GreenCine Daily: Shorts, 10/16.

October 16, 2006

Shorts, 10/16.

"Humanism" is the key word in both Kristi Mitsuda and Michael Koresky's reviews of Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem. Only two takes from the Reverse Shot team this time around at indieWIRE, but they're embracing ones.

Also: indieWIRE's interview with Doug Block as his moving 51 Birch Street begins its trek across the country and a dispatch from the Pusan International Film Festival from Brian Brooks.

For SF360, Michael Fox talks with Joseph McBride about his new book, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career, in which he "catalogs Welles' amazing output in the last 15 years of his life, demolishing the widely held perception of Welles as a debauched clown."

"[W]hat makes Reign of Terror great isn't necessarily how well it adheres to, or shakes up, various genre conventions," writes Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab. "It is, quite simply, an incredibly well-put-together, gripping film - a true showcase for the visual and narrative expertise that would serve [Anthony] Mann so well in his later career."

Matthew Clayfield ruminates on Susan Shineberg's recent profile of Peter Greenaway in the Age: "Greenaway seems to me to be the perfect excuse for distinguishing auteurism, which is about films, not directors, from dead-end fascination with authorial rhetoric, which is an entirely different, far more limiting, thing."

David Bordwell recommends Backstory 4 and selects a few choice bits from the interviews.

Substantial discussion of The Departed going on over there at scanners.

Grady Hendrix: "Shochiku has announced the next Yoji Yamada film and - surprise! - it's a period piece. But what's genuinely surprising is that it's set not in the distant past like Twilight Samurai or The Hidden Blade, but in the 1940s."

Douglas Coupland will be creating a sci-fi series for television, reports Todd at Twitch. Also: Asia Argento's online video project.

The Fly In an appreciation of The Fly at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Tom Huddleston notes, "Cronenberg is consistently undervalued as a writer."

David Brusie talks with Justin Rice about Mutual Appreciation at music (for robots).

Amos Posner at PopMatters: "In terms of quality, 2006 is on pace to be the slowest since 2000, which was so bad that Chocolat and Erin Brockovich could be passed off as two of the year's best efforts. But no matter how much this year needs autumn to redeem it, it's worth examining the previous nine months, and shedding light on the hidden gems, dreck, and mundanity found within. After that, it will be easy to see why Oscar season is more crucial this year than any in recent memory."

Suddenly, MS Smith presents the third installment of his reflections on Toronto with his takes on Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako and Jia Zhangke's Still Life.

Brian Liloia has a good long talk with Sujewa Ekanayake about making Date Number One.

In the Independent, Andrew Gumbel asks Eric Steel why he made The Bridge.

Logan Hill profiles Christian Bale for New York.

Variety's redesigned its site, and they've done an outstanding job. So many different categories of information, and yet it's clear, clean, easily navigable and loads several times faster than it used to. Bravo.