January 12, 2006
Shorts, 1/12.
Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death is subtitled Five Portraits of Work in the 21st Century. "Each episode comes with its own unique, vivid sense of place, of colour, sound and even of smell," writes Carolyn Nikodym, who calls Glawogger for Vue Weekly. He tells her he'll be expanding the Nigeria segment for the DVD, "And with this film, I have the feeling that people are astonished, sometimes, what the world looks like - that they think that I go to extremes. But what I show is not so extreme - the world looks like that a lot of the time. If that’s understood, then I would be happy."
In the new issue of Mute, Stewart Home defends Melvin Van Peebles seminal 1970 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song from attacks from all quarters, including those close to, well, home: "There are, of course, purists who will bemoan the fact that the BFI are 'recuperating' revolutionary culture... I see the BFI attempting to absorb Sweetback into the institution of art as a progressive step from a proletarian perspective, since it results in the bourgeoisie having to address some of its own contradictions and limits."
Right at Your Door, premiering at Sundance, will present a grand scale catastrophe on a small budget. David M Halbfinger meets accomplished production designer and first-time director Chris Gorak: "In his bleak envisioning of a day in Los Angeles that begins like any other, bombs go off downtown, in Beverly Hills and at the airport; countless people are killed as toxic ash carrying a deadly virus falls like snowflakes; the air becomes unbreathable; thousands are driven from their homes; confusion and misinformation reign; and ordinary citizens are victimized not just by the unseen terrorists but also by their own overwhelmed and unprepared government."
Also in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis: "In [Béla Tarr's] Sátántangó, life is beautiful and grotesque by turns, and never less than mesmerizing." More from J Hoberman in the Village Voice: "Despair has never been more voluptuously precise. Sátántangó has cast its spell on cineastes as varied as the late Susan Sontag and the rejuvenated Gus Van Sant. If you have a day to devote to it, the same might happen to you."
And Jeannette Catsoulis: "Moving from the breathtaking beauty of the Peruvian Andes to the graceful sweep of coastal Lima, Pamela Yates's harrowing documentary State of Fear chronicles 20 years of terror, brutality and repression." More from Michael Atkinson in the Voice, Scott Tobias in the AV Club and Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.
At Alternet, Onnesha Roychoudhuri talks with Purpose Films co-founder Nick Bicanic about Shadow Company, a doc that explores the alarmingly rapid rise of private military contract employees (mercenaries, more or less) in contemporary warfare.
J Hoberman: "Revisited today, Billy Wilder's 1961 farce One, Two, Three is a Cold War poltergeist, rattling chains in the vanished spook house that was West Berlin." The film "celebrates as it satirizes American cultural imperialism."
Also in the Voice:
Another columnist debuts at PopMatters: Dante A Ciampaglia looks back at "one of the most acerbic [films] to ever come out of Hollywood," Sweet Smell of Success. It's also "one of the most noted films highlighted by filmmakers as being a primary influence on their work. Barry Levinson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Scorsese — they've all referenced or "quoted" the film in their efforts."
Also: Bill Gibron on what actor Giuseppe Andrews has been up to over the past few years: "In order to pass the time and explore his burgeoning interest in filmmaking, Andrews decided to get a camera and cast his fellow trailer park residents in a series of experimental narratives. The results have been nothing short of monumental, the kind of cinematic shockwave that is destined to be ignored by the current pop culture mindset, but praised a few decades from now."
David Poland maps Munich, "sequence by sequence... In the process of doing this, a lot of the detail work becomes clearer."
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price director Robert Greenwald at the Huffington Post: "You would think by now that Lee Scott, the $13-million-a-year failed CEO of Wal-Mart, would know better than to send confidential memos to his employees, many of whom are happy to share them with those fighting Wal-Mart." Via Craig Phillips.
This Divided State "deserves to be a part of the ongoing conversation about politics, popular culture, and polarization," writes Chuck Tryon.
Ed Champion: "I like the idea behind Wolphin, which involves collecting a good deal of film shorts and assorted narratives that don't really have a place outside of their initial small venues. But unfortunately, like almost anything that comes from the McSweeney's Empire, the DVD carries the uncomfortable stamp of films that are just too safe to be innovative." Speaking of, and via Eugene Hernandez, Chris McCoy: "A Selection from George W Bush's Eavesdropping Tapes: Matthew Barney and Björk Place an Ikea Phone Order."
"Excerpted in Following Sean, [Ralph Arlyck's 1969 short, Sean] is still a remarkable document nearly 40 years later," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "At the time it made even nonsquares worry about what would happen to the flower children's children when they grew up, and it's not hard to see why." More from Mark T at Scene and Unseen. Also, Glory Road.
