February 3, 2007

Weekend shorts.

Ahlaam "Every movie ever made carries with it a tale of hardship and difficulty: budget problems, creative battles, equipment failures," writes Ashraf Khalil. "But Ahlaam [Dreams], [Mohamed] Daradji's first feature, may just trump them all. Filmed in post-invasion Baghdad with antiquated equipment and an untrained crew amid collapsing security, the movie is a testament to Daradji's resourcefulness, stubborn dedication and, to an extent, sheer dumb luck." One helluva story, which opens with the near-execution of Daradji and three crew members.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

  • In Tokyo, Bruce Wallace finds Michael Arias, "the first non-Japanese director green-lighted for a major anime feature," Tekkon Kinkreet: "[M]echanical Buddhas with elephant heads join gangs, and lost boys battle for turf, while greedy developers from another planet work with the local mob to plow old neighborhoods under. But it is the city itself - with its 24/7 glow, its temples and tuk-tuks and color-splashed skyscrapers with grotesque animal-head motifs - that is the star of this critically acclaimed anime."

Dead Daughters In the Moscow Times, Tom Birchenough recognizes that Pavel Ruminov's Dead Daughters "is certainly the first contemporary Russian horror movie, set in the all-too-recognizable location of an outlying Moscow neighborhood. It's also one of Russia's most successful engagements with the realms of genre cinema to date, the kind of project that fuels the film business from Asia to Hollywood. Critics the world over (including, periodically, this one) may frown on all that, preferring the more rarefied reaches of the art-house stratosphere. But in the end, it's time to give credit where credit is due." Via Ray Pride.

Black Book, Paul Verhoeven's "voluptuously directed epic crumbles beneath the weight of its well-oiled but mechanical plot," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

Steven Shaviro finds in Jaromil Jires's The Joke "almost a critique of the liberal conscience, a display of its impotence when faced not just by the horrors of history, but but also by the very passage of time." Also: The Shot on Main Street.

For the Bangkok Post, Kong Rithdee contacts several Thai movie bloggers to ask them what they're up to and why. And there are links, naturally. Thanks, Peter!

At Twitch, Wolf has the list of nominees for the Hong Kong Film Awards.

Jeff Dawson gets a one-on-one with Robert De Niro for the London Times; Jamie Graham has one for the Telegraph.

Un Chien Andalou When Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali fell out, it was hard and ugly. Geoffrey MacNab tells the story in the Independent. Also: Lesley O'Toole talks with Drew Barrymore.

Kimberly Chun's interview with Werner Herzog: The Outtakes.

euro|topics translates a bit of Bartosz T Wielinski's piece in the Gazeta Wyborcza on Volker Schlöndorff's new film on Solidarnosc: "Strajk is full of pathos, at times unrealistic and at times trite. But perhaps that's the way it has to be to appeal to audiences in the West." Related (and in German): Christian Esch's talk with Schlöndorff for the Berliner Zeitung.

"Oscar-nominated Spanish actress Penélope Cruz is to star in the new Woody Allen film, to be shot this summer in Barcelona, newspaper El Pais reported Friday." Reuters reports.

In the New York Times:

  • "If earnestness equaled skill, Constellation would be a classic," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "If only the film weren't so boringly conceived." Also: "East of Havana is the real deal" and Tazza: The High Rollers, "a terrific film about the sensual energy and reckless optimism of youth." And, The Messengers: "Even when they're working with weak material - the case with this haunted house picture, set around a South Dakota farm where a Chicago family has settled - the Pangs devise scenes so scary that they stain the imagination and never scrub out." The paper's really really putting its new reviewer to work! More on Messengers from Cinematical's horror 'xpert, Scott Weinberg.

