Shorts, 10/1.

31 Days of Horror. It's back at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, and today, October 1, Rumsey Taylor opens this year's series with, interestingly enough, Big Trouble in Little China, "which some twenty years after its initial release remains difficult to posit firmly within Carpenter's career. For one, it's certainly not a singular genre film, whereas Carpenter's others are nearly archetypal genre efforts. A meld of action, horror, comedy, romance, and even wuxia, this film isn't adequately housed by any single, familiar category. 'We take what we want and leave the rest,' says the magician Egg Shen of his culture. 'Like your salad bar.' His observation describes the distinctiveness of the film."

"Maybe people are finally getting it," suggests David Bordwell. "The most celebrated director in the US has to get his career back on track with The Departed, the first Hollywood remake of a Hong Kong film (Infernal Affairs). Although Scorsese evidently claims he never saw the original (must be the only film he hasn't seen), the point is clear. With the exception of smarty-pants B films (Torque, Running Scared, Crank), which are all good dirty fun, Hollywood genres have been severely blandified. Asian filmmakers, from India to Malaysia, have understood our genres better than we have, and they have given them a new visceral force and emotional edge."

"The history of Italian cinema in the mid-to-late 20th century can be summed up in two words. Dante Ferretti," writes Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. "The history of Italian-American cinema in the 21st century - and for a few years before - can also be summed up in two words. Dante Ferretti." Andrews meets the set designer who "styled the looks of The Decameron, Salo, And the Ship Sails On, City of Women and Ginger and Fred. Later, he did the same for Casino, Kundun, Gangs of New York and, last for Scorsese and Oscar-winningly for himself, The Aviator." Via Ray Pride at Movie City News.

Doug Cummings reviews a set of Kieslowski's documentaries: "Many of the films are highly-edited montages collating people and ideas in provocative ways."

"No director has ever dealt more insightfully with the offhanded, snide, and potentially suicidal aspects of bigotry than [John] Ford," writes Stanley Crouch in Slate. "This sets him above almost all other directors because he could understand and make art of the tragedies that attended bigotry, one of the most pernicious forms of superstition. Beyond that, Ford recognizes how community acts as a protection against the inevitable meaninglessness of human life, which is no more than anarchic energy unless put in a story of some sort."

At WSWS, Richard Phillips talks with Iranian director Tahmineh Milani about The Hidden Half - and about being arrested for making it.

"During a meeting, they came to the conclusion that, at the same time as they were drinking tea, a number of air planes circled the earth, ready to drop the atomic bombs on a given command." And "they" were Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras and the film they made was Hiroshima mon amour. Ulf Zander reviews Criterion's edition. Also in Film International: "The Bombay Film Poster: The Journey from the Street to the Museum," Ranjani Mazumdar argues that "while contemporary publicity and television fare have brought about major transformations in the look and financial value of the poster, it has also triggered off a nostalgia for the former hand-painted poster."

"The chance to reassess it shouldn't be missed by anyone who cherishes the lost movies of a tumultuous era in American history and American cinema." John Patterson meets Robert Downey, now "pushing 70," on the occasion of the return of his 1969 Putney Swope. The film, writes Patterson, is "what happened when a New York Jewish absurdist comic sensibility like Downey's, far harsher and more cynical than the cuddly version being purveyed by at the time by mainstream contemporaries like Woody Allen and Mel Brooks (who in fact has a nanosecond-long cameo in Putney Swope), collides with a revolutionary African-American worldview."

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• Ken Williams: "The question needs to be asked: are the words 'authentic' or 'authenticity' in regards to black film or culture simply bywords for mad, bad and dangerous to know?... The problem is that this interpretation of authenticity is completely uninterested in seeing the pride our youth take in themselves." Related: In the Independent, Matilda Egere-Cooper looks ahead to the next films of Britain's "black new wave," Life and Lyrics, Sugarhouse Lane and London State of Mind.

  Will Hodgkinson chronicles the end of an era: "The factory in Lausanne, Switzerland, that processes Europe's supplies of Kodachrome - grainy, colour-saturated frames of 8mm film that have convinced a generation that their 60s and 70s childhood and adolescence was spent leaping through flowers in a Technicolor haze - is shutting its doors on Saturday."

