May 17, 2007

Shorts, 5/17.

Center Stage "When has meta-cinema ever privileged the performer over the auteur to this extent?" Andrew Chan on Maggie Cheung (currently serving as an Official Jury member at Cannes) and Actress, via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

Good reading: Girish posts a few fine excerpts from Richard Roud's biography of Henri Langlois, A Passion for Films, and points to Adrian Martin's piece in Tren De Sombras on Tsai Ming-liang:

Tsai Ming-liang

In Tsai, as in Rivette, Sohrab Shahid Saless or Darezhan Omirbaev, we find the expression of a paradox which is peculiarly cinematic: so much loneliness ([Jonathan] Rosenbaum ranks him among Rivette and Nicholas Ray as the medium's "poets of loneliness") in the midst of the "lonely crowd" of the modern city, but so much aliveness (rather than alienated misery) in that solitude, "this closed system where all things are alive" as Valery said; and an intense address to the film spectator who is, himself or herself, also alone, and also connected (as a film watcher) to a community or crowd, even if only in a virtual or possible way, as a "fish in an aquarium" as Thierry Jousse has recently imagined it. Rosenbaum trembles at the brink of a philosophy of connection and disconnection when he plaintively but deeply writes of Rivette's Haut bas fragile (1995) - and one can say the same of all of Tsai's major films - that they explore "the joys and sorrows of being alone and of being with someone else."

Tim Lucas: "I haven't written about it before, but I believe that Tom Hanks's That Thing You Do! is one of the best American films to emerge in the last decade or so, and arguably the most impressive American directorial debut since Preston Sturges accepted the princely sum of one buck to direct his original screenplay The Great McGinty in 1940."

Heat

"Robert De Niro and Al Pacino will team onscreen for just the second time in Righteous Kill, a $60 million indie production," reports Dade Hayes for Variety. At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg points out the most surprising aspects of this project.

"For all its documentary-like tracing and recreation of notorious murderer Iwao Enokizu and his 78-day killing spree, 1979's Vengeance Is Mine is curiously hesitant to cast blame squarely on its cold-blooded protagