Shorts, 10/4.

Girish has been reading Raúl Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema and learns how a moment of boredom might become a "privileged moment."

Perlentaucher points to a "beautiful" essay by Belá Tarr in the Hungarian publication Élet és Irodalom on filmmaker Gábor Bódy. The occasion is an exhibition at the Ludwig Múzeum in Budapest, and of course, I can't read a single word. But Perlentaucher notes that although Tarr doesn't even mention that Bódy cooperated with the Stasi, he does write that Bódy "saw people not just as social creatures but also as beings of nature, as a part of the cosmos... He put an upside down world back on its feet. He was seen as someone who 'thought differently,' as a 'marginal' artist (or as a drunken pig, even if he hadn't been drinking for weeks. It was wonderful to see the state-approved directors and their studio brigades freeze in fear when Bódy entered a café wearing his tuxedo with its yellow buttons). From the moist and warm sheep stalls of their security, they held him in contempt without realizing that, over time, it was they who were becoming marginal."

Perlentaucher also points to a special dossier in L'Express on Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes and a piece by Dorota Mas?owska in Polityka. The gist: "It's extraordinarily difficult for a Pole to watch 20 Polish films about Poland in Poland!"

Doug Cummings offers a second round of brief reviews of documentaries by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

"Tear-jerking melodrama or sinpa (originally meaning the "new style" theater, a term imported from Japan during the colonial period) is arguably not only the most significant cinematic genre in Korean cinema today, but also Korea's unique contribution to the global media culture. Disparaged as vulgar and tasteless only a few decades ago, like so many popular Korean artforms, melodrama has stoutly weathered insults and derisions, to claim the position of a commercial and artistic force to be reckoned with." Kyu Hyun Kim reviews Moon Seung-wook's Romance.

Also at Koreanfilm.org, Adam Hartzell on Jang Sun-woo's Bad Movie: "Due to its portrayal of violent and obnoxious resistance to authority and disregard for basic human decency, standard film narrative, and high production quality... one can see justification in Kyung Hyun Kim's claim that 'The film is quite possibly the most controversial and ruptured film text in the history of Korea' (The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, p.187)."

Michael Guillén has a good long talk with David Thomson - about Nicole Kidman, of course, but also about the state of American cinema and how he got started writing about film.

Dave Kehr on the new Maltese Falcon DVD package: "Though the Huston remains the definitive version - thanks as much to the miracle of casting that brought together Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook Jr as to Huston's direction - the two other versions have striking merits of their own."

Also in the New York Times:

• Stephen Holden: "As informative as it is, Wrestling With Angels doesn't have time to do more than scratch the surface of its fascinating subject." More ffrom Phyllis Fong in the Voice. Related: The Hollywood Reporter's Martin Grove talks with Freida Lee Mock about the year in docs: "It's just a great renaissance for the form. Basically, the public has discovered how entertaining and interesting and engaging documentary films can be." Plus, the indieWIRE interview.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "A 'what went wrong?' documentary bristling with answers, ...So Goes the Nation is a clear-eyed and utterly ruthless dissection of the battle for Ohio in the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election.... It's not pretty, but it is instructive." More from Michael Atkinson in the Voice.

• Nathan Lee: "A wordless stop-motion-animated feature shot on 16-millimeter film, Blood Tea and Red String is wondrously obsolete, a scruffy rebuttal to the digital suavity and celebrity shenanigans of the Pixar era." More from R Emmet Sweeney in the Voice. Trailer.

• Laura M Holson: "With more than a dozen computer-animated movies being readied for release by next summer, Hollywood is facing viewer fatigue worthy of Sleeping Beauty."

Anthony Kaufman spots news at Gawker that the Voice has fired Michael Atkinson: "J Hoberman and Dennis Lim are the last remaining film staffers from the old regime. It's hard to believe they've lasted this long."

But Atkinson's still around for this week's issue, writing of the Up series, on the occasion of the release of 49 Up, "[Michael] Apted's achievement is one of essential humanity.... Try to think of another movie project that endeavors to capture in some fashion the entirety of a life's experience." More from Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. Related: Apted is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"I enjoy the Miike films I've seen, but it's hard to criticize them using the kind of criteria that you'd apply to narrative cinema by just about anyone else," writes Bryant Fraser. "Instead, I tend to judge his films on how apeshit they are - the more, the merrier. Imprint is pretty apeshit."

Nick Schager revisits Aguirre: The Wrath of God: "If Herzog and Aguirre are kindred spirits, so too are both with Klaus Kinski, the infamously eccentric thespian and favorite of Herzog's who, in his first of five collaborations with the director, embodies the Spanish explorer with a bestial ferocity that's breathtaking in its enormity." Also in Slant, Schager on Poison Friends and 1/3 and Ed Gonzalez on Maria Ramos's Justice: "The film brings to mind the good and bad of two other courtroom documentaries, Raymond Depardon's rigorous 10th District Court and Kim Longinotto's good-hearted Sisters in Law."

Dennis Harvey at SF360: "Beautifully shot in a rainbow of grey tones by John Alcott - who the very same year shot Barry Lyndon, a major candidate for Most Gorgeously Photographed Movie Ever - Overlord was duly complimented by Stanley Kubrick, who reportedly told [Stuart] Cooper, 'The only thing wrong is it's an hour and a half too short!'"

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Tom Huddleston suggests finding The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, "a discarded relic of socially conscious 70s cinema, a forgotten salvo in the generation wars, and a unique, vividly haunting experience." Also: Matt Bailey on The Curse of the Crying Woman, "resolutely Gothic, full of the genre's characteristic tropes: an inherited curse, pervasive madness, a decaying old castle, a blurring of the line between life and death, mirroring and doubling, a persecuted ingénue, and an overpowering sense of impending doom."

At the House Next Door, appropriately enough, Wagstaff offers an appreciation of The Old Dark House.

"The eponymous Cinema Panopticum is a penny arcade in a forlorn carnival. One day, a little girl parts the curtain and wanders in to watch its five macabre, short films in succession - alone." In Boldtype, Andy Warner reviews Thomas Ott's Cinema Panopticum.

Bob Rafelson's Mountains of the Moon "seems to be, on its surface, a classic prestige picture of the kind David Lean and Richard Attenborough excelled at - handsome locales, historic pedigree, period recreations, epic running time," writes Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab. "But look a bit closer, and it becomes clear that Mountains is a darker, more bracing film than most others of its ilk."

Darren Hughes: "I'm nowhere near deciding yet whether or not The Black Dahlia is good, but it's certainly among the strangest and most fascinating Hollywood films I've seen in quite some time."

For Cheryl Eddy, writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Last King of Scotland "never answers the essential question it raises: why do we need a white guy as a ViewMaster in the first place?"

"The characters in Jesus Camp hardly represent a fringe movement," argues Anthony Kaufman in In These Times. More from Rob Nelson in the City Pages.

Time Out's Chris Tilly: "Mean Girls helmer Mark Waters is currently assembling a stellar cast for this forthcoming fantasy flick The Spiderwick Chronicles." So far: Mary-Louise Parker, Joan Plowright, Nick Nolte and Martin Short. Also, Rafe Spall on his favorite Londoner, his dad, Timothy.

Maria Elena Fernandez spends a day with James Woods. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Scott Martelle finds Steve Zaillian "shellshocked" in the debris of All the King's Men bombing and Jay Fernandez hears that collaborators Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga are spatting.

Sally Vincent interviews Brenda Blethyn for the Guardian.

Spiegel Online reports (in English) on the premiere in Berlin of Germany. A Summer Fairy Tale, drawing the chancellor et al.

This week's list at the AV Club: "19 Terrific Midnight Movies From The Last 10 Years."

Online viewing tip #1. Via Grady Hendrix a trailer for Wisit Sasanatieng's The Unseeable.

Online viewing tip #2. Via Todd at Twitch, a trailer for Satoshi Kon's Paprika.

Online viewing tip #3. The trailer for For Your Consideration at Time Out.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The Guardian's Kate Stables has seven political shorts for you.

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2006 2:47 PM