Matthew Wilder: "Malick is the first artist in movies who has managed to translate Whitman's ecstasy - the bliss of connectedness to all creatures and things - into sound, music, and images." Also in the City Pages: Caroline Palmer on Ballets Russes, "an invaluable record."
Matt Clayfield: "For me, the film can be more or less situated on the same continuum as films like Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Virgin Suicides, and those of David Gordon Green - it's a slight, quotidian drama, almost fragile, almost breakable - only I don't like any of those films and yet adore Funny Ha Ha. What's the go?" More from John at Gladsome Morning.
The WSWS's David Walsh on Casanova: "The film has significance primarily because one feels that it encourages the audience's own opposition to present ills and injustices, as it laughs at their perpetrators."
Kirill Galetski in Screen Daily: "A solid piece of escapist entertainment, Day Watch, the sequel to Night Watch, again demonstrates how Russia is capable of making special effects-laden fare on a par with Hollywood productions."
Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "On the Outs is an American moral fable, as familiar as the Horatio Alger stories or Dreiser's Sister Carrie, and our appetite for such tales of salvation and damnation is undiminished."
At Hollywood Bitchslap, Eric D Snider finds Film Geek "an agreeable, occasionally very funny low-budget movie."
In the Independent, Anthony Barnes talks with Samantha Morton about her next role, "Moors Murderer" Myra Hindley.
Edward Douglas talks to Steven Soderbergh about Ocean's 13 ("Certainly, nobody's asking for this one. I just had another idea and went to everybody, and everybody said 'Fine'") and Che ("[W]e're just now starting to get close, I think, to having the script the way we want"). Via Chris Barsanti.
Martha Fischer: "When he finishes Zodiac (currently filming, with Jake Gyllenhaal) and Benjamin Button (currently in development) for Paramount, David Fincher will continue to hang around the studio, this time directing a screen version of Torso, a graphic novel that details Elliot Ness' post-Capone stint as Cleveland's public safety officer." Also at Cinematical, Karina Longworth's sneak peek at Sex and Death 101, evidently a new project from screenwriter Daniel Waters (Heathers).
At indieWIRE, Henriette Mantel & Stephen Skrovan talk about their Sundance entry, An Unreasonable Man.
In the Guardian, Jeremy Kay talks with Robin Swicord about adapting Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.
The Hollywood Reporter's Jeff Bond talks with John Williams who, this year alone, has scored Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, War of the Worlds, Memoirs of a Geisha and Munich.
In the Berliner Zeitung (and in German), Gerhard Midding has a brief talk with Patrice Chéreau about Joseph Conrad. Also via Perlentaucher: In Libération (and in French), Shoah director Claude Lanzmann argues that denying the Holocaust should indeed be a punishable crime.
"Hollywood's search for new mythologies now extends to the Indian subcontinent." Rachel Abramowitz reports in the Los Angeles Times on comics and TV series being cooked up by Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra, Shekhar Kapur and Gotham Entertainment.
"Over three decades, the Roxie has become a mythical institution within the San Francisco film scene," writes Ryan Blitstein in a cover story for the SF Weekly. "The Roxie's mounting debt is portrayed [in the local media] as a badge of honor, not an embarrassment, neglecting the true stories of dozens of struggling independent filmmakers and distributors who count themselves among the theater's horde of angry creditors." Now the New College of California is taking the theater over to run as a nonprofit, but Blitstein doesn't see much in that institutions record that guarantees this'll actually work.
Belinda Acosta calls up Rob Thomas, "creator of one of television's hottest cult dramas, Veronica Mars." Also in the Austin Chronicle, Kate X Messer: "Ultimately, Tab Hunter Confidential is itself a wink, a nod, and a middle-finger salute to the celebrity scandal rags of his heyday."
In the New York Observer, Nicole LaPorte profiles a new generation of managers: "Mostly in their late 20s and 30s, and mostly men, they fashion themselves as canny visionaries who've forsaken the slick polish and perma-grins of the agency world for a homegrown, back-porch approach to the representation business."
Mia Garlick at Creative Commons: "Bay Area Video Coalition, Independent Television Service and the Center for Social Media are hosting an event on Friday February 24, 2006 on the topic of 'What Fair Use Really Means For Independent Filmmakers.'"
Mark Favermann in the Boston Phoenix: "Over the next month, the MFA is presenting a series of nine films documenting the works of important 20th-century architects. Many of these architects are shaping the institutional landscape of Boston."
News from Korea, rerun at HanCinema: Yang Sung-jin on two action films with a social conscience, Running Wild and Holiday, and Park Chung-a on Korean actors running into trouble as they blog.
Back in Vue Weekly:
Posted by dwhudson at January 12, 2006 1:29 PM
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