Slate. "Summer Movies Week."

More goings on during Slate's "Summer Movies Week": Walter Hill, Joe Dante and John Milius "are not doddering codgers, but individuals in late middle age who would still have been working regularly under the regimes of the old moguls, who knew the value (economic and artistic) of experience," writes Dave Kehr. Earlier he the piece, he observes:

Many film buffs have a special affection for the late works of the masters, even when those films - like Hawks' Rio Lobo (1970) or Ford's 7 Women (1966) - lack the obvious appeal of their midcareer work. These wintry films often have a stark, pared-down quality, a sense of cutting to the essence, that can be tremendously moving - at the same time, they seem a bit sketchy and remote. The glow of seeing Carl Theodor Dreyer's startlingly direct Gertrud, made in 1964 when the great Danish director was 75, temporarily makes all other movies look sentimental and overfurnished.

Slate asks a slew of directors, critics, a producer, an editor, "What movie have you seen the most?" For Paul Schrader, for example, it's Pickpocket; Albert Maysles, Rocco and His Brothers; Jonathan Rosenbaum, Playtime.

In Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, writes Joshua Glenn, "audiences may finally catch a glimpse - even if through a glass darkly - of the director's own paradoxical worldview, one in which slacking is not only a form of political activism but the only possible activism." Related: Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "By cutting to the story's political core, Linklater has given A Scanner Darkly the coherence the book never had, and he has done so without diminishing [Philip K] Dick's scattershot brilliance - which is to say, his life.... A Scanner Darkly is funny, unnerving, astonishing, urgent. It's my kind of summertime special-effects extravaganza."

Christopher Kelly argues that "while [Larry] Clark might very well be a pornographer, a hypocrite, and whatever else you want to call him, he's also the only American director working today whose work reckons with the complexities of our current generation of MySpace exhibitionists, and especially the way so many young people today seem to relish their own exploitation." Related: Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly: "If Crash grew a pair of cojones, it might look something like Larry Clark's cheerfully defiant Wassup Rockers." More from JR Jones in the Chicago Reader.

Tim Wu explains why we'll "likely see less funding [in China] for films that Chinese people enjoy - like those of director Feng Xiao-Gang, filled with quirky Chinese humor - and more movies designed for American tastes (kung-fu aplenty). For better or for worse, it's less beating Hollywood than serving it."

There are many reasons the big-budget historical epic is falling out of favor in Hollywood, and Ross Douthat explores several. Basically, though, "The studios had the technology, it turned out, but lacked the vision thing."

Grady Hendrix breezes through an amusing history of novelizations, their rise, their fall, and quite possibly, their rise again.

And poor Bryan Curtis sorts through that damn list I've previously struggled to avoid even mentioning and concludes, "It's a vicious cycle of inspiration, spanning decades. And it's enough to make anyone a cynic."

Posted by dwhudson at June 30, 2006 3:58 PM