January 29, 2006

Shorts, 1/29.

Birth You'll want to have seen Jonathan Glazer's Birth before you read Robert C Cumbow's essay in 24 Lies a Second. But you definitely want to read that essay and Cumbow's take on the question, "Who or what was it?" So: Seen it? Read it. And if not, see the movie, then read that piece.

The other bit of reading you'll definitely want to get around to comes in the form of a compressed PDF file, courtesy of Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: Calvin Tomkins's 1973 profile of Jonas Mekas for the New Yorker. While you're there, you'll also find an online listening tip.

"Without much fanfare, Michael Almereyda has developed into one of the most intriguing and intellectually rewarding filmmakers at work on the American independent scene." Mark Olsen interviews him for the LA Weekly, where Scott Foundas reviews Almereyda's "extraordinary documentary," William Eggleston in the Real World. More from Cheryl Eddy in the SFBG and Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

Newsweek's annual Oscar Roundtable takes a fine turn this year, going exclusively with directors. Five of them: George Clooney, Paul Haggis, Ang Lee, Bennett Miller and Steven Spielberg. Nigel Parry's snapped a cute photo of the group clowning around to accompany the conversation moderated by Sean Smith and David Ansen.

Matt Zoller Seitz interviews Alonso Duralde, the arts and entertainment editor of The Advocate and author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men who has some maybe-surprising things to say about Brokeback Mountain: "Regular folks are seeing it and being moved by it, and that's where its power lies. And while the film certainly doesn't wear an agenda on its sleeve, I'd go so far as to say that Brokeback Mountain has the potential to be the Uncle Tom's Cabin of gay marriage; Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel allowed readers to empathize with the horrors of slavery, and Brokeback will probably be, for many viewers, their first glimpse at the notion that there is a real, human cost to homophobia." Update: Part 2.

Mark Rahner in the Seattle Times: "Still can't wrap your head around the concept of gay cowboys? Got news for you, pardner: You've been watching them all your life."

Gunner Palace director Michael Tucker (at Movie City News, courtesy of International Documentary Magazine) on the absurdities of the MPAA's current ratings system: "Like many of the soldiers in the film, I walked into an Army recruitment station when I was sixteen and was wearing a uniform at seventeen. If young Americans can make decisions like that - and if they can actively be recruited by the military when they are 14 - then surely they are mature enough to see a film about their peers at war."

Batman Begins Mark Fisher in the new issue of ImageTexT: "[I]t is a specific mode of capitalism - post-Fordist finance capital - that is demonised in Batman Begins, not capitalism per se. Yet the film leaves open the possibilitity of agency which Capitalist Realism forecloses." Also: Fisher on "The Shining's Hauntology."

DK Holm at Movie Poop Shoot: "Film Geek is a delightful, sad, witty, scorchingly satirical film about movie buffs and their tendency toward asociality.... And I'm in a position to comment with some intimacy about the film's value for a simple reason: I'm in it."

In the Austin Chronicle, Marc Savlov talks to John Roecker, who's "finally unleashing Live Freaky! Die Freaky!, his jaw-droppingly outrageous feature debut, upon a public already up to its pinpoint pupils in black body-bag humor and anxiety."

Tim Lucas investigates "The Strange Case of Dr Jerry and Mr Gillis."

Girish: "So, if you feel like reminiscing: The first film (or scene from a film) that you can remember?" The cinetrix has a different yet not-so-different question: "When did cinematic poetry reveal itself to you in the past year?"

Damage "Magnetically attractive to adolescent women and alternately threatening and validating to neurotic men, [Jeremy] Irons has become one of the most self-consciously, unnervingly erotic male performers in the business," writes Jonathan Kiefer in Maisonneuve. "If he has a niche then it's a strange and disquieting one: the go-to guy for the thinking person's kink."

Sarah Kernochan, who co-directed Marjoe with Howard Smith, in the American Prospect: "Flash forward 30 years. The evangelical sect has grown from this fringe cult to a huge, vibrant mass movement. It is in one's face 24/7. According to a Barna research poll in 2001, four out of ten Americans reported that they consider themselves 'born-agains.'" The DVD's out January 31.

"[A]nyone this cool is bound to be somewhat reluctant to analyze his own work, especially when he loves the gaps between words and the hobbled exchanges between people who speak different languages." And yet, writes Andrew Hultkrans in Artforum's "Diary," onstage for a Q&A in NYC a few days ago, "Jarmusch gamely faces this and more—impassive, Cuban-heeled, deadpan as John Lurie in Stranger Than Paradise."

