Weekend shorts.

At Twitch, X translates highlights of a Film 2.0 interview with Im Sang-soo after a couple of paragraphs of succinct background on the director, including news of his new film, The Old Garden (scroll way down). I found this poster, by the way, which I'm assuming is for The President's Last Bang, in a special feature at the Film 2.0 site, "Poster of the Year." And it's not even the one at the top.

"I'm at an age right now where if I don't take risks, I lose respect for myself. And this was an important risk for me to take." The risk is Munich; for the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz meets a weary Steven Spielberg: "He's just finished both War of the Worlds and Munich in a blazing 18-month streak, and although he doesn't mention it, just hours earlier sold DreamWorks, the company he founded with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, to Paramount. It is the end of an era for him; the end of his dream of owning his own studio."

On a related note, Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter: "That DreamWorks couldn't survive as a stand-alone company has everything to do with the words 'studio' and 'independent.'"

For HKFilmArt, Light Sleeper editor Saul Symonds quotes Chris Doyle on the subject of The Departed, Martin Scorsese's remake of Infernal Affairs: "I find it disappointing, if not depressing, to see someone of the integrity and scholarship of Marty apparently not knowing or caring where the original originates from, which I find insulting to our integrity and efforts, our energy and perseverance." Via Grady Hendrix, whose found a 1962 Bollywood version of King Kong.

Matt Clayfield: "Let's say, just for the sake of the argument, that there are essentially two types of film critics: missionaries and skeptics."

Reverse Shot's cnw: "In anticipation of the critical lambasting of Terrence Malick's exquisite and altogether dazzling The New World, a brief reflection on how some things never change." It's a game, actually. Match the critics and the quotes from the past and project into the near future.

Also, robbiefreeling: "Riding on approximately seven months of Cannes hype, Woody Allen's Match Point still manages to impress." But then there's Ben at the Whine Colored Sea: "Match Point is fine in theory but a wreck in execution; it's all overheated acting and expository-heavy dialogue."

Manohla Dargis has more thoughts on Brokeback Mountain: "Here, against the backdrop of the great American West, that mythic territory of rugged individualism and the Marlboro Man, is a quietly devastating look at masculinity and its discontents." Related:

• Rick Moody, whose novel, The Ice Storm, was adapted by Ang Lee, in the Guardian: "[I]t is almost as affecting and classically sound as Romeo and Juliet."

• Lakshmi Chaudhry at Alternet: "Brokeback Mountain is just the latest iteration of a narrative of tragic love that has gripped the Western imagination ever since troubadours in medieval France began to sing the legend of Tristan and Iseult.... Progress suggests that the gay love stories of the future will look a lot like that other Hollywood staple: the romantic comedy. Coming soon: When Harry Met Harry."

• For the American Prospect's Noy Thrupkaew, the question of whether or not Brokeback Mountain is "a gay film... smacks of an essentialism ill-suited to the gender-bending that queerness can inspire."

• James Wolcott rounds up examples of wingnut pundits making asses of themselves. A few centrists, too.

• Film Journal editor Rick Curnutte: "Lee has crafted one of the best Westerns I've ever seen."

• The Gilded Moose presents the "2005 Guide to Modern American History As Told Through Anne Hathaway's Hair in Brokeback Mountain." Via Joe Brown at the Culture Blog!, where Aidin Vaziri's found a surprising shot of Sofia Coppola.

Holland Carter on Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video at the Bronx Museum of the Arts:

[T]oday's art audience must wonder at the patience that some of those early videos demanded of viewers, with their minimal content spun out for many grainy minutes and hours. It was as if art were saying: this is not Hollywood or television. This is not entertainment (though sometimes it was). This is serious. This is work.

No one would buy that line now.

Also in the New York Times:

• Roberta Smith on MoMA's Pixar: 20 Years of Animation, "the largest, most object-oriented exhibition in its history devoted to film."

• Catherine Billey traces the history of the supporting roles the NYT has played in the movies: "The paper has been a presence in pictures at least since 1931, when Groucho Marx, in Monkey Business, tried to cover up his own chicanery with a threatened letter to the editor. Since then, The Times and its reporters have been portrayed as investigators, cultural arbiters, pleasant diversions and, now, even a career dead end."

