Shorts, 7/10.

"Ours is a culture notoriously uncomfortable with death," writes Holly Myers in "Nothing Happens to No One: The Death Trilogy of Gus Van Sant," a new piece for n+1:

Yet it courses into our collective consciousness with renewed insistence every day. Death in Iraq, death in New Orleans, death in Sudan, Afghanistan, Israel, Indonesia. Death on local streetcorners and in apartment buildings down the block. More death than it seems possible to comprehend.

[...]

Taking the silence, the mystery, the essential unknowability of death as a given, Van Sant makes no attempt to interrogate or explain. He simply enacts this transition and encourages his viewers to watch.

The result is closer to meditation than to storytelling, and the films are difficult in the way that meditation is difficult, which has made them - Gerry in particular - a hard sell.... [T]his is cinema in a rare state of purity.

Besides two pieces on Guy Debord, the Winter 2006 issue of October features seven pieces by Béla Balázs, mostly on film, while Pavle Levi's "Doctor Hypnison and the Case of Written Cinema" closes the Spring 2006 issue. Via filmtagebuch.

Robert Cashill's been doing a bit of summer reading. On Jon Krampner's Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley: "With so much promising material, why isn't this book better?" On Lee Server's Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing: "You wonder: Did Stanley and Gardner meet? Did they talk about stealing husbands and boyfriends from Shelley Winters, who stole them right back?" Meanwhile, "I'm currently finishing up Kenneth D Ackerman's Boss Tweed, a superb biography of New York's legendary king of graft."

Girish's most recent bit of mind fodder: a snippet from a conversation between Ingmar Bergman and John Simon, dating back to at least before 1972, in which Godard, Pasolini and others are dismissed with seeming ease.

Zach Campbell imagines a debate on the value of the work of Vera Chytilová between Herbert Marcuse and Godard and Gorin.

FW Murnau's Faust is the latest addition to Slant's collection of "100 Essential Films. Fernando F Croce: "Siegfried Kracauer, after Caligari but still before Hitler, called Faust a simplistic battle of good versus evil that thoroughly vulgarized the nuances of the author, yet there is nothing simplistic about the raging storm of sights and emotions that makes Murnau's film such a staggering experience."

Reviews of new films:

• Nick Schager on My First Wedding, You, Me and Dupree and Beowulf & Grendel.

• Ed Gonzalez on "something of a best-of package, compiling as it does some of the stronger works from 'The World According to Shorts' series Jonathan Howell has been programming for BAM since 2000" and on Mad Cowgirl.

• Jeremiah Kipp on Edmond.

Greylodge posts Wall Street Journal coverage of Greylodge: "It's the latest reflection of an online culture where fans can function as curators of digital entertainment, bypassing libraries and museums with their own collections of music or movies."

"We haven't arrived at our own moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles; we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering, as all human things and human beings are." The Observer runs Stephen Fry's speech launching the History Matters initiative.

Also:

• "I was thinking of how incredibly old and frail I am," John Malkovich tells Lynn Barber. "And I suddenly thought, 'It's funny, now I'm one of those guys I used to watch on television occasionally and you might know his name, or you might not, and you sort of know his face but you don't know from where.'"

• Rachel Cooke: "In his new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, the American journalist Chris Anderson argues that the end of the blockbuster is nigh."

• Rob Sharp: "Despite [Oliver] Stone's insistence that his days of deliberate provocation are behind him, World Trade Center... has divided the public, critics and academics ahead of its release."

• Carole Cadwalladr meets Vince Vaughn.

Todd has news of Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Sons of El Topo at Twitch.

AICN's Quint visits the set of Michael Bay's Transformers.

In the Los Angeles Times, Phillip Lopate reviews James Mottram's The Sundance Kids, "a valuable, detailed map to the newest New Wave in Hollywood," and Mary McNamara explains the new and complex obstacle course the $100-million-plus movie is now running in Hollywood.

Janet Maslin calls The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale "not just a puff article but a full-length, unintentionally riotous puff book." Indeed; not long into the review, you can't help but start wondering if the book isn't some sort of elaborate joke.

Also in the in the New York Times:

• Virginia Heffernan's very fine piece on Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer is also a quick primer on why playing the lead in a television series can be one of the toughest acting jobs to land.

