Shorts, 11/20.

Jonathan Romney in Modern Painters: "In [Jacques] Demy's cinema, the everyday is magically transmuted, with even the drab port towns of northern and western France - Cherbourg, Rochefort, the director's native Nantes - becoming poetically heightened, visually amplified locales for stories that are bigger, more jubilant and more heart-rending than realism ever affords."

Matthew Wilder in the City Pages: "[O]ne of the signature pleasures of Bresson's work, whether he would have liked it said or not, is its magnificent acting - as strong and truthful as that of the writhing Method performers in an Elia Kazan movie."

Ken Worpole for openDemocracy: "For those of us for whom Bergman's films have provided much of the imagery of our interior worlds - in my case for something like forty years - Saraband is as fearsome and emotionally terrifying as ever."

Short but beautiful Jonas Mekas snippet at Invisible Cinema.

Signandsight translates Katja Nicodemus's interview with Lars von Trier for Die Zeit. Q: "What would be Condoleeza Rice's role in your Manderlay plantation?" A:: "She would be a 'good' slave. One who works in the master's house."

"Can someone who loves American movies really hate America?" asks Joseph Braude, author of The New Iraq:

In the Arab world, Hollywood rivals the mosque for impact on the popular imagination. Conservative Muslims may stick with tradition and condemn the U.S. film industry as an instrument of American or Jewish hegemony, but the movies have a wider audience in the Middle East than ever before and a fan base that spans the cultural spectrum. Often under the cover of the Internet, Hollywood images are fueling discussions about almost anything, from the prosaic to the political.

Also in the Los Angeles Times: Rachel Abramowitz profiles Heath Ledger. Related: Choire Sicha in the New York Observer: "Brokeback Mountain may be the first film to come out of Hollywood since God knows when which doesn't whimper over the difficulties of finding love, assessing love, complaining about love or denouncing love."

Independently produced Seoul Train DVDs are now available at the site, notes acquarello at Cinemarati: "I'm heartened that more people will get a chance to see this powerful film because the humanitarian crisis in North Korea really is such an underreported tragedy, much like most human rights violations that don't conveniently serve the political agendas of the governments of 'civilized nations'."

"The Bush administration's failure to pull themselves out of their current military quagmire has apparently sparked renewed interest in the films that documented the conflict in Vietnam," writes Jane Fonda in her piece in the Guardian on two revivals and a new doc.

• She quotes Vincent Canby on Hearts and Minds: "I don't think the film means to knock American achievements but only to point out that a certain lack of perspective, of modesty, perhaps, can be close to fatal."

• She recalls her own involvement in realizing Winter Soldier: "Today, we do those who served in Vietnam a grave disservice to feign outrage at what these men said and did, and to deny that any atrocities were committed by Americans."

• And she recommends Sir! No Sir!, "which shows how some of the most dedicated troops turned their backs on violence and devoted themselves to the peace movement."

Related: The cinetrix has a story about The Green Berets and the US Senate. Back to the Guardian and Observer:

• "Only a few years ago Greek cinema was the preserve of arid intellectual epics choked with philosophical allusion and cloying nostalgiac melodramas on the manifold historical misfortunes of the Greeks," writes Fiachra Gibbons. "No longer. Not only have mainstream directors found a formula that has Greeks returning in their millions to cinemas to see big, well-made films like Brides and A Touch of Spice, but a new wave of young film-makers has emerged to rewrite the rules and create a very particular extreme humanist style of their own." That's the good news. The bad news is that the Greek government is cutting the funding that's made this "renaissance" possible.

• We'll be seeing a lot of this sort of thing, but Peter Conrad does it well: "King Kong connects our origins in the swamp with our ambition to reconquer heaven by building towers of Babel; it is about atavism and aspiration, and, when the monster starts to fancy his screaming female captive, it forces us to rethink the divisions we have made between animal, man and god."

• John Morrison tells the true story behind Mrs Henderson Presents.

