Weekend shorts.

Matt Feeney takes a good, hard, honest look at La Haine in Slate. Yes, it's remarkably prophetic; but is it also, as a film, overrated?

The Reeler has a scrumptious report on Gena Rowlands's recent appearance following a screening of A Woman Under the Influence, part of BAM's "An Independent Spirit" series. "I would say it's the hardest picture that I ever did to get over," she told Peter Bogdanovich onstage. "It did linger a while." And via The Reeler: Army Archerd blogs.

Darren Hughes: "I had so much fun watching Jim Jarmusch's films this summer, I've decided to devote the fall to another "author study," this time of Nicholas Ray." He begins with In a Lonely Place and, as it happens, is reminded here and there of Cassavetes. Also: "Five Favorite Performances By Actors I Otherwise Dislike."

David Cronenberg has signed on to direct an adaptation of his Dead Ringers - as a TV series. No, really. Denise Martin reports in Variety. Via Ain't It Cool News.

Steven Spielberg is a man with many fingers in many pies. At AICN, Quint passes along roundup of updates.

Sujewa Ekanayake: "Like Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise or like experiencing a church basement Positive Force DC indie/punk rock show, Chain offers a technically simple (seemingly), accessible, but totally inspiring and dare I say positively transformative experience that made me want to go home and work on editing my movie and made me notice the ordinary surroundings that I walked through daily in a more romantic light (at least for three hours or so at full effect)."

"These days, if you make a movie about East and West and turn it into a simple piece of disposable entertainment, that seems to me criminal," Stephen Gaghan tells Stephen Farber. Gaghan, who wrote Traffic, has taken a similar multi-narrative approach to writing and directing Syriana. In the audio slide show that accompanies the piece, he sounds rather exhausted, having just juggled four stories; "this type of fractured narrative has turned out to be a hallmark of this year's thoughtful, independent-spirited films," writes Farber.

Also in the New York Times, Anupama Chopra:

Traditionally, there were two schools of Hindi cinema. The center stage was occupied by Bollywood, which enthralled Indians globally with song-and-dance extravaganzas and melodramatic stories big on family values. The other was the Satyajit Ray-inspired realistic art-house films, which flowered in the 1970s and 80s.... Lately, a third type of Hindi cinema has emerged. It's composed of smaller, offbeat films that are more realistic than Bollywood tales and edgier than art-house ones. The films have an urbane, uniquely Indian sensibility.

And:

• Pause a moment and consider the pressures facing those poor, poor movie studio execs every time they get up in the morning. Heart-wrenching, isn't it. Adam Leipzig spells out the details; Peter Arkle draws them.

• Alan Riding in London: "After Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli and others, Anthony Minghella, the acclaimed director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley, is the latest filmmaker to try his hand at opera. And already his production of Puccini's Madam Butterfly for the English National Opera has become the hottest ticket in the West End."

• Manohla Dargis on Bee Season, "a serious film filled with both great and awkward ideas and made as much from the heart as the head" (more from Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times and Ray Pride at Movie City News) and Derailed, "a glossy and often risible bit of trash about an adulterous affair gone bad, bad, bad."

• Stephen Holden on Zathura, "gentler, more family-friendly and in every way better" than Jumanji (more from Jim Tudor at Twitch), and Ellie Parker: "For [Naomi] Watts, it is a small, brave acting tour de force." More on that one from Kevin Thomas in the LAT.

• Laura Kern on Cape of Good Hope, "a genuine uplift of a film that even the most diehard cynics will find hard to resist," and Comedians of Comedy, "indulgent and often numbingly slow."

• Dana Stevens on A Wake in Providence, "the kind of broad romantic comedy that purports to satirize ethnic stereotypes even as it merrily reinforces them."

• Richard Siklos and Geraldine Fabrikant on CBS's attempts to catch up with NBC and DirecTV and ABC and Apple in the race toward the ultimate switch to video-on-demand.

• Laura M Holson on a new award created "to recognize original video content for computers, cellphones and other hand-held devices, like the video iPod and PlayStation Portable."

Mike Russell's posted another one of those big, long, career-encompassing interviews of his. This time it's with Shane Black.