• Sharon Waxman: "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, the rollicking, effects-laden sequel starring an indelibly roguish Johnny Depp, pulverized several records in its first three days in theaters over the weekend, becoming the most successful movie opening in Hollywood history." As always, turn to David Poland for analysis.

• Laura M Holson reports from Preston, Idaho on how the town's aiming to lure Napoleon Dynamite fans: "Other towns have done the same and prospered. Field of Dreams turned little-known Dyersville, Iowa into a tourist haven when that movie was released in 1989. Now about 65,000 people visit yearly. The Santa Ynez Valley in California became a popular vacation spot after Sideways was released two years ago. Even Metropolis, Ill experienced an increase in visitors after Superman Returns was released in theaters last month."

• David Carr on The Devil Wears Prada and Anna Wintour: "She does not put a finger in the wind to judge trends: she is the wind.... Most mortals would have responded to a wide-screen depiction of their excesses by dressing in sackcloth and hiding in the basement. Ms Wintour donned Prada, natch, and went to a New York premiere." Related: "[C]ostumiers in the movies now are people who can have as much influence on public dress sense as the heads of the great fashion houses," writes David Thomson in the Independent.

• Buying movie tickets online has yet to catch on, reports Bob Tedeschi.

• Roger Cohen on what this year's World Cup has revealed about the latest version of Bush I's New World Order: "Where only a few years ago, the return of the capital to Berlin from Bonn was marked with an almost flagless, almost pageantry-free circumspection, now the national flag as sarong has become a fashion statement. Pretournament worrying about what racist thugs might do — 'We have been the undisputed world champions of worrying,' [Günter] Grass noted — has given way to a new German flexibility." Meanwhile, the US team "was the only one that traveled in an unmarked bus for fear of attack, and the only one that spent part of its time in Germany on a military base."

"Why Maurice Pialat, who died in 2003, is not readily acknowledged as the greatest French director of his generation is a grand mystery," declares Travis Miles as he launches into a review of À nos amours for Stop Smiling.

"Quite unlike the saucy 1927 film of [Elinor] Glyn's It starring Clara Bow, Beyond the Rocks handles sexual desire from a distance," writes Ray Young at Flickhead. Nonetheless, the DVD (out tomorrow) is "another exceptional presentation from Milestone, a company with an unflagging devotion to the preservation of early cinema."

Adam Dobson for Metaphilm: "Trainspotting examines the tension caused by segregation and the demands of citizenship, and as such explains social problems as the denial of this tension. Denial is shown only to exacerbate the problems."

Peter Nellhaus on Roma Citta Libera: "While not a rediscovered masterpiece, this is a film that helps fill a missing piece in the overall history of Italian cinema."

Jeremy Knox at Film Threat: "Tokyo Zombie isn't the best zombie film I've seen, but it makes up to us with sheer exuberance and energy. From one minute to the next you don't know what you're going to see and that's the greatest experience in the world when you're watching a movie."

"Almost three years to the day after its premiere at the 2003 SF International LGBT Film Festival, Tracy Flannigan's Rise Above: The Tribe 8 Documentary is finally making its theatrical premiere in San Francisco, home for the long-running (though now defunct) lesbian punk band it scrutinizes." Dennis Harvey talks with Flannigan for SF360.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival opens on Friday and runs through the weekend; at the Siffblog, Anne M Hockens tells you why you want to go if you can. Also, David Jeffers on the star attraction, Pandora's Box.

"The fact is, spilling an ugly secret is the price of admission for the cover of Vanity Fair. And it's corporate policy." Bill Robinson, writing at the Huffington Post, blames Oprah.

Time's Richard Corliss picks 7 DVDs that "Show How Divine and Dramatic Dance Can Be."

Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE: "With the goal of releasing six to eight films per year, Paul Hudson and Peter Peterson recently unveiled the launch slate for their new distrution company, Outsider Pictures."

Summer reading tip. Tim Lucas: "A couple of my friends have been using Lulu to make some interesting rare items available to a wider readership."

Online viewing tip #1. At Twitch, Todd's got the trailer for Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

Online viewing tip #2. Movie City News points to the trailer for Night at the Museum.

Online viewing tip #3. The trailer for Opie Gets Laid, screening at Dances With Films on July 25.

Posted by dwhudson at July 10, 2006 7:13 AM