Shorts, 7/5.

"Harold Pinter regularly offers actors what will become the opportunities of a lifetime," writes David Hare in the Guardian: "to Meryl Streep, obviously, in The French Lieutenant's Woman; to Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft in one of the most overlooked of all British films, The Pumpkin Eater; and, unforgettably, to Dirk Bogarde, both in Accident and The Servant. Pinter offers the stuff actors want and with which they can do magic - surface vitality, of course, but also an undertow of narrative and implied feeling which deepens the simplest remark. In the spare, complicated screenwriting of Pinter, 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe' become words which do a hundred jobs."

"Fifteen years after its release, Slacker hasn't aged much," writes Brian Raftery in Salon. "[T]oday's Internet-addled, career-minded 20-somethings may be wigged out by idea of living without a steady paycheck, but the movie's characters' social and environmental concerns are as timely as ever." Raftery talks at length with Richard Linklater and a slew of cast and crew members.

"A need to devour, punish, humiliate, or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it's certainly a big part of sex," Charlotte Rampling tells Judith Thurman in the New Yorker.

Acquarello reviews Benoît Jacquot's docs, parts 1 and 2.

"What moves us to provide commentary, in-depth analysis, of some films (and not others)?" The question was sent to Zach Campbell, who outlines his approach to an answer illustrated by three quick reviews of An American Romance, Viva La Muerte and The Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter.

At indieWIRE, Jason Guerrasio checks in on five indies in production: Day Zero, Gracie, In the Footsteps of Orpheus, Running Funny and The Savages.

Felicia R Lee talks with filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris about Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela: A Son's Tribute to Unsung Heroes - as well as a few of its subjects: "'There has never been a film tracing the people who left South Africa,' Bethuel Setai, a 67-year-old 'disciple' who is a former director general of the Free State Province, said in an interview from Bloemfontein. 'So many people believe the struggle began in 1976 with Soweto. This shows this whole struggle has been a relay race.'" The film is part of a trilogy, the Reeler reminds us.

Also in the New York Times: Nathan Lee on Urbanscapes, Dave Kehr on Petulia, Cannibal Holocaust and The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection and Tim Weiner: "Dieter Froese, an artist whose work helped define New York's downtown scene in the 1970s, died on Friday at his home in Lower Manhattan. He was 68."

Mohamed El-Assyouti in the Al-Ahram Weekly on the adaptation of the bestselling Egyptian novel, The Yacoubian Building: "The film seems at times to want it both ways - corruption is dead, long live corruption. For the new corrupt can at least boast of their tolerance and democratic values by allowing the release of such a film, while the public can vent their anger on fictional rather than real characters."

"The bond between the older woman and younger man in more recent pop culture is still constructed as largely sexual," writes Michelle Orange in Sirens, "but the peripheral lures and assortment of players are newly multi-dimensional."

Craig Phillips points to Joseph P Kahn's story in the Boston Globe on writer Reed Martin's law suit against Jim Jarmusch and the studios that co-financed Broken Flowers, based on his suspicion that they stole a screenplay he'd worked on for ten years. Craig: "While there's two sides to every story, and I also know that, as painful as they can be to a writer to acknowledge, coincidences do happen and there's not much they can do about them - this particular case does sound a little fishy."

Joe Bowman starts "a list of 100 Films that have aided the continuation of my film adoration. This post will cover 25 films that mattered to me in my formative years from birth until the end of middle-school."

Online viewing tip #1. Aurélien Poitrimoult's The Green Hornet, a short via The Crime in Your Coffee.

Online viewing tip #2. The trailer for Mad Monster Party at filmtagebuch, also pointing you to stills from El Topo.

Online viewing tip #3. At Ironic Sans, an elementary animation, "Uma Thurman's Severed Head," via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at July 5, 2006 8:52 AM