December 29, 2005

Shorts, 12/29.

Syriana At Movie City Indie, Ray Pride points to a rousing rant by Stephen Gaghan (Traffic, Syriana) in Written By: "'That movie will never get made... You can't show the War on Terror to be wrong or, worse, absurd and tragic... Where are the easy answers? Where is the catharsis? Where's the part where the "antagonist goes down?"' Well, as a filmmaker friend of mine said, 'Isn't the goal always to write something unmakeable, but then execute it so well they have to make it?'" Related: Xeni Jardin posts a scanned page from the original screenplay for Syriana, noting a probably wise edit, and adds a few more related links as well; and more from JT Ramsay.

Brokeback Mountain is no breakthrough, sneers David Ehrenstein. Also in the LA Weekly. Robert Abele on HBO's Epitafios.

In the Village Voice:

  • Michael Atkinson on Match Point: "A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon, the movie sports a British veneer, and this relative oddness has been cause for 'return to form!' sighs of relief. But Allen is, alas, pushing forward and downward into de-fertilized soil badly in need of crop rotation." More (and more comprehensibly) from AO Scott in the New York Times, the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE, Ryan Stewart at Cinematical and a handful of German papers. The Hollywood Reporter's Martin A Grove looks into the unusual marketing campaign.

  • Works by Oskar Fischinger will be screened as part of the Walter Reade's ongoing survey of Cartoon Musicals. Ed Halter: "Imagine the paintings of Malevich or Kandinsky swirling into psychoactive phantasmagoria, choreographed to symphonic music or jazz, and you'll only begin to understand his achievements."

Ich hiess Sabina Spielrein

Rob at City of Sound: "With Kong, the ravishing pixellated-yet-painterly recreation of a decent chunk of thirties New York is too compelling to ignore." Via Coudal Partners.

More Munich: Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader and Jeffrey Overstreet.

"[S]ophisticated animated films like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles - Pixar's two most successful movies of the six it's made so far - are not so much visual works as visual candidates for the occupation of a literary void." Lee Siegel in Slate on MoMA's Pixar: 20 Years of Animation exhibition (through February 6). Also, Grady Hendrix has some fun: "[H]ow can anyone watch The Dukes of Hazzard special features and not be convinced that this is the most important movie of the 21st century?"

Seattle Times critic Moira Macdonald explains why, for the first time, she walked out on a movie, namely, Wolf Creek. Via Jim Emerson, who has more thoughts on the matter.

Stop Smiling has a quick chat with Roger Ebert.

M Leary suddenly posts a slew of reviews at Image Facts.

Typhoon Kwak Kyung-taek's Typhoon, with Jang Dong-gun, has all the makings of a Korean blockbuster. "But is it a good movie?" asks Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org. "Well, here the math gets more complicated."

In the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keough looks ahead to the theatrical releases of the new year (well, through March).

Laura M Holson profiles Eric Bana in the NYT.

BBC: "A TV adaptation of cult novel The Master and Margarita has become a ratings hit in Russia despite superstition that it was 'cursed.'"

In Die Zeit (and in German), Hanno Rauterberg has a long talk with Peter Greenaway about Rembrandt.

For SuicideGirls, Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson.

"Spend an hour talking to [Edward Jay] Epstein, and he will run down his estimable list of myths promulgated by and about Hollywood," writes Robert Wilonsky in SF Weekly. One of those myths, Epstein tells him, is the Great Slump of 2005 - but that doesn't mean things are changing and changing fast.

Scott Roxborough in the Hollywood Reporter: "Having closed the tax loophole that pumped more than $1 billion annually into Hollywood productions, the German government now faces a dilemma... what, if anything, will fill the film funding void?"

Online viewing tips. "Each month this group of diverse French filmmakers takes on a new theme for their videos." DVblog selects a few from Les Filmistes Associés.



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Posted by dwhudson at December 29, 2005 6:00 AM

Comments

Interesting that Ebert gave Wolf Creek no stars but two to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, when there's not really much separating the two films except the accents. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, on the other hand, was inspired (albeit somewhat less directly) by the same real-life event, and is part of his Great Movies selection. Obviously it's all down to how you tell the story. Or maybe who tells it.

Wolf Creek provoked a mass walkout here in Sydney at its premiere and prompted a lengthy piece of horrified hand-wringing from the Sun-Herald's chief reporter Frank Walker, who'd covered at great length the Ivan Milat story that largely inspired the film, and he kept going on about the film exploiting the events and making money out of an appalling human tragedy. I still don't know how I refrained from writing to the paper and pointing out that Walker's career was based upon doing the same sort of thing, filling the front page with people's personal horror stories (I think the front cover of that particular edition had a big splash story bearing his byline about some particularly horrific car accident that had killed people) to help sell papers. Maybe he was disgruntled at Greg McLean muscling in on what had been his turf...

Posted by: James Russell at December 29, 2005 6:55 AM

I see your point, re: the who, but the reviews I've read do suggest that it's the how. I haven't seen Wolf Creek; does it have the landmark feel of Texas or brilliant moments of storytelling like Hitchcock's shower scene?

Posted by: David Hudson at December 29, 2005 7:43 AM

No, by simple virtue of the fact that it can't because those things have already been done. What it does, however, may not be original but it is done exceptionally well (which is why I can easily understand the freak-out responses it produces in so many people), and within the context of Australian cinema Wolf Creek is relatively unusual. We don't often embrace the pleasures of sheer genre filmmaking here, particularly not when the genre of the film in question would be described as horror; you see that sort of thing more often in the no-budget underground (by which I mean Richard Wolstonecroft from MUFF and his friends) but it's fairly rare to see it in films intended for actual release...

Posted by: James Russell at December 30, 2005 12:27 AM

Interesting. Is there more focus on suffering, as the reviews make it seem, than on the fear roused by the anticipation of suffering (which is what make Texas and Psycho "work")?

Posted by: David Hudson at December 31, 2005 8:47 AM