• "In watching a film on video or DVD on a television screen we are simply receiving information about a film," argues Fred Kelemen. "It's like looking at a postcard showing a reproduction of a painting."

• Oliver Burkeman profiles Richard Griffiths.

• Paul Harris on the challenge of marketing Mel Gibson's Apocalypto.

• Novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi: "If we can say the east envies the west while wanting to distance itself from it - 'they' refuse to integrate; why don't they want to be like us if they want to live here? - we can say that the self-disgust of the west conveys a profound confusion about the way we view ourselves now. From this point of view the Muslim is telling us what we already feel about ourselves but cannot yet own up to."

"Movies, and our expectations of them, remain so much in thrall to outmoded conventions of the novel and theater that Broken Sky may seem flagrantly precious. It is no more contrived than Keats," argues Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "[Julián] Hernández doesn't always grab what he's reaching for - his talent soars untethered by discipline - but the thrust of his effort lights up the sky." More from Keith Uhlich at Slant.

Also in the NYT:

• Dennis Lim opens his profile of David Lynch by noting how much the director will miss film now that he's gone digital, though he'll probably never go back, and then we get to peek around in his LA home: "One room has the signature red curtains. Propped against one wall is an Abstract Expressionist canvas by Mr Lynch, a brown expanse with a violent splotch of blue and the inscription 'Bob loves Sally until she is blue in the face.' A photograph of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation guru, sits on a conference table, sunlight illuminating a single cobweb that hangs from its gold frame."

• With Jon Jost, Mary Harron and Errol Morris as a few of the guideposts and producers Ted Hope and Christine Vachon as guides, John Clark maps "the mostly sideways career path followed by many of the generation of independent filmmakers who made a splash in the late 1980s and early 90s. When these directors, mostly now in their 40s and 50s, got started, the indie business was full of mom-and-pop operations with nickel-and-dime aspirations. Now the corner stores have been edged out by studio specialty divisions with far larger appetites and needs." Related: CNN's Catherine Andrews on the slippery definition of "indie." Via the SXSW "Newsreel."

• Sylviane Gold asks the director and subject of Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner a few questions: "Why, exactly, would someone who is often described as shy, who is palpably 'anxious' (Mr Kushner's term) and 'self-flagellating' ([Freida Lee] Mock's term) and whose work, when he's not being what he calls 'delinquent,' often entails sitting alone in a room, agree to be the central figure in a documentary?" Related: At Slant, Ed Gonzalez finds it "better than a puff piece... but for all its sweetness, Freida Lee Mock's film inadequately addresses how the elitism of the theater world - which typically attracts rich, white audiences - explicitly works against Kushner's attempts to bring his eye-opening work to the masses."

• In the Magazine, Deborah Solomon talks with Warren Beatty about Reds, running for office (he won't) and married life.

• Stephen Holden recommends Eric Khoo's "delicate, melancholic" Be With Me.

• "The Guardian, emphatically directed by Andrew Davis from a script by Ron L Brinkerhoff, is an action movie, a basic training movie, a swaggering sea adventure, a home front melodrama and an inspiring tough-love heroic teacher fable," manages AO Scott all in one breath. "If the aggregate of all these movies is exhausting and occasionally overwrought, some of the parts are stirring and effective, though not exactly fresh." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon and Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. Related: From IFC News, "Our Favorite Buddy Pairings From Hell."

• Laura Kern: "In the grand-scale animated comedy-adventure Open Season, periodic bursts of cleverness and eye-popping imagery, further enhanced in the 3-D Imax version, can't disguise that this is just another movie full of jive-talking computer-generated animals with little new to say." More from Nick Schager in Slant, Armen Boudjikanian at fps and MaryAnn Johanson.

• Neil Genzlinger: "If it wasn't true before, it's certainly true now with the appearance of The Latin Legends of Comedy: the word legend has been devalued to the point of worthlessness."

• Billy Bob Thornton's "estimable talents are squandered" in School for Scoundrels, sighs Manohla Dargis.