Julian Fellowes talks to Sheila Johnston about LA Confidential and the world it conjures:

At that time, Hollywood was supplying the most sophisticated movies in the world, yet it was still a kind of Wild West town. I remember Laurence Olivier talking of when he first went there. He'd go to parties and down the staircase would come a series of glamorous people. Forty-five minutes later, they'd all be throwing up in the bar. There was an incredible contrast between this very high-resolution image that LA liked to present and the jungle behind.

Also in the Telegraph:

• SF Said on William Eggleston, Michael Almereyda's doc and the series of related screenings and events at the ICA in London.

• Interviews: David Gritten with Laura Linney, John Hiscock with Jodie Foster and Robert Sandall with Stoned director Stephen Woolley. Related to that one: some anonymous soul for the Independent.

• Tim Robey on The Constant Gardener, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and more.

Slate's David Edelstein proposes a new tagline for Pride & Prejudice: "Sometimes the last movie on earth you expect to like is the one that seduces you utterly." Related: Cinematical's Ryan Stewart, Stephen Holden in the New York Times, Annie Wagner (and here's her review) interviews director Joe Wright in the Stranger, Noy Thrupkaew for the American Prospect, Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon and Kim Masters has a fun NPR piece on how the Jane Austen Society has reacted to the film.

Laurence Sterne scholar Lana Asfour in the New Statesman: "In my view, Tristram Shandy is only as unfilmable as it was unwriteable."

For WSWS, Marc Wells talks with Quintosole director Marcellino de Baggis and Joanne Laurier reviews David Riker's La Ciudad and Adrián Caetano's Bolivia.

Richard Gott on Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba: "Those who have had the chance to see it recognise it at once as one of the masterpieces of world cinema, the outcome of the Soviet Union's first exposure to the world beyond its frontiers since Eisenstein's encounter with the Mexican revolution in the 1930s which produced his unfinished opus Viva Mexico."

Also in the Guardian:

• Interviews: Gareth McLean with Lili Taylor, Zoe Williams with David Morrissey, Laura Barton with Val Kilmer and Will Hodgkinson with Leo Gregory.

• John Patterson double: Johnny Depp's mastery of British accents; and how Jarhead measures up to the movies it references.

• Marina Hyde: "The trade in celebrity artefacts makes the pre-Reformation market in saints' fingers look like a village bring-and-buy."

Filmbrain: "Everything that's wrong with 80s films can be found in this lame remake of Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street."

Hellboy Animated, the production diary (i.e., blog). Via Drawn!.

Cory Doctorow reads John Scalzi: "Agent to the Stars is the story of Thomas Stein, a junior agent in a cuthroat Hollywood agency who finds himself representing an entire alien race to humanity."

Steve Erickson at Gay City News on Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse: "The loneliness it describes long predated computers, even if the film suggests that they further it along."

In the Independent, Elaine Lipworth talks with Toni Collette.

Rebecca Barry interviews Tilda Swinton for the New Zealand Herald. Via MCN.

Nerve's Will Doig meets Patricia Clarkson.

For the Nation, Sam Graham-Felsen has five questions for Robert Greenwald.

Ari Eisner interviews Josh Stolberg for Creative Screenwriting.

Fests:

• Sarah Jo Marks at the AFI Fest: "I've stopped reading the festival catalog and I'm just walking blindly into documentaries." And then writing capsule reviews.

• From the AFI Fest to Twitch, Peter Martin reviews Eduardo Raspo's Tattooed and interviews director Martin Boulocq.

• New Italian Cinema, Sunday through November 20 at the Kabuki 8 in San Francisco.

• Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film, Part II, at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, November 17 through December 11.

Online viewing and listening tips. A roundup at Bibi's Box via Wiley Wiggins.

Online viewing tip #1. Chris Cunningham's PSP ad. Via Opus.

Online viewing tip #2. A trailer's up at the Brick site. Via Anne Thompson.

Online viewing tips, round 1. At Twitch, Todd links to a trailer for Jan Svankmajer's Sileni and X translates an interview with Im Kwon-taek.

Online viewing tips, round 2. "Watching all six Star Wars movies simultaneously" at WeirdHat.com. Now that's avant. Via Screenhead, who's got much more to wile away the hours with into the weekend.

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2005 3:53 PM