April 21, 2006
Weekend shorts.
"To see [Killer of Sheep] again today - on those rare occasions when one can see it - is to be reminded of just how much American movies in general, and African-American movies in particular, have suffered for not having [Charles] Burnett as a regular voice at the table," writes Scott Foundas.
Also in the LA Weekly's people issue, Ella Taylor profiles "the thinking critic's go-to girl for quality cinema," publicist Laura Kim and a "prince among independent film publicists," Mickey Cottrell; Dave Shulman celebrates Jack Black; Steven Leigh Morris calls up Ed Asner; Caroline Ryder meets Larry Clark; and Libby Molyneaux jokes with Sarah Silverman.
What were those recent riots in India actually about? In Spiked, Alexander Zaitchik explains: "Understanding what happened in Bangalore last week starts with understanding Rajkumar's seminal role in the local Kannada-language film industry, based in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka."
Wednesday was Angie Dickinson Blog-a-Thon Day, and blast it, there was too much going on around here to catch up with it. But here's the weekend and time to take in the appreciations from Dennis Cozzalio and Flickhead, who seem to have launched this one after spotting this, Steven Carlson, Brendon Connelly, Richard Gibson, Michael J Hayde, Inisfree, John McElwee, Peter Nellhaus, Pete Roberts and That Little Round-Headed Boy.
Philip Lopate went to San Francisco to talk about Mikio Naruse and Michael Guillen was there to take extensive notes.
"While viewing the clips comprised during Monday night's Gala Tribute to Jessica Lange at Lincoln Center," writes The Reeler, "I started to wonder if Lange might be the American actress most taken for granted - the one we know is out there, whom we know is good but whom we just expect to churn out one tight, powerful performance after another."
At PopMatters, Violet Glaze celebrates "a fantasy of release from stifling circumstance via the intervention of an unpredictable and superhuman visitor whose mere presence destroys the status quo in an orgy of divine chaos... oh, wait, did I say Fight Club? I meant Mary Poppins."
Jeffrey Wells: "I finally finished reading I Wake Up Screening: What To Do Once You've Made That Movie (Watson-Guptill) last week, and it's one of the easiest-to-get, best written, most thoroughly sourced books ever written about how to get your indie movie seen (and maybe even distributed!) once it's more or less finished." Also: "The advance buzz about M:I:3 being awfully damned good has turned out to be true, I'm afraid - as shallow but very expensive action films go, this is about as good as it gets. But I would hold up on the talk about Philip Seymour Hoffman stealing the picture from Cruise."
Lee Marshall for Screen Daily: "After his compelling Red Brigade psycho-drama Good Morning, Night, Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio returns to the hermetic, dreamlike mode of The Hour of Religion with his latest effort, The Wedding Director, in which a leading arthouse filmmaker is talked into shooting a Sicilian matrimonial video." Also, Jonathan Romney on Yoon Jong-bin's award-winning debut feature, The Unforgiven.
The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson talks with Andy Garcia about his directorial debut, The Lost City, "a Cuban love song set in the 50s of his childhood that took 16 years to get made."
"The documentary Nobelity is a 'what can we do to help?' movie, and as such, has an unusual distribution plan." Jette Kernion explains at Cinematical.
Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "I won't pretend there's some uplifting vision or spiritual epiphany offered at the end of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - such things lie outside its range - but something about the film's relentless clarity, its enormous cast of damaged but profoundly believable people, and its accidental panoply of human dreams and desires, is almost as exhilarating as it is depressing." More from Stuart Klawans in the Nation and, at Film Comment, Mark Cummins's talk with director Cristi Puiu.
"[W]hat started out as a Q&A almost immediately became an A&A, as the two directors compared notes about movies, motherhood, aging in Hollywood and their experiences directing prime-time television." The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday gets Nicole Holofcener and Mary Harron chatting. Related: Rick Klaw, whose grandfather was Irving Klaw, talks with Harron for the Austin Chronicle.
Reviews in the New York Times:
"I thought it was a good marriage to see Guy Maddin make a film on Roberto Rossellini written by me, a surrealist," Isabella Rossellini tells Kaleem Aftab. Also in the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab: "[Peter] Lorre's virtuosity is not in doubt. His misfortune, once he decamped to Hollywood, was that the qualities that had made him so utterly distinctive as Beckert [in M] were too often mobilised for cheap shock effects."
In the LAT, Kevin Crust reviews the "deliberately enigmatic drama" Erosion and Kenneth Turan reviews The Syrian Bride, "a wedding narrative laced with more Kafkaesque moments than romantic joy." Related: John Esther's interview with director Eran Riklis at the main site.
Mack hears that Peter Chan's next project will be a remake of the 1973 Shaw Brothers/Chang Cheh film, Chi ma. Also at Twitch, new reviews from Todd: Starcrash, Midnight My Love and The Art of Fighting.
David Gritten in the Telegraph: "We learned this week that Japanese film audiences are watching Terrence Malick's The New World with an updated version of the 1950s fad Smell-O-Vision: machines in cinemas waft scents of flowers and herbs over them at key moments. This device would have been ideal for Paul Mayeda Berges's film Mistress of Spices, which is largely set in an aromatic spice shop. It needs all the help it can get."
