Weekend shorts, fests, etc.

In the week since the last batch of "shorts," there have, of course, been other things going on besides Sundance and Oscar talk.

The WSWS, for example, is running arts editor David Walsh's talk at York University, "Film, history and socialism" (Parts 1, 2 and the Q&A that followed).

In the latest issue of Offscreen to go online, Donato Totaro tackles Paul Schrader's "Canon Fodder," Paul Rist has two 2006 top tens, Paul W Salmon reviews Criterion's release of Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hofffman, and the titles of Heather Macdougall's and Linda J Merelle's articles tell all: respectively, "Local and Global Identity in European Film" and "Kieslowski and Besson Meet in Le Cercle Rouge."

"With nine nominations each, box office hits Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory (see Focus) and Guillaume Canet's Tell No One are vying for the title of Best French Film of 2006 and dominate the list of films selected for the 2007 Cesars." Fabien Lemercier has the full list at Cineuropa.

Michael Guillén talks with Mark Becker about Romántico, cinematographer Rainer Hoffmann about The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez and with Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, who responds to a few recent criticisms aimed at The Lives of Others.

The Berlinale's Panorama program is now complete. Somewhat related: Pavel Braila at the New National Gallery in Berlin, through February 25.

"Wolf André Oleg 'Andi' Engel was the kind of man to invent a magazine (Enthusiasm) and a distribution company (Politkino) in order to spread the ideas and cinema of Straub/Huillet. He was also the kind of man to make issue Number 2 of Enthusiasm 30 years after the fact of Number 1." Andy Rector presents an essay by Engel on Straub/Huillet published in 1970.

Acquarello reviews "Isaki Lacuesta's elegantly conceived essay film Cravan vs Cravan on the enigma of Arthur Cravan - the legendary poet-boxer, Dadaist, writer, critic, eccentric, provocateur, editor of the notorious Left Bank cultural publication Maintenant (whose readership included such notable personalities as Ezra Pound, Maurice Ravel, Jean Cocteau, and Gertrude Stein), and nephew of famed Irish playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde who, in 1918, set alone on a boat off the coast of Mexico bound for Argentina to reunite with his expectant wife, poet Mina Loy, and disappeared."

"While it's understandable that Brando would be celebrated for his visceral portrayal of adolescent limitations at a time, after World War II, when that archetype began to overtake American society, that wasn't Brando's principal talent," argues Stanley Crouch at Slate. "The aesthetic fact of the matter is that Brando's main achievement was to portray the taciturn but stoic gloom of those pulverized by circumstances. He was one of our finest cinematic poets of defeat."

"Emanuele Luzzati, whose haunting fairy tale images graced opera stages and animated films, has died in his home in Genoa, officials said Saturday. He was 85." The AP reports.

Before catching up with the New York Times, note that Nikki Finke weighs in on the paper's shuffling of personnel overseeing movie coverage. Now then:

• "The cosmopolitanism of international filmmaking is matched by the parochialism of American film culture," sighs AO Scott. "Is it just me? I'm leery of nostalgia, but it does seem that things were different once."

• Manohla Dargis looks back, too: "Once upon a time not very long ago, it seemed as if the studios' specialty divisions might take independent film to another level, like the rich uncle who plucks you out of the weeds and makes you a star." They've done fine, but the true indies are left behind. But there's hope: "Video on demand may not be the great savior of independent film, but it bodes well for those who will never go Hollywood and wouldn't want to even if Harvey Weinstein himself signed the check."

• Kristin Hohenadel talks with Marjane Satrapi about seeing her bestselling Persepolis turned into an animated film.

• Written by Sam Fuller and directed by Douglas Sirk, Shockproof is "a curiosity that's more fun to think about than to watch," writes Matt Zoller Seitz.