• Ben Marshall interviews Curtis Hanson. Related: An early review of Lucky You from "Kurt Hectic" at AICN.

• William Shaw meets Ray Harryhausen.

  

• Peter Bradshaw on The Libertine (and I had such high hopes for this a few years ago; for slightly more positive takes, see Wendy Ide in the London Times and Tim Robey in the Telegraph), Separate Lies (more from Philip French), Stoned, Familia Rodante, Factotum (related: director Bent Hamer tells the Telegraph's Benjamin Secher why Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll's Whisky is one of his favorite films) and Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story.

• Andrew Pulver is disappointed by William Eggleston in the Real World (more from Antonio Pasolini in Kamera). Also: "Paths of Glory remains a model of narrative precision, owing more to the terse crime potboilers that Kubrick already had under his belt."

• What actually disturbs kids in a movie is hard to make out, notes Mark Kermode, and probably varies from kid to kid anyway.

• Joe Queenan on the current releases in which "the dead play at least as important a role as the living, and sometimes even manage to upstage folks who are still breathing."

• Stuart Jeffries proposes a few happier endings.

That last one's inspired by the silly fact that, as you've probably heard, Pride & Prejudice ends differently in the UK than it does in the US. IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez finds that this sort of tweaking is "increasingly commonplace in Indiewood." Also, as November races outta here, indieWIRE's set up its "Awards Watch." Anthony Kaufman: "With national pride on the line, not to mention increased value, the Academy's single award for foreign achievement raises significant anxiety overseas - as well as here at home."

Meanwhile, Oscar's list of potential nominees in the Animated Feature category is now down to ten. Via the SXSW News Reel.

Early reviews in the Hollywood Reporter: "[T]he character and geographical jumps leave you in a muddle with thinly sketched personalities and confusing plot points," writes Kirk Honeycutt. "Worse, dialogue dense with nuance and shaded meaning flies by too quickly. So what Syriana feels like is a television miniseries condensed into two hours." Related: AICN's Moriarty has a long talk with writer/director Stephen Gaghan. More Honeycutt: Rob Marshall has - surprise! - "Americanized" Memoirs of a Geisha.

"From the first Golden Age that emerged from the shadows of World War I and the Great Depression to the fears and anxieties of post-World War II America that gave birth to film noir, social unrest arguably makes for more-compelling cinema." For the Hollywood Reporter, Kevin Cassidy asks a slew of filmmakers if we might be entering another such phase. Via Movie City Indie.

"John Simon is a critic who improves with age," writes Richard Schickel in a piece for the LAT on three new collections of Simon's film, theater and music reviews. "Or, perhaps what I want to say is that he improves in our age, during which there has been a noticeable decline in the amount of space and attention that general-interest journalism cares to devote to discerning and knowledgeable criticism."

"I consider Agee one of the five major American film critics, the others being Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael," announces Phillip Lopate immediately after writing, "Before he quit to write Hollywood screenplays, he left a substantial record of moviegoing that has inspired many reviewers since, while irritating the hell out of others." Also in the Nation: Olivier, a biography by Terry Coleman, has not been well received, but never mind. David Thomson has stories to tell about the actor anyway.

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's Four Eyed Monsters has done fairly well on the festival circuit but has yet to score a distributor. Even so, the couple's done extraordinarily well in the PR department. Their vlog's been noted on a wide variety of blogs, including this one, and they've seen heavy coverage at indieWIRE, where they're also blogging, laudatory mentions elsewhere, and now, they're Exhibit A in Charles Lyons's piece in the New York Times in that they "appear typical of a generation of filmmakers determined to bring their visions to the screen, never mind that a staggering number of completed films don't get farther than the filmmakers' closets. In one measure of the glut, the 2005 Sundance Film Festival received more than 2,600 feature-film submissions - up nearly 30 percent from a year earlier - and selected only 120."