  • Stephen Holden on Factory Girl: "[T]he kindest thing to be said about this deluxe photo spread of a film is that Sienna Miller's Edie and Guy Pearce's Andy capture their characters' images and body language with relative precision." That does seem to be about it, though. Also, Fired!, much of which "feels like a desperate attempt to stretch a flimsy half-hour made-for-cable concept into a feature film." Slate's Dana Stevens finds the film "a bit like Sedgwick herself - whatever substantial qualities it might once have possessed have been wasted, picked over by rumor and gossip, and sullied by the pawing of many hands." More from Nathan Lee in the Voice, Dan Callahan at the House Next Door and Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

  • Manohla Dargis: "With In the Pit [Juan Carlos Rulfo] isn't advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world." Also, The Situation, "[e]xploitation cinema of the most narcoleptic kind." More from Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE and Steve Erickson at Gay City News.

Because I Said So
  • Because I Said So "is a mild exercise in deliberate mediocrity, with chuckles and heartwarming moments distributed as carefully as nuts in a factory-made brownie," writes AO Scott. More from Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times and Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. And Slate's Dana Stevens has a "Confession: I'll watch any movie with Diane Keaton in it." Sing it: "Keaton's enduring appeal isn't that she's stuck in an eternal girlhood, it's that she makes being a grown woman look like so much fun. The problem is, the movies haven't grown up along with her." More from David Thomson in the Guardian.

  • Not much to do with film, but Blake Bailey's review of The Way It Wasn't: From the Files of James Laughlin is rather buried in this week's Book Review, and it shouldn't be missed.

Back at indieWIRE, Michael Joshua Rowin reviews An Unreasonable Man; Nick Pinkerton, Seraphim Falls: "David Von Ancken's marathon-man Western trades in Mel's favorite things: out-of-breath action filmmaking in an allegorical vein."

A Fistful of Dollars "Film composers are craftsmen; their music is more or less made to order based on what the film and the director require," writes Steve Garmhausen at the House Next Door. "The best, like [Ennio] Morricone, are freakishly skilled.... But the music of The Man With No Name trilogy is special because it shows Morricone as more than a craftsman who writes beautiful cues. It is strange and inspired, wry and deeply mischievous."

Nick Rombes finds that Thomas Vinterberg's It's All About Love "is a beautiful failure; in fact, it's such a failure that it almost needs to be judged against its own strangeness."

And the Self-Styled Siren finds that, despite "its pedigree," John Ford's Arrowsmith, based on the by Sinclair Lewis, is "basically an interesting failure, proof positive that they were making dull Oscar-bait almost as soon as the awards were started."

Scott Macaulay's been enjoying Rick Trembles's reviews.

David Lowery on Troll 2: "The people to whom I'd mention the film's title would fall into two distinct camps; those who had no idea what I was talking about, and those who'd already seen it about ten times and, upon hearing about a midnight screening at the best movie theater in the country with most of the original cast present, would get this strange light in their eyes. Dear reader, I now understand that reaction."

"Fyodor Bondarchuk's The 9th Company was an enormous success and became post-communist Russia's second highest grossing film to date," reports Luke Harding. "It is the first attempt by a Russian filmmaker to create a big-screen, big-budget movie about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, comparable to Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and other polished Vietnam war movies of the 1980s."

Also in the Guardian:

Notes on a Scandal

Dennis Cozzalio: "Babel is a movie made by a filmmaker seized by one simple idea who then, by devising narrative strategies designed to keep the viewer off-balance, gooses his film into the appearance of profoundity."

"In the Jacobean stage, you'd have this tremendous bloodbath at the end of a work, and then the next thing that would happen is the clown would come out. And everyone in the theater would laugh and it would take the edge off the intense experience." Talking to the AP, The Departed screenwriter William Monahan defends the rat. Spoiler alert, by the way. Via Joe Leydon.

Like many, they're anticipating The Bourne Ultimatum over at the Film Experience.

Ongoing slow-motion best-of-06 lists: Nick Davis and Tim Robey.

"As most of you know, Facets is in Chicago. And, also, that the Chicago Bears are in the Super Bowl." Phil Morehart introduces a list of "Facets' Favorite Football Flicks."

Mike Russell mingles among Tolkienites.

At Bad Lit, a different Mike considers the future of online distribution.

Online listening tip. Peter Kenyon reports on film clubs in Saudi Arabia, a "land without theaters," for NPR.



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Posted by dwhudson at February 3, 2007 4:06 PM