June 14, 2006
Shorts, 6/14.
"It may seem foolish to travel several thousand miles just to dash to a movie theater," writes Meghan O'Rourke in an entry she and James Surowiecki are keeping for Slate. "But what the early 1970s were to film in the United States... the past decade has been to film in Argentina: a period of renaissance and excitement, thanks to a host of striking films that are usually grouped under the rubric 'New Argentine Cinema.'... [F]ilms like Lucrecia Martel's Holy Girl, Fabián Bielinsky's Nine Queens, and Pablo Trapero's Mundo Grúa... have gained increasing attention abroad, winning coveted prizes at Cannes, Sundance, and Rotterdam." So they decided to go down and "talk to people in the film community about the New Argentine Cinema, all while getting a feel for the city itself." After all, "Buenos Aires is the closest thing Americans have to a Paris of the 1920s or a Prague of the 1990s."
Also in Slate, Richard Morgan considers a recent wave of anti-Americanism in Turkish pop culture (there's a whole lot more to it than Valley of the Wolves: Iraq) and notes that it's a two-way street: "Anti-Turkish pop-culture references turn up in, for example, episodes of 24, which started last season with a Turkish national kidnapping the secretary of defense; or The West Wing, in which an international incident centered upon Turkey's beheading of a woman accused of having sex with her fiance. (Turkey, one group pointed out, doesn't have a death penalty anymore and hasn't executed anyone since 1984.)" Just another reason Ankara and Brussels need to stop pussyfooting around and get on with Turkey's membership in the EU.
"In one of those remarkable defining moments that exemplify the grass-roots nature of today's pop culture, the most compelling film about the immigration reform debate that's raging across the country today has come from a 63-year-old former schoolteacher living outside a tiny border town in southern Arizona." Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times on Cochise County, USA.
"It's mid-June, and much has been made of the dearth of worthwhile cinema thus far in 2006," writes the Reverse Shot team, eight-fold this time out, at indieWIRE, but "we thought we'd try to raise everyone spirits by taking a preemptive look back... and give our favorite films one more grand shout-out." Related: "Here we are closing in on the year's halfway mark and I'm thinking: where's a movie to send me back on my heels?" asks Vince Keenan. "This Australian western will do the trick nicely."
"Sometimes the things you feel closest to are the hardest to write about." But Girish finally gets around to writing about Robert Bresson.
Doug Cummings finds Cavite "an effective, compelling, and uncommonly revealing thriller." Also, a rich entry on Arthur Lipsett. By "rich," I mean, besides his own initial thoughts on 21-87, Doug offers pointers to online listening and news on an upcoming documentary.
"The reality of reality television is that it is the one place that, first, shows our fellow citizens to us and, then, shows that they have been changed by television," writes Mark Greif in n+1. "This reality is the unacknowledged truth that drama cannot, and will not, show you."
Nathaniel R visits the Douglas Gordon: Timeline exhibition and hovers around 24-Hour Psycho: "This exhibit unexpectedly gave me a different Psycho experience than I've ever had before. I felt more inside the film than ever. But I also felt removed enough (without the sound and music) to notice things I've never noticed and to appreciate with renewed clarity what a genius Alfred Hitchcock was."
Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer: "Sometimes we're not even aware of the way films change the way we see things - or, as in the case of Tony Scott's Domino, which practically nobody saw (but which I want everybody to see), the way a film captures, purely with its look, the way we look. Holds a mirror up to our distorted nature." Among such films for Rosenbaum are "Terrence Malick's Badlands, Peter Brook's King Lear, Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Oliver Stone's JFK (not for the idiot conspiracy theory, but for the faster-than-the-speed-of-thought fluid film-stock-shifting look), Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line and, most recently, David Gordon Green's George Washington and All the Real Girls. (If you haven't seen the last two, especially the former, you've missed something inexplicably powerful and almost mystically beautiful.)"
Also, Andrew Sarris on A Prairie Home Companion and John Heilpern on Neil LaBute's new play, Some Girl(s). And more on that from John Lahr in the New Yorker, Jeremy McCarter in New York and Jorge Morales in the Voice.