Also in the NYT, the Big Three are on a roll this week:

• Stephen Holden on "Neil Jordan's picaresque fairy tale": "Breakfast on Pluto proposes a kind of radical disengagement from the mad, mad world: a fiercely willed, stubbornly held innocence that in the end stands as its own reward."

  More from Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "It's all so wide-ranging and eccentric that I really wish it worked." (Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling replies.) Related: Erica Abeel interviews Jordan for indieWIRE and Andrew O'Hehir talks with him for Salon.

  

• Manohla Dargis on the "happily satisfying" Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: "[A]t once susceptibly human and wholly alien, a geeky outsider and an awesomely cool kid, Harry holds up a mirror to those who curl up with books and congregate in theaters, taking flight in their imaginations."

  More from Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, where Mary McNamara interviews screenwriter Steve Kloves, Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly, David Edelstein in Slate, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, Anthony Quinn in the Independent, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Jeremiah Kipp in Slant, James Rocchi at Cinematical, Cynthia Fuchs at PopMatters, Tasha Robinson for the AV Club and a Cinematical podcast. Related: The Guardian asks tourists at the Hogwarts platform at King's Cross what they're looking for.

  

• AO Scott on Walk the Line, "more tribute than insight."

  More from Ella Taylor in the LAW, Carina Chocano in the LAT, Zacharek in Salon, Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper, Cinematical's Ryan Stewart, Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix, Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Fuchs at PopMatters and Nick Schager in Slant. Related: Joe Leydon meets Joaquin Phoenix for the Tennessean.

  

• Scott: "Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques is the kind of French movie that makes you want to throw on your trench coat, light up a cigarette and shoot somebody."

  More from Martha Fisher at Cinematical, Michael Joshua Rowin at Stop Smiling (where the current interview excerpt is James Hughes's with Peter Bogdanovich).

• Dargis: "Etched in black and vivid color and infused with melancholy, [Phil] Solomon's stunningly beautiful films have an emotional power that might well attract more viewers, if not for the maddening divisions that find a few rarefied films classified (read: ghettoized) as art, while the vast majority are relegated to the commercial trough." Also, Gilles's Wife and, in particular, Emmanuelle Devos.

  More from Steve Erickson at Gay City News.

  

• For Holden, Saverio Costanzo's Private "shows the human instinct to fight oppression, even if that rebellion risks disaster. It's what oppressed people do." Also, Eran Riklis's "tightly wound" Syrian Bride.

  More on that one from the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE and Erickson at GCN.

• Scott on Zizek!: "Mr Zizek is funnier, in person and on the page, than anyone whose mission is to fuse Hegelian dialectics with Lacanian psychoanalysis has any right to be."

  Related: Looker sorts through Zizek's faves.

• Blackmail Boy "just seems determined to shock," finds Anita Gates.

  

• Unveiled "occasionally suffers from a self-conscious artiness," writes Dana Stevens, "but at its center is an extraordinary performance by [Jasmin] Tabatabai." Also, Naked in Ashes, a doc "more heartfelt than it is rigorous."

• Laura Kern on the "taut, well-balanced 82 minutes" of Aristide and the Endless Revolution.

• Franz Lidz profiles Nick Goossen, "about to make his directing debut with Grandma's Boy, a stoner comedy that was shot in 25 days on a budget of $5 million for the production company of his mentor, Adam Sandler."

• "There has been an explosion [this season] of Oscar-baiting performances in which straight actors play gay, transvestite or transgender characters," notes Caryn James.

• Norimitsu Onishi reports that "two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the last four months."

  

• Books: Richard B Woodward on Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment, Dave Itzkoff on Alan Moore's Absolute Watchmen and Jonathan Lethem: "[Italo] Calvino, with his frequent references to comics and folktales and film, and his droll probing of contemporary scientific and philosophical theories, had encompassed motifs associated with brows both high and low in an internationally lucid style, one wholly his own."

• Trey Parker and Matt Stone have signed a three-year deal with Paramount, reports Ben Sisario.