• You want to take the kids to the movies. So: Which one? That's a complicated question, as AO Scott explains. Also, The Producers: "[H]ow come the movie feels, in every sense, like a rip-off?" More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon and Karina Longworth at Cinematical.

• Scott again: "What if the problem with Hollywood today is that the movies aren't bad enough?" The reasoning: "The storied wrecks of the cinematic past - Showgirls, Heaven's Gate, Duel in the Sun - all exhibit a spark of madness that keeps them alive in memory." With the madness rationalized out by the current system, truly great movies won't get made, either.

• Sharon Waxman: "With evidence increasing that the American moviegoing habit is in decline, theater owners are undertaking a concerted campaign to bring it back." Commentary: Peter Merholz. Related: In the London Times, Hollywood veteran Budd Schulberg offers his take: "[T]oday's Masters of the Hollywood Universe seem to be very slow to realise that they have met the enemy - and it is them.... Instead of having their own true sense of what will be moving and appealing and meaningful to their audience, the corporate minds that have taken over Hollywood employ all the old, cold techniques of big business marketing." And Joe Queenan in the Guardian: "[A]n element of desperation has crept into the greenlighting process." Hence, all the remakes.

• More Manohla Dargis: The Family Stone is "a clear attempt to bottle the manic energy and generous spirit of madcap classics like George Cukor's wonderful 1938 Holiday." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon and James Rocchi at Cinematical.

• Stephen Holden on Electric Shadows: "An Asian answer to Cinema Paradiso, this movie is so passionately committed to the notion that favorite films from childhood and adolescence shape our imaginations that it unwittingly portrays an obsession with movies as a kind of pathology."

Chris Mooney's bestselling The Republican War on Science (reviewed this week by John Horgan in the NYT) will be the foundation from which Morgan Spurlock builds his next doc, reports the Guardian.

Also: James Meek, who's reported from Iraq for the Guardian, considers Jarhead within the context of the American war film, particularly, interestingly enough, The Deer Hunter. And Justin McCurry reports on Yamato: The Last Battle, a "major Japanese film about the dramatic sinking of a battleship in the second world war has provoked anger among Japan's former enemies because of its sympathetic portrayal of the ship's crew."

Bookish: "Thirty years before Harry Potter, in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), she sent Ged, also called Sparrowhawk, to a school for wizards in a pre-industrial archipelago of dragons and sorcerers governed by magic, death and the power of language." With Studio Ghibli set to adapt the book, you may be interested in Maya Jaggi's backgrounder on Ursula K LeGuin (related: Steven Shaviro in the Stranger on Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future). And John Mullan on CS Lewis's appeal to kids.

Speaking of, Carla Blumenkranz argues in the Village Voice that The Chronicles of Narnia is "the closest thing we've got to a source for the current conflation of Christian philosophy and global imperialism. Imagine a re-creation of World War II in Arthurian costumes, and in this version the young Christian soldiers have Santa Claus, the unicorns, and Christ himself fighting on their side."

The Reeler: "Talk about a coup: George Clooney, David Strathairn and Grant Heslov crashed my alma mater New York University [on Thursday], analyzing Good Night, and Good Luck's journalistic implications for a few hundred young aspiring reporters." About that live-TV remake of Network: "I asked who they thought about casting as Howard Beale, and Clooney suggested Michael Caine. And then Abe Vigoda, whom he then impersonated saying, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.'"

James Rocchi interviews Strathairn at Cinematical, where Martha Fischer reviews The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: Tommy Lee Jones "has created a film not unlike himself: rugged, deceptively simple, and unwilling to compromise. That the movie is a success should not be a surprise; what is surprising, however, is the movie’s weakness, and how that weakness is overcome." Also: Quentin Tarantino's Hell Ride is a go. Related: Ray Pride points to a clip of QT being QT.

In the Japan Times, Kaori Shoji is pretty put off by Memoirs of a Geisha, while Philip Brasor remains skeptical even after hearing the stars defend the film. Via Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog, who also points to similarly critical pieces by Sarah Kaufman in the Washington Post and Jae-Ha Kim in the Chicago Tribune.

