November 29, 2005
Shorts, 11/29.
First, a bit of brilliance from Michael Bérubé: "Variety, May 1, 2008 - According to insider reports, action star Bruce Willis is drastically over budget and cannot decide on an ending for his pro-war Iraq film, Mission Accomplished.... Industry analysts note that the cost of Mission Accomplished now exceeds $200 billion... 'It's way beyond what happened with Coppola,' said one of the film's producers, 'not that there are any parallels with Vietnam or anything.'" Via Evan Derkacz at Alternet. Update: David Kline's response to Roger L Simon's enthusiasm for Willis's project. Via Weblogsky.
At 24 Lies a Second, Robert C Cumbow compares and contrasts "the Trotsky and Stalin of Hollywood in the 1970s": "What happened in the world of movie-making between the Hollywood of the 1950s and that of the 1970s was not a weakening but a redistribution of power. Not coincidentally, the redistribution of power is exactly what Altman and Coppola, in different ways, made their most enduring films about." Related online browsing tip: This wonderful page.
Chuck Tryon reviews The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah, a mockumentary about "Brian," who insists that he is, of course, not the messiah, but "a regionally-selected messiah for a '100-mile radius'... The film is currently making the rounds at film festivals, and I hope it receives the much wider audience that it deserves."
BlackBook's realized a terrific idea: Sit Philip Seymour Hoffman and New Yorker editor David Remnick down together and get them to talk about Truman Capote. Also: Screenwriter and novelist David Benioff gets Don Cheadle and Ryan Gosling talking about the state of things in general.
Darren Hughes picks "My Top Five Spiritually Significant Films."
David Lowery replies with a list of his own.
In the New York Times - on the editorial page, no less - Lawrence Downes remembers Pat Morita, "one of the last survivors of a generation of Asian-American actors who toiled within a system that was interested only in the stock Asian."
Also, Charles McGrath considers the "very different Restoration" evoked in The Libertine from, say, Restoration, and, from this week's new DVD releases, Dave Kehr highlights in particular Emile de Antonio's Point of Order and Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.
Nick Rombes finds Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse "uniquely frightening... Near the end of the film, there is an especially unsettling scene..." And he walks you through it, shot by shot.
Acquarello: "Mike Hoolboom continues to refine the tonally complex, multi-chapter, mixed media compositions of his 2003 video essay, Imitations of Life with his latest - and equally ambitious and inspired - offering, Public Lighting."
Yes! Filmbrain joins the Cinemarati.
In the Agony Booth Forum, rosybloom posts an anonymously told tale (originally told here) of the long and silly (and expensive) road to Superman Returns. Slashdotters discuss.
Bill Gibron at PopMatters: "If you believe that Italians offered the best examples of neo-realism in cinema, think again. You haven't seen the mind-numbing dullness of true reality until you've witnessed the work of Coleman Francis."
DK Holm's new "Nocturnal Admissions" column at Movie Poop Shoot is once again just too honking big to encapsulate, but: plenty of movies, DVDs and books, plus one literary hoax are reviewed (and I was actually pleasantly surprised by Asia Argento's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things; ultimately, the hoax probably won't skew my appreciation) and, of course, reviewed well.
"Smugness" is "what connects Good Night, and Good Luck, The Squid and the Whale, North Country, The Dying Gaul, The Weather Man, Syriana and Capote - some of the year's most acclaimed yet detestable films," writes Armond White in the New York Press. But wait, there's more: "Smugness may be at the heart of the low attendance problem that perplexes Hollywood this year." Why hasn't anyone else thought of this? Via Ray Pride at Movie City News.
Also: White's review of Syriana (more from David Denby in the New Yorker, who, just as startlingly, detects "that something unhappy in the national mood has crept into the movies"; you think?) and Matt Zoller Seitz on The Libertine.
Ray Pride interviews Harold Ramis for Movie City News. Speaking of which, in the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein takes potshots at David Poland (who's responded), Jeffrey Wells and Tom O'Neil (who also responds). Related: Eugene Hernandez on Wells's Sundance predictions: "If that rate of about 20 percent accuracy holds up, it's quite distressing."
David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back: "The Pinky Violence Collection is a fantastic entry-point to a genre that, until very recently, was almost completely inaccessible to the Western viewer. In the 1970s, facing stiff competition from television, the Japanese film industry fought back by providing viewers with what television couldn't - excessive sex and violence."
Surrounded and ambushed by the Reverse Shot trio at indieWIRE this week: Takashi Shimizu's Marebito.
At Salon, Allen Barra on the persistence of The Warriors.
Greg Ursic has a pair of Match Point-related interviews at Hollywood Bitchslap: Scarlett Johansson and Emily Mortimer. Related: A first impression you can trust: Anthony Kaufman.
Christopher Campbell has harsh words for The Boys of Baraka at Cinematical.
At nthposition, CS Lewis's letter to a BBC producer: "A human, pantomime, Aslan wld. be to me blasphemy." Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.
Rowan Atkinson will once again play a vicar in Keeping Mum; John Mullan looks back on a grand English tradition. Also in the Guardian, Andrew Pulver on why we should take Madonna's directing ambitions seriously and Justin McCurry on what's upset many in China and Japan about Memoirs of a Geisha even before it opens. Related: Alison Willmore's Geisha roundup at the IFC Blog and Dave Kehr: "Shohei Imamura's version of Memoirs of a Geisha would have been something to see, but of course, Sony Pictures Entertainment (a Japanese company, I believe) would not for one minute have considered entrusting this Japanese subject to a Japanese filmmaker - certainly not when the director of Chicago was available."
Also: Dave Kehr's takes on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady and Gus Van Sant's Last Days.
Up-n-coming:
Posted by dwhudson at November 29, 2005 2:45 PM
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