Fests and events, 3/1.

"No one mixes art house and butcher shop quite the way the 43-year-old [Quentin] Tarantino does," writes Geoff Boucher, who has a good long talk with QT for the Los Angeles Times. "And now he is sending a valentine back to the vintage exploitation films that have been his lurid muse: This Sunday marks the start of his Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival 2007, a tenderly titled, eight-week retrospective of five dozen deliriously bad films, among them Autopsy, Jailbait Babysitter, Chinese Hercules and The Legend of the Wolf Woman. For the uninitiated, 'grindhouse' is a nickname for the creaky theaters that would 'grind' away their projectors for triple features filled with second-run films, exploitation flicks and foreign-film curiosities." Related: GC's serialization of Eddie Muller's Grindhouse.

Now, if you're actually going to be able to attend all or part of this marathon, here's the name you need to click: Dennis Cozzalio. Bookmark that entry and refer to it from here through April.

"Where preservationists might shriek, Bill Morrison sees a strangely rapturous alternative cinema narrative," writes Robert Abele, also in the Los Angeles Times. "Degenerating archival film has long been a source of temporally bewitching beauty for the Chicago-born filmmaker — perhaps best known among the art-house set for his 2002 feature-length study Decasia and Los Angeles is fortunate to have a pair of programs of his short work in local venues over the next two weeks, with Morrison present at both." And they are: Bill Morrison's Theater of Decaying Memories at Redcat on Monday and the LA Film Forum's program on March 11. More from Robert Koehler in the LA Weekly.

The Abbas Kiarostami retrospective at MoMA, "covering more than three decades and including shorts and features, documentaries and instructional films, provides plenty of opportunities to appreciate his plainness and to ponder his mysteries," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But what are [the films] about? The radicalism of Mr Kiarostami's approach to narrative filmmaking may lie in just how thoroughly his films confound that basic question without slipping into abstraction."

"Four years ago, the already desperately loved Noise Pop Festival added a Film Festival component, making it an alt-pop lover's best friend in nearly every relevant medium." Dennis Harvey recommends a few highlights for SF360. Through Sunday.

The American Theatre of Harlem's third annual film festival, "Cultures Collide, opens tonight, runs through the weekend, and features over a dozen films, including Death of Two Sons.

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez previews the True/False Film Festival, also opening tonight and running through the weekend - but in Columbia, Missouri. AJ Schnack is there.

Another iW preview: Brian Brooks on the Cinequest Film Festival, running through March 11 in San Jose.

Through Lebanese Eyes: Recent Political Documentaries by Lebanese Women is a series at Artists' Television Access; March 4, 6, 8 and 11 in San Francisco and Berkeley.

"Momentary Momentum: an exhibition devoted to animated drawings, comprising a dozen installations and a film loop with the participation of Francis Alÿs, Robert Breer, Paul Bush / Lisa Milroy, Michael Dudok de Wit, Brent Green, Takashi Ishida, Susanne Jirkuff, William Kentridge, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Jochen Kuhn, Zilla Leutenegger, Arthur de Pins, Qubo Gas, Christine Rebet, Robin Rhode, Georges Schwizgebel, David Shrigley, Tabaimo, Naoyuki Tsuji & Kara Walker." Saturday through May 3 at Parasol unit in London.

With just over a week to go before the three-pronged SXSW blasts open, the Austin Chronicle is packed with previews for the Music and Interactive festivities. Look for a Film package next week, but there's loads of appetite-whetting going on in this issue already. Besides the likelihood of your finding a fistful of bands you'll want to catch, there's also Richard Whittaker's piece on "The Future of Film on the Web."

Acquarello, catching up with the Film Comment Selects series: "Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's These Encounters of Theirs is a rigorous and subversively irreverent, but thoughtful, sensual, and articulate meditation on the search for enlightenment, the rapture of divine inspiration, the intranscendable distance of gods, and the elusive quest for immortality." Also, Robert Aldrich's "Twilight's Last Gleaming articulates a sincere and elegiac plea for transparency in government and empowerment of the people - a sobering vigil for the restoration of the dignity of political service and the dying ideals of a once great civilization that, in the myopic intoxication of power, has lost its way."

Posted by dwhudson at March 1, 2007 3:06 PM