Dave Kehr on Caché: "[T]he camera belongs to [Michael] Haneke, who uses it to judge his middle class characters with the same stacked-deck disdain he displayed in his highbrow snuff film, Funny Games, in 1997... If the violence is less explicit in Haneke's later films, it may be because Haneke has learned that Europe's privileged cultural elite is, ironically enough, the primary audience for his work." What would Ryan Wu say to that?

Acquarello's recent reviews: Chantal Akerman's Nathalie Granger and Theo Angelopoulos's Days of '36.

Jeffrey Overstreet: "Coming Soon has good news - David Gordon Green, one of the most interesting young American directors, is at work on a new project called Snow Angels. It'll star Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale."

"Imagine the pressure on a fledgling film director whose dad made Alien and Gladiator, whose uncle made Top Gun and whose two brothers have both been directing for 10 years." In the Independent, Alice Jones meets Jordan Scott. Also: David Thomson chats with his dog about - well, onscreen dogs.

Interviews in the Telegraph: Benjamin Secher with Juliette Binoche and John Hiscock with Sam Mendes.

King Kong:

• For Nick Davis, it's "a stout, muscly heart of a movie whose rhythmic, colossal beats are echoed by murmurs of plangent nostalgia, both for the original movie and, in an odd way, for itself."

• For the Independent, Lesley O'Toole interviews Peter Jackson and Anthony Quinn gives the film four out of five stars.

• Kwame McKenzie sets off quite a discussion at the Times of London: "If I had not been at a premier with my transfixed son I would have been out of the door soon after the wide eyed, homicidal, half dressed, blacker than black natives of Skull Island started cavorting one hour in. I was lucky that my paternal instinct to stay and explain this to my son at the end got the better of me, because the next two hours were fabulous." Via Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

"With its third edition now available, Cinema Retro continues to mine the films of the 60s and 70s," writes Ray Young at Flickhead. "In this issue the central feature is author/filmmaker Mike Siegel's extensive and heartfelt tribute to Sam Peckinpah."

Dennis Cozzalio introduces "Professor Brainerd's Christmas Vacation Quiz." Sample question: "Michelle Yeoh or Ziyi Zhang?"

The UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Bijan and Soraya Amin Foundation have unveiled the schedule for the 16th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema, January 13 through February 11.

On a related note, Antonia Carver in Bidoun: "Mohammad Shirvani's first feature film [Nahf (Navel] is an intimate diary that mixes real life and screen life with experimental abandon. Welcome to Big Brother, Iranian style."

CNET's John Borland reports on "one of the biggest steps yet in the film industry's slow move to replace film reels and whirring projectors with arrays of satellite receivers, servers and digital files."

You know you've got a good thing going when you've got competition like the William Shatner DVD Club. Via Kim Voynar at Cinematical. Also: Peter Jackson's next project will be an adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.

Online listening tip. Terry Gross interviews Tommy Lee Jones. They come from very different worlds.

Online viewing tip #1. The cute trailer for Berlin & Beyond: New Films from Germany, Austria & Switzerland, a series running at the Castro in San Francisco, January 12 through 18. Looks like a nicely representative lineup, too.

Online viewing tip #2. Jason Morehead: "Why do I find it so appropriate that the new trailer for V For Vendetta arrives on the same day that I read that Bush authorized the NSA to spy on American citizens without warrants."

Online viewing tips. Trailers via Twitch: The Pit and the Pendulum, a short executive produced by Ray Harryhausen, a fresher version of the trailer for Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story (note that the site has gone all pomo self-reflexive, too), the trailer for Alatriste with Viggo Mortensen and... well, let Todd introduce it: "Enter Russian production Master i Margarita, based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. This thing could easily have been a 70s era Canadian camp horror production. Throw in a screaming Margot Kidder or Andrea Martin and you're right there. And yes, that does mean that there are breasts in the trailer, so this is your 'not work safe' warning."

Todd's also collected five teasers for the Russian horror film, Dead Daughters.

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2005 3:37 PM