"[F]or his many biographers, Peckinpah represents the last of the fierce Western individualists, a renegade who preferred to go out in a violent blaze of glory rather than submit to the leveling forces of modern industrial America. Certainly that was a story he told again and again in his films," writes Dave Kehr, reviewing the four new DVD releases from Warner. In the New York Observer, Charles Taylor cuts "small windows into each picture as a view into the director's preoccupations, and as a way of listening in on the echoes that occur from film to film." More from Steve Uhler in the Austin Chronicle.

Back to the New York Times:

  • Jason Zinoman: "Anytime a movie star writes a play, a little skepticism is in order (if the actor is Tim Robbins, make that a lot of skepticism). But Apartment 3A, the gentle new romance by Jeff Daniels, who specializes in portraying morally weak pseudo-intellectual husbands, is no ego trip."

  • "When it came time to meet with network executives, even [David] Mamet, the author of Glengarry Glen Ross, found he had much to learn about salesmanship." Dave Itzkoff tells the story behind The Unit.

Zomboid!
  • Ben Brantley: "O the heresy of it! With Zomboid!, his latest work, [Richard] Foreman has resolutely introduced film into his theater, and it looks as if these seemingly antithetical art forms will just have to learn to get along."

  • Elisabetta Povoledo: "When the film Melissa P hit Italian screens late last year, it caused as much of an uproar as the 2003 novel upon which it was based: One Hundred Strokes of the Hairbrush Before Going to Sleep, the allegedly autobiographical account of a promiscuous Sicilian teenager that became an international best seller."

  • John Anderson looks into the process for nominating docs for Oscars and finds it wanting.

  • Coeli Carr previews What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole, the sequel to the first Bleep!?: "Hollywood still seems to be scratching its head over the little hybrid that combined a narrative starring Marlee Matlin, animation and interviews with scientists discussing how quantum physics, molecular biology and neuroscience can affect one's everyday reality."

  • The concert movie is "mounting something of a comeback," reports Marc Weingarten.

  • David M Halbfinger on the 3D Imax extravaganza, Roving Mars. More from Nathan Lee, who also files a "Critic's Choice" column: "The timing couldn't be better - for reasons that couldn't be worse - to take a fresh look at Blue Collar."

At Twitch: Todd on The Call of Cthulhu, "a loving homage to the [HP Lovecraft's] work, a direct adaptation of the original story short as a black and white silent, holding as tightly as possible to the techniques that would have been employed when the story was originally written in 1926. And it works fantastically well."

Melies the Magician Noting the differences between Alfred Clark's The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) and George Melies's The Haunted Castle (1896), Marco Lanzagorta launches a three-part examination of the history of special effects in horror and sci-fi film.

Also in PopMatters, Simon Wood on why Hollywood chases trends, Bill Gibron on Spalding Gray's Life Interrupted and Amos Posner asks, "Is there such a thing as a female superstar?"

And then, Michael Ward, referencing Thomases Mann and Pynchon, on the strange attraction of Escape to Witch Mountain and Return from Witch Mountain: "The Witch Mountain storyline - involving a pair of supernatural, extraterrestrial siblings trying to reunite with their other-worldly community - entwines many powerful narratives, deftly synthesizing, for example, a potent wish-fulfillment fantasy with an almost beatific dream of ascending into the sky, of learning one is not of this Earth and, strangely, embracing this knowledge."

Filmbrain considers the "Orientalization of Myrna Loy" and wonders, "[H]as Hollywood changed much over the years?"

Buster A season of Buster Keaton's films runs at the National Film Theatre in London from February 2 through March 29. In the Telegraph, Philip Horne analyzes a scene in Seven Chances and, in the Independent, David Thomson writes, "the experience is not only comic - it has to do with space, light, movement, duration, time. It is great theatre, but it is music and form, too. These are among the most beautiful films ever made in the silent era."

Cinematical's Kim Voynar talks with Alex Gibney about Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

Stop Smiling unveils its January DVD roundup.

The Chronicles of Narnia has turned out to be a huge hit with very long legs. Why aren't we hearing more about that - and its director, Andrew Adamson - wonders Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. Related: Alison Lurie in the New York Review of Books: "It is no surprise that conservative Christians admire these books. They teach us to accept authority; to love and follow our leaders instinctively, as the children in the Narnia books love and follow Aslan. By implication, they suggest that we should and will admire and fear and obey whatever impressive-looking and powerful male authority figures we come in contact with."

Back to the LAT:

  • Casey Dolan talks to the co-directors of the 28-minute film, God Sleeps in Rwanda.

  • Claudia Eller reports that Warner Bros is having second thoughts about an adaptation of A Million Little Pieces.

  • Greg Braxton: "Increasingly, producers of movies and TV series are bringing the pain to mainstream fare — highlighting sadism, torture, brutality and human suffering — all in the name of entertainment."

Stuart Klawans is both pleased and somewhat frustrated with Why We Fight, writing in the Nation that Eugene Jarecki "can't find a line through this vast and bloody subject - until, remarkably, he does, in the last fifteen minutes or so."

Stanley Kauffmann: "Match Point doesn't even dramatize the truth that people who don't suspect violence in themselves can astonish themselves with violent acts. Allen's finish is just an inferior Somerset Maugham surprise." Also in the New Republic, Christopher Orr on the current paucity of "B+ movies, competent, mid-sized genre films that are formulaic in the good sense" and Noam Scheiber has a bone to pick with Glory Road: "I don't mean to deny Don Haskins his glory. I just think El Paso deserves a share of it."

The White Countess "The White Countess isn't like anything else in the Merchant Ivory canon I've seen; it's a significantly, substantially better work (though also seriously flawed) than the muck for which these filmmakers have often been highly praised," writes NP Thompson, crediting cinematographer Christopher Doyle with spurring director James Ivory "to take a greater number of risks."

At the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore's been engaging in a bit of "counter-programming," that is, reviewing films currently without distribution in the US that have nothing at all to do with Sundance. For example: Johnnie To's Election, Olivier Marchal's 36 Quai des Orfèvres and Park Kwang-hyun's Welcome to Dongmakgol.

In the Guardian, Ryan Gilbey wonders if Jennifer Aniston will really ever be a movie star (and asks around), as does John Patterson, who also wonders why anyone still goes to movies, while Jason Solomons wonders, "Whatever happened to the 90-minute movie?"

Also: Oliver Burkeman on Grizzly Man (more from Leslie Felperin in the Independent), Andrew Mueller calls for a sequel to Walk the Line, Laura Barton talks with Clive Owen about Derailed, Emma Brockes meets Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Marshall interviews Eric Bana.

The Purple Rose of Cairo For the Observer, Gaby Wood pays a visit to Mia Farrow: "She's been filming The Omen 666 in Prague, she has appeared in a Luc Besson movie, Arthur and the Minimoys, and last year she gave an extremely well received performance on the New York stage in Fran's Bed. As she puts it, 'Things have been chugging along.'" Also: Graham Fuller asks a panel of 'xperts how the Oscar race will pan out. Related: Jason Solomons on award-magnet Focus Features.

Elaine Lipworth meets Reese Witherspoon. Also in the Independent: James Graham on the British rating system.

Felix Vasquez Jr in Film Threat: "While Oliver Stone and many other big wigs in Hollywood prepare their big budget, star studded spectacles tackling that horrible day, in comes September 12th, a heartfelt exploration in to a family's grieving of their daughter."

In the New Statesman, Rachel Dwyer recommends four Bollywood films "you must see."

Freshly forged, the site freshly launched: The Faith and Film Critics Circle.

Science loves you. Invisible Cinema: "The cinephiles already know that seeing movies increases empathy, but now we have the data (extrapolated ever so slightly) to prove it. Mirror Neurons!"

Annalee Newitz for Wired News: "Ostensibly a strategy game like The Sims in which you build up a movie studio, The Movies also contains the world's first dedicated machinima-building tool set." More from Lore Sjöberg.

Online browsing tip #1. The Lydecker Gallery, Dave Kehr's "Film Posters of Distinction."

Breathless Online browsing tip #2. Kinoart.net. Via Sean Spillane, who writes at Bitter Cinema: "I typed in Buñuel, Godard and Jess Franco, and was not disappointed by a long shot."

Online listening tips. At Slate: Mark Jordan Legan picks the best bad gorilla movies and Rita Dove reads "Two for the Montrose Drive-In" at Slate.

Another online listening tip. Milo Miles on Fresh Air, talking about the recent spate of punk-themed DVDs.

Online viewing tip #1. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's Even Statues Die, via GreyLodge.

Online viewing tip #2. "Part of what I do, is teach storytelling, and recently I've become interested in master plots, or story templates, and how they've been changing in recent years." Hence Richard BF's Five Minute Matrix. Via Matt Clayfield.

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Posted by dwhudson at January 29, 2006 4:41 PM