Back to the NYP and Armond White: "The sociological problem of sustaining a livelihood while pursuing personal dreams is such an elegant, seamless part of Kinky Boots that only the film's gender politics seem contrived."
DK Holm at Movie Poop Shoot on what's "missing from Hard Candy, as well as from the score of other pedophile films released in the last 10 years (in fact, if you want to fund an indie film, write about child abuse). The Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman, Mysterious Skin, L.I.E., and 12 or more others all dwell on the attraction of adults for children (usually men for boys), but rarely explore just what it is that drives the compulsion, what quirk in the psyche creates it, what need it satisfies, and what the vocabulary of this particular sexual language consists of."
Waggish on 4: "[Ilya] Khrzhanovsky is so aggressively creative that I would trust him to adapt a Celine novel; I think his visual - and moreover, his physical - senses would mesh."
Acquarello: "Channeling the zeitgeist of the French new wave, The Koumiko Mystery assimilates Jean-Luc Godard's enraptured clinical deconstructions of the feminine mystique (as well as a penchant for structuring these ruminations within the framework of noir) with Jacques Demy's achingly nostalgic evocations of elusive, romanticized longing into a whimsical, organic, and fractured, yet quintessential Chris Marker exposition on culture, identity, contemporaneity, and strangerness."
At the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz introduces a few choice snippets from Durgnat on Film.
Cahiers du cinéma: Emmanuel Burdeau and Eugenio Renzi on V for Vendetta and Inside Man.
Andrew at Lucid Screening on what happens "whenever European directors point their camera towards America: their films tell us as much about these directors they do about us. Antonioni's America is one of total alienation; von Trier's is one of total violence."
Joanne Laurier on Before the Fall (Napola: Elite für den Führer): "[Dennis] Gansel's darkly rich film is serious and honest." Also at the WSWS, David Walsh on Caché: "[Michael] Haneke is sincere in his concerns, but his apparent belief that he can treat coldness with coldness, disconnection with disconnection, is false."
Stop Smiling runs an excerpt from Nile Southern's interview with Chris Hegedus.
"What is it about Julia Roberts that reduces grown men to such goops?" asks James Wolcott.
Anthony Kaufman on Gabriel Sherman's New York Observer piece on the slow and painful demise of the Village Voice: "[F]ilm-lovers will take note 'the film-review budget has been cut by two-thirds,' and freelancers like myself have been essentially written out of the budget completely."
What's plaguing Canadian cinema? "[T]he Byzantine world of English Canadian film financing," explains Paul Gross in Macleans, "a surreal maze of auteur dreams, bureaucratic nightmares and ritualized failure." Via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie.
You won't believe the MPAA's take on recent popularity of Korean cinema. Neither can Grady Hendrix, and he heard it straight from the horse's... Well, meanwhile, Bob Tourtellotte is reporting for Reuters that MPAA head "Dan Glickman now wants to help independent filmmakers, in a seismic shift in thinking from his predecessor."
Covering Bollywood in London is a lot different than any other cinematic beat, as Time Out's Anil Sinanan explains.
"Global Green USA and Brad Pitt announced [yesterday] that they are teaming up to sponsor a design competition to provide an opportunity for talented architects, urban planners, designers, ecologists and students to put forward a creative yet practical vision for New Orleans neighborhoods."
Well, it's about time. Double Indemnity. Two discs. R1. August. Brendon Connelly.
For Die Zeit (and in German), Michael Naumann talks with Jeanne Moreau about François Ozon's Time to Leave.
Online listening tip #1. The IFP's "Distribution Now... Distribution How?" panel with directors Jay Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Caveh Zahedi (I Am a Sex Addict), producer Susan Leber (Down to the Bone), and moderated by Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay.
Online listening tip #2. DVD Talk editor Geoffrey Kleinman does just that with Eli Roth.
Online viewing tip #1. "What would get me back to blogging?" asks mrdantefontana at PCL LinkDump. "Christina Lindberg of course!"
Online viewing tip #2. Stanley Milgram's Obedience.
Online viewing tip #3. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight is "a screen-movie made from a side-scrolling Mac Classic game that never existed, but should have."
Online viewing tips #4 and #5. The trailer for Dai Sijie's Les filles du botaniste. Via Todd at Twitch, where logboy's found one for Johnnie To's Election 2.
Online viewing tips, round 1. Shorts by Brick director Rian Johnson. Via Coudal Partners.
Online viewing tips, round 2. Sesame Street clips at foldedspace. Via Listology.
Posted by dwhudson at April 21, 2006 6:16 PM
Comments
David, how could we have missed the Angie Dickinson Blog-a-Thon Day, I depend on you for these things?!
I could have mentioned meeting her at 3:00 a.m. at Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake and telling her how I lost my virginity after watching one of her episodes of "Police Woman" when I was 10 years old.
"...you lost your virginity when your Ten years old? How old was the girl?" she asked me.
"Oh I was alone at the time."
Boy, that's an old one, but so was the joke. She laughed politely.
However, this is one of my favorite scenes of her with, in my opinion, the greatest actor of all time.
It looks like nudity, but really it's all CGI.
Posted by: Jerry Lentz at April 22, 2006 1:35 AM
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