• Steven Lee Myers, actually reporting from Kazakhstan, notes that the Kazakh on the street isn't nearly as worked up over Borat as the government is. Related: In the Guardian, Kirsty Scott profiles Sacha Baron Cohen.

• ST Van Airsdale reports on the recent trend "to hold the movie's premiere far from the media centers of New York and Los Angeles, in a place actually connected to the film." All the King's Men in New Orleans, for example, or A Prairie Home Companion in St Paul.

• While the future of the Los Angeles Times remains smoggy, "the newspaper has been quietly making money for the last year by renting out the sixth-floor executive suite, as well as the facade for exterior shoots," reports Allison Hope Weiner.

Cinema's not over, argues Jim Emerson: "I've always found [Paul] Schrader to be a fascinating writer (Obsession, Taxi Driver, Last Temptation of Christ) and director (Blue Collar, Light of Day, Light Sleeper, Affliction), and I can see how he might view life as a 'narrative' (he is, after all, a professional storyteller), but I don't agree with him. Life isn't a story. We pattern-seeking animals (my favorite phrase) just find it more comprehensible when we pretend that it is."

Kevin Maher heralds the new Bollywood, "not the all-singing all-dancing pulp factory of old, famed for melodramatic weepies such as Mother India and Devdas, and derided for bold-faced knock-offs of Hollywood mainstays such as The Godfather (Sarkar), Reservoir Dogs (Kaante) and Fight Club (er, Fight Club). Instead, it is a decidedly modern and increasingly youth-based industry, a place where, in a long awaited turnaround, Hollywood has finally come knocking for much needed source material."

Also in the London Times, Wendy Ide meets Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

For SuicideGirls, Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Roger Corman.

David Chute has a few questions for Benny Matthews about Santeria, "an almost ethnographic 'horror film,' for want of a more precise term, set among lower-middle-class Mexicans in Texas."

For Time Out, Trevor Johnston talks with Douglas Gordon about Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.

Peter Nellhaus: "I've known Linda Thornburg for a few years and knew that she went through several years in realizing her dream of making a film from May Sarton's novel, Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing." And he interviews her.

At the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz highlights two very fine bits in Jeremiah Kipp's interview with Ron Perlman in Shock Cinema.

"Call them 'Gordo' ([Guillermo] Del Toro), 'Flaco' ([Alfonso] Cuarón) and 'El Negro' ([Alejandro González] Iñárritu)," suggests Reed Johnson. "At least, that's what they sometimes call each other, which sounds a lot less cloying than, say, 'The Three Amigos.' Not that anyone could miss the depth of their professional camaraderie. It has become routine for the three men to send each other their screenplays, and to proffer advice on films in progress, all the way up until final printing." Related: At Film Monthly, Paul Fischer talks with Del Toro about Pan's Labyrinth. Via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Sorina Diaconescu meets Andrew Bujalski, Tina Daunt profiles Michael Peña and Rachel Abramowitz reports on Oliver Stone's recent outspokenness, e.g., in San Sebastian, he told the press, "This war on Iraq is a disaster. I'm disgraced. I'm ashamed for my country."

Tom Giammarco at Koreanfilm.org: "Fly Low was an independent release produced more for the film festival circuit, opening at festivals in Europe more than six months prior to its release in Korean theaters. Its quiet atmosphere and the non-action of the characters probably prevented it from becoming commercially successful. However, it is an exceptional film that was the first, and so far only, work of director Kim Sion."

"Frankenstein's Bloody Nightmare is a wild cocktail of nightmarish sensibilities," writes Ed Gonzalez. "The story is bootleg but [director John R] Hand's head-trippy dissolving of consciousness is something fierce, inviting repeat viewings with a joint in hand." Also in Slant, Jason Clark: "Driving Lessons is the type of movie that makes you want to single-handedly dismantle the British film industry." More from André Soares at the Alternative Film Guide.

Mark Fisher: "I'm the world's greatest apologist for Brian De Palma but his version of Ellroy's The Black Dahlia is a disaster." More from Stuart Klawans, who also tells Nation readers: "I think you will recognize the characters in Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy."

"If you've been wanting to discover new (or at least new to you) filmmakers, specially real indie filmmakers who are pioneers of, or role models for, the US DIY film movement, then Fame Whore can be an easy & entertaining introduction to Jon Moritsugu," suggests Sujewa Ekanayake.

Gordon Thomas at Bright Lights After Dark: "Anyone infatuated with silent film - like me - is always on the lookout for that one pre-talkie film that will win over the unconverted, and I think I've found a mighty fine contender in Joe May's 1929 film, Asphalt."

Nick Davis: "The boys in the Best Supporting Actress band have collected for another monthly cocktail party over at StinkyLuLu's pad. The year in question is 1936, the ninth year of the Academy Awards, but the first year of the Supporting awards."

"What is the single best American fiction film made during the last 25 years?" asks Andy Horbal and half a zillion replies pour in.

Tim Lucas takes a movie meme and runs with it.

"Paracinema is the 'invisible ray' that allows us to shift perception by adjusting the lens of conception (or vice versa)." Invisible Cinema offers a taste of Bradley Eros's "There Will Be Projections in All Dimensions..."

HarryTuttle: "I'd like to call for a blogathon on contemplative cinema, the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and star system." Details, suggestions and links follow. Tentative date: November 13.

Anne Thompson parties in LA with the Marie Antoinette crowd. Related: "[S]ensational pamphlets written before 1789 to extort money from the French crown were used for political purposes during the revolution. But they were not a cause of the revolution," insists Simon Burrows in the New Statesman. "Indeed, but for the revolution, they would probably never have surfaced, and would not have been able to stain Marie-Antoinette's reputation for ever." His book, Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution, is due at the end of October; Martin Wainwright reports on the significance of his findings in the Guardian.

Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "Just as studios don't need us to do what they do, we don't need them to do what we do. It's the readers and the readers only that critics need to worry about."

"Old people and the movies are rediscovering one another," announces Malte Herwig in Der Spiegel.

Brian Geldin launches a blog with a unique concept: The Film Panel Notetaker, which is... exactly what it says it is: "Dedicated to all the notes I ever took while attending film panel discussions." Other notetakers are encouraged to submit theirs as well.

Scott Kirsner posts the full transcript of his long summertime conversation with Stu Maschwitz and Jonathan Rothbart, "two of the three founders of The Orphanage, the San Francisco visual effects firm (and software development shop) that is just now branching out into computer-generated animation." An abridged version appears in the Hollywood Reporter's "Future of Entertainment" issue.

"On MySpace and YouTube, making friends is secondary to generating a virtual fanbase, an online altar to yourself," writes In These Times executive editor Jessica Clark. The thesis of anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It is explained and endorsed, and then: "How soon will it be before we see a lonelygirl15 political candidate—so appealingly genuine that she's fake, so fake, she might just be real? Barack Obama comes to mind." Goodness.

Cory Doctorow at InformationWeek: "High-Definition Video: Bad for Consumers, Bad for Hollywood." Via the SXSW "Newsreel."

Online browsing tip. Joe Kral's collection of Penguin and Pelican book covers. Via Coudal Partners. Related: Book Covers, a favorite after the classic BibliOdyssey, or, on a more contemporary note, Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books, "Books@Google."

Online listening tip. BBC film critic Mark Kermode's podcast. Via logboy at Twitch.

Online viewing tip. At Bright Lights After Dark, George Brown's found a montage of Hitchcock's cameos.

Online viewing tips. David Poland's Departed interviews: Leonardo DiCaprio, Vera Farmiga and Matt Damon.

Related: Josh Tyrangiel hosts a roundtable with Scorsese, DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon for Time. Then there's Gill Pringle's interview with DiCaprio for the Independent, David Ansen's rave in Newsweek (where Mark Starr's got a list of Boston movies), Gregg Goldstein's NY premiere party notes and, in the Hollywood Reporter, Anne Thompson's profile of producer Graham King (Departed and Blood Diamond) and Kirk Honeycutt's review: "Thank God we have Martin Scorsese back."

Posted by dwhudson at October 1, 2006 2:58 PM