chris Fox, Gene Blakefield, Leonard Riley and Doug Gordon. Via Drawn!.
Online viewing tip #3. Twitch's Logboy has found a TV spot for a collection of Studio Ghibli shorts.
More online viewing tips. Kate Stables picks out seven in the Guardian.
Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2005 2:16 PM
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