• AO Scott: "2 or 3 Things I Know About Him, a new documentary directed by Malte Ludin, examines the impact of Nazism on a single family, in this case the family of a high-ranking member of Hitler's government. But if it tells, in Mr Ludin's words, 'a typical German story,' the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil." In the Voice, Jim Ridley: "Malte's discomforting interviews with his siblings, supplemented by surreally matter-of-fact, Zelig-like photos of Hanns in Hitler's company, make for gripping and confrontational viewing. Yet the harder he persists, the less clear it is what he wants from his family." More from Steve Erickson at Nerve.

• AO Scott: "A schematic exercise in liberal, privileged guilt - in the tradition of Crash and Grand Canyon, but without the prepackaged Southern California anomie - Breaking and Entering moves through a series of moral and social crises as if they were yoga poses and comes to rest with a smile of virtuous complacency on its face." For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, it "might have been farce, if [Anthony] Minghella weren't so dead-serious." More from Nathan Lee in the Voice.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is Romeo and Juliet with fewer manners and more exotic dentition." But Salon's Stephanie Zacharek finds it "offers the kind of B-movie pleasures - albeit elegant B-movie pleasures - that are hard to come by these days." More from Nick Schager at Slant.

• Stephen Holden: "Although I find the term 'chick flick' odious, I imagine that Columbia Pictures regards Catch and Release as exactly that, although there are signs that [first-time director Susannah Grant, the screenwriter behind Erin Brockovich and In Her Shoes] was reaching for something more layered and subtle than the usual fairy-tale formula. If the compromise between one thing and another leaves the movie struggling for basic credibility, its affection for its characters doesn't feel cynical." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

• Stephen Holden: "Archetypes and symbols solemnly parade through Seraphim Falls, a handsome, old-fashioned western of few words and heavy meanings that unfolds with the sanctimonious grandeur of a biblical allegory." Related: Pierce Brosnan "manages to show how far a serious actor will go to outrun his own glamorous persona," writes John Anderson.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "China Blue, a heartbreaking and meticulous documentary about life inside a blue-jeans factory in China, reveals more than we may care to know about the provenance of our most beloved item of clothing." More from Michelle Orange in the Voice.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Aliens offer a cure for earthling ennui in From Other Worlds, a limp sci-fi comedy with fewer laughs than a meeting of Abductees Anonymous."

• Look Back in Anger "is almost pure autobiography, and as John Heilpern makes clear in his biography, the anger in it is so deeply personal, with such singular causes, as to make nonsense of it as politics." Ian Jack reviews John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man.

Jeff Reichert on two by Jacques Rivette: "Duelle and Noroît, represent something of a perfect double-bill, though I'd only recommend it to those well initiated with his work. Neither film's necessarily inaccessible, but they're both remarkably strange and benefit from firm grounding in his development through the 60s and early 70s." Also at Reverse Shot, Justin Stewart on Idiocracy.

"[Frank] Capra would almost single-handedly bring esteem to Columbia Pictures when he was hired by the studio in the late 20s," writes Zeth Lundy, who examines Capra's years at the studio for PopMatters.

To follow up on this, a few recent reviews from Steven Shaviro: Andrzej Munk's Eroica, Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains, Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water, Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde and Vera Chytilova's Daisies.

Time Out's Dave Calhoun visits the set of Ken Loach's These Times, "an uncompromising examination of the shady world of immigrant workers" in London.

"Dasepo Naughty Girls is Korea's entry into the hyper-stylized candy-colored absurdist comedy genre that has been popular of late in Japan, and it fits nicely alongside films like Survive Style 5+, Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims and Funky Forest," writes Filmbrain. "In some ways the film is a tremendous departure for director Lee Je-yong, whose last film, Untold Scandal, was a Chosun Dynasty-era rendition of Dangerous Liaisons. However, in that film (as well as his earlier An Affair) Lee exposes a certain hypocrisy in Korean moral attitudes towards sex, and that criticism can be found in Dasepo Naughty Girls as well, though exaggerated for comedic effect.... [I]t is unquestionably one of the most original, memorable, and funniest Korean films of 2006."

Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org on I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK:

While by no means a "watered-down" version of Park Chan-wook's disturbingly resplendent cinema, the movie is likely to disappoint anyone looking for either a TV-drama style tear-jerking romance or a piece of white-hot "extreme cinema" with devastating plot revelations and dynamic action sequences, although it does contain one spectacular sequence of Peckinpah-like carnage that will blow many viewers out of their seats.... Still, few films I have seen, made in Hollywood or Japan, have had such a sumptuous but exacting imagination on display in re-creating the archetypically manga-ish imagery of a young girl fused with machinery. In my humble opinion, Park outclasses any living Japanese director (Kaneko Shusuke, Miike Takashi and Kurosawa Kiyoshi included) in getting "right" such mind-boggling visual details as the jet plasma ejected from the hovering Young-goon's sneakers, scorching footprints onto the dried glass.... Cyborg is every inch a Park Chan-wook film.

"Chatrichalerm Yukol is known in the west for the Francis Ford Coppola-edited version of The Legend of Suriyothai," writes Peter Nellhaus. reviewing Tamnan Somdej Phra Naresuan Maharaj: Ong Prakan Hongsa, which "has even greater ambitions than the earlier film... Part One clocks in at almost three hours, with a record length combined with a record budget for a Thai film. Chatrichalerm clearly wants to make the Thai equivalent to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and indeed recruited some of Peter Jackson's team."

"The Spinning Wheel Film Festival is a showcase of outstanding Sikh films, featuring a diverse mix of genres including documentary, independent, foreign and narrative films." Saturday, February 3, Standford, CA.

Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books: "Deftly, without polemics or heavy-handed messages, [Clint Eastwood] has broken all the rules of the traditional patriotic war movie genre and created two superb films, one in English, the other in Japanese: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The latter, in my view, is a masterpiece." Related: Bruce Wallace profiles Kazunari Ninomiya for the Los Angeles Times.

Also in the LAT: Reed Johnson visits the set of Mike Newell's adaptation of Gabriel Garciá Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and turns in a longish report.

And Susan King: "Saul Bass: The Hollywood Connection, which was developed with the curatorial guidance of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, also features screenings of his Oscar-winning 1968 short, Why Man Creates. And on select Tuesday afternoons this month and in February, the Skirball will screen films for which he designed the titles and the posters."

Related: Peet Gelderblom's Bass-inspired poster for Terrence Malick's Moby Dick, starring Mel Gibson. Commissioned, see, by Matt Zoller Seitz for his "Wish List" at the House Next Door.

Also: "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a that rarity of rarities: a genuinely deviant work of art. It's the kind of film that could move Prince, Oliver Stone, Courtney Love, Tom Ford, Jenna Jameson, Roman Polanski and Charles Manson to tears, and send them home elated and wrung out, with the same thought rattling in their heads: 'At long last, someone told my story!'"

Grant Rosenberg catches a rare screening of Robert Frank's Rolling Stones doc, Cocksucker Blues, and writes in Time, "Perhaps most pointedly, beyond all the antics of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, the film is a testament to overexposure. Everybody films everybody, all the time, even when nothing is happening."

Richard Corliss has really been cutting loose since Time's shift towards placing more emphasis on its online publishing. In his latest, he remembers Audrey Hepburn 14 years after her death: "In the 40 years between Hollywood's make-believe headlines and the horrifying reality of Somalia, Hepburn as actress and woman seemed an emissary from a finer world than ours."

At the Siffblog, David Jeffers calls DW Griffith's Way Down East "magnificent. By 1920, Lillian Gish had become an actress of considerable depth and the story, with its harrowing climax has never entirely left the cultural consciousness of the American Cinema."

Matthew Clayfield on Casino Royale: "[Daniel] Craig's debut does not, as I had initially expected, usher in the era of what some have called a 'brand-new Bond'; if anything, it ushers in the era of an old one - the oldest one, in fact."