Armond White on Jim Sheridan's Get Rich or Die Tryin': "A moviemaker who can detail the conflict of retribution and rebirth that was at the heart of Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson's Irish-troubles love story in The Boxer should have been able to see through Fitty's bluster and question the way hip-hop, post-Dr Dre (Fitty's sometime producer), has corrupted the African American human-rights struggle." Also in the NYP: Jennifer Merin interviews Ric Burns.

Steven Mikulan, LAW: "Now that his latest documentary is out, Greenwald is finding that the real work is just beginning as he spends the next two months crisscrossing the country and Europe to promote Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price."More on the doc itself from Chuck Tryon. Also, Mikulan's talk with George McGovern about One Bright Shining Moment.

Dennis Harvey in the SFBG: "Shamelessly schematic, effectively cinematic, and brilliantly performed by all three principals (especially [Peter] Sarsgaard, pushing himself just shy of excess mannerism), The Dying Gaul is a striking gambit that will reward those who like their dramatic cocktails strong, with a bitter aftertaste."

Girish: "So, tell me: your favorite literary adaptations? And why?" The conversation spills over into the chutry experiment.

Russian Insider: Blogging Russian animation. Via Coudal Partners.

AICN's Moriarty has a huge update on Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon, which is, yes, a remake of The Poseidon Adventure.

Interviews in the Independent: Kaleem Aftab with Martin Scorsese ("I don't know if I have the patience any more to do a film in a sense for them [Hollywood], and to find myself in a film for them"; The Departed, it turns out, has been made primarily for Leonardo DiCaprio) and Phil Hoad with Terrence Dashon Howard.

For Grist, and via Alternet, Amanda Griscom Little talks with Larry David about Earth to America!, "a two-hour comedy extravaganza produced by Laurie [David] and starring Larry that is designed to get America laughing - and, more to the point, learning - about global warming." Sunday night, TBS; more from Michael Janofsky in the NYT.

Sujewa Ekanayake has a brief chat with Caveh Zahedi. Related: Chuck Tryon reviews I Am a Sex Addict.

AICN's Quint chats up Harold Ramis.

Grady Hendrix reads Casio Abe's Beat Takeshi Vs Takeshi Kitano and several Japanese books that have been made into Japanese films.

Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "What is so disquieting, unnerving, even distasteful about Vengeance is Mine is that, in closely following Enokizu's murder-spree, in its refusal to offer simple explanations or moral judgments on what is depicted onscreen, and through its frequent use of black humor, the film seems largely to sympathize with the sociopathic killer." Also: Rumsey Taylor on Bad Timing.

Filmmaker, writer, musician, etc Amir Motlagh is revving up his first narrative feature and blogging about it.

Oh, my. Flipbook.info. Via Drawn!.

In the New Statesman, Boyd Farrow lists the conservative Christian groups who've poured money into The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and notes that the wave of merchandise in the film's wake will be very unlike that for most other films as well.

Every time Heart on a Stick sees the Rent trailer, "I think to myself: You couldn't pay me to see that crap. And then I think again. You - YOU! - could pay me to see that crap. Thaaaaat's right. I'm offering the opportunity to MAKE ME SUFFER. For charity!" Via Movie City News.

"A spate of fall movies crashed and burned, movies that if they had been produced and marketed at the independent level might have worked," argues the Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson, sparking a response from David Poland, sparking, in turn, a response from Thompson.

Online listening tip #1. The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Via Matt Clayfield, who's been "Reading, Closely," and has an online viewing tip (and followup): Chasing Windmills.

Online listening tip #2. Sarah Silverman is Elvis Mitchell's guest on The Treatment.

Online listening tip #3. Jeffrey Wells launches his new talk radio show, Elsewhere Live, on Sunday, 7 pm PST.

Online viewing tips. Chuck Tryon points to this MCI ad; there's more to explore in the "Semiotics of Advertising" section of Landscapes of Capital.

Online listening and viewing tip. TheMovieTimes.Interviews.

Posted by dwhudson at November 20, 2005 7:37 AM