Interviews @ GC.

To catch up with a few of the things going on at the new main site: Jonathan Marlow asks Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck whether he perceives "the beginnings of a minor backlash" against The Lives of Others. Other topics touched on: The Conversation and whether or not an aspiring director should bother with making shorts or going to film school.

Jonathan also asks David Paterson about adapting his mother's novel, The Bridge to Terabithia, and with David Koepp, "perhaps the most successful screenwriter working today" (Toy Soldiers, Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and just out on DVD, Apartment Zero). This last one's appropriately extensive and wide-ranging, but also loose enough to drop a slew of names.

Related:

Updated through 2/23.

• Elbert Ventura at Reverse Shot: "Florian Henckel von Donnersmack's debut feature is hardly a bad movie, but it can't possibly bear the weight of the outsized praise heaped on it." Vince Keenan's impressed, though. Rob Nelson for the City Pages: "If the filmmaker commits a crime, it's in pushing the character's rehabilitation slightly too far - about as much as the weight of a teardrop." Meanwhile, for the Guardian, Hannah Booth has spoken with people the Stasi harassed, jailed, terrified.

• Jeannette Catsoulis, writing in the New York Times, finds Bridge to Terabithia to be "a thoughtful and extremely affecting story of a transformative friendship between two unusually gifted children. The result is a movie whose emotional depth could appeal more to adults than to their offspring." More from Alex Chun in the Los Angeles Times and Kim Voynar at Cinematical.

• "Martin Donovan's Apartment Zero (1988) made one of biggest indie splashes of the late '80s, co-opting primal Hitchcockian ingredients and going for broke," writes Michael Atkinson, who then explains how to play the Apartment Zero Game.

Updates, 2/23: Emily Bazelon in Slate on "the power of [Katherine] Paterson's story 30 years after it was written and its relevance for our addled child-rearing times."

For Der Spiegel, Lars-Olav Beier follows Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on his Lives of Others Oscar campaign trail.

Posted by dwhudson at February 21, 2007 1:20 AM