That Little Round-Headed Boy has five thoughts on The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

"A ghost story as transparent as the specter of its title, The Other gave me the willies when it first came out in 1972," recalls Flickhead, who was 14 at the time. Now, he finds it "scattered, a frivolous mix of genres, patented Jerry Goldsmith musical clichés, and actors in search of motivation."

In contrast to John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, "for all his great roles, was never the ward of a great technician," notes Nathan Kosub in Stop Smiling. Even so: "At his best, Mitchum's characters follow hunches; when instinct doesn't pan out, he deals with the consequences without rescinding his intentions or mistakes. Sometimes he is cruel, more often indifferent, but always wiser than just street smarts, and romantic enough to believe in a kind of freedom most Western cowpokes or noir snoops never sniff the air enough to try. His persona wasn't Humphrey Bogart's cynicism or Grant's casual precision, but an internal remove that suggested a clear conscience and thought-out certitude."

John Adair's caught Children of Men, and now, he's exploring "why it is I reacted so strongly against [Alfonso] Cuarón's film (a film which has received nearly universal critical acclaim). Suffice it to say that when I walked out of the movie, I found my frustration growing to a point I rarely experience. What is it that's driving this reaction?"

"Diary of a Mad Old Man left me with a strong after-impression, and the sense that the film I wanted to write would be concerned with some of these ideas." Venus screenwriter Hanif Kureishi on the works of Tanizaki Junichiro.

Also in the Guardian:

• Steve Rose presents "a guide to the best issue-drama cliches. But let's not forget these films are here to help all of us - for we are the world." Fun. Related: In the LAT, Todd Boyd wonders, "When did Africa become so hip?"

• "Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, is so iconic that it is easy to think you have watched it when you haven't. And I hadn't." Nell Leyshon on watching it once and then putting it away before adapting Daphne du Maurier's story for the stage.

• John Patterson: "The unreliable narrator could easily be superimposed upon almost every major release, and it would probably invigorate every last, sorry one of them. It could be offered retrospectively, as a DVD extra."

• Marina Hyde on the whole Tom Cruise as "new Jesus" thing: "Cynics are instructed to put aside the image of Terry Jones squawking, 'He's not the Messiah, he's a very disturbed man!' and just acknowledge how much more resonant the whole water-into-wine thing would have been if Jesus had been able to do cool bar tricks like Tom's character in Cocktail."

• Ed Pilkington meets the guys behind Loose Change, "the most successful movie to emerge from what followers call the 9/11 Truth Movement." Also: Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia is making a minor bestseller out of Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers.

• Stuart Jeffries interviews Eva Green and Mark Brown profiles Paul Greengrass.

"Sadly, I watched each of these on DVD in my home, unless otherwise noted. Doesn't that just suck?" Matt Prigge introduces his list of "Eleven Favorite/Best Non-2006 Films Seen For the First Time in 2006."

Geoff Andrew talks with Nuri Bilge Ceylan about Climates for Time Out.

Back at IFC News, Aaron Hillis on why four fanboy directors and one fanboy extraordinaire should stay behind the camera.

"A tweaking of artists, the English, the Hollywood studio system, and freaked out momma's boys, all in one deliriously dark comic cavalcade." Bill Gibron revisits The Loved One for PopMatters.

Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly: "If [Sharon] Stone began 2006 in a fruitless effort to revive her early glory, she ended the year with two small but terrific turns in otherwise indifferent ensemble movies, both of which not only played against her beauty but drove home the fact that she's pushing 50. In each she plays, against type, a good woman blinded by her unconditional devotion to others."

In the Independent, Nicola Christie profiles Jodie Whittaker (Venus) and Michael Coveney meets Jessica Lange.

Eilene Zimmerman reports in Salon on how High School Musical can utterly restructure a family's lives.

Online viewing tip #1. Abbas Kiarostami's Two Solutions for One Problem at Expanded Cinema.

Online viewing tip #2. Brian, the "American Messiah" of The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah, is not only blogging but also now "video blogging" on YouTube.

Online viewing tips. Kate Stables's monthly roundup for the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at January 27, 2007 3:18 PM