Speaking of Prairie, at the naked gaze, Carlos Rojas has been considering it hand in hand with, interestingly enough, X-Men: The Last Stand: "One of the distinctive aspects of the embattled communities in each of these films is that their members straddle an invisible boundary between a mundane and an imaginary/performative space."
"When [Russ] Meyer and I were hired a few years later to work on an ill-fated Sex Pistols movie called 'Who Killed Bambi?' we were both a little nonplussed, I think, to hear Johnny Rotten explain that he liked Beyond the Valley of the Dolls because it was so true to life." With the film now out on DVD, Roger Ebert revisits an article he wrote for Film Comment in 1980. If you're looking for a review, Eric Henderson's got one at Slant.
Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman pooh-poohs the "Myth of the Decline of the Critic." Via Jeffrey Wells. Related: Jim Emerson reacts to director Wayne Kramer reacting to critics: "Actually, I wish more filmmakers would talk about the critics they respect, and the ones they don't - and why."
Preview for free or even buy a copy: the June issue of fps Magazine.
"There is no movie more overrated in recent history than Napoleon Dynamite; it's to cinema what the Doors are to rock and roll," writes Robert Wilonsky in a review picked up by the Voice. "So it's of some relief to announce that Nacho Libre, the latest from [Jared] Hess..., isn't an entirely unpleasant experience, which is to say it doesn't feel as though it's worn out its welcome before the second reel." More from Ed Gonzalez in Slant and Aaron Hillis in Premiere.
Also:
At SF360, Susan Gerhard talks with Sheery Avni about her book, Cinema by the Bay.
The New Republic's Christopher Orr calls Kiss Kiss Bang Bang "a delightfully crafty ride, a film that succeeds as both paragon and parody of its genre better than any other since the Scream franchise."
"There's at least one thing that makes the modest, marvelous Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack a unique documentary," writes Ray Pride, introducing his interview with the director: "it's a five years ongoing mutual appreciation-cum-bitch session between a pair of successful men in their 70s who must navigate the ego and caprice of other men who would give them the millions necessary to practice their respective crafts of architecture and moviemaking." Ray's also got info on the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers closing its doors on June 28. More from Anthony Kaufman and Brian Newman.
And via Movie City News, the AP's Jacob Adelman reports that some Christians see parallels between Jesus and Superman.
Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker, Stuart Gordon tells SuicideGirls' Daniel Robert Epstein why he'll be revisiting Re-Animator: "I actually believed that Donald Rumsfeld had died. I couldn't believe he was still around. Suddenly I had this idea that this was a reanimated Cabinet. I got very excited about the idea. I've actually been pestering Brian [Yuzna] to do this House of Re-Animator idea for awhile. It wasn't until Bush started his second term that Brian had finally said, 'Okay. I think we should do it.'"
The AV Club's Noel Murray spoke with Richard Linklater just before he went to Cannes. Related: Looker walks out of A Scanner Darkly.
That Little Round-Headed Boy on Two-Lane Blacktop: "You could describe it as Antonioni directing a Roger Corman quickie, a sort of Zabriskie Vanishing Point, in which the characters remain tight-lipped as they stare into the existential abyss (it's no wonder the Euro critics revere this film.)"
In the New York Times:
In the Philadelphia Weekly, Chris Anderson talks with Kevin Bacon directorial debut as a feature filmmaker, Loverboy. For the AV Club, Scott Tobias reviews the film; so does Luke Y Thompson for the freebie chain.
At PopMatters, Amos Posner wonders whether Lady in the Water "will show the artistic growth we've all been waiting" to see M Night Shyamalan, "or if we'll continue to watch a talented filmmaker's potential drift away."
David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back: "Even by poliziotteschi standards, Convoy Busters is not a stand-out film. What makes it memorable is the presence of Maurizio Merli (Violent Naples; Violent Rome; The Cynic, The Rat and The Fist), a legend in the genre." Also, the "DVD Release of the Week," Cemetery Man. More on that one from Craig Phillips.
Up-n-coming:
Posted by dwhudson at June 14, 2006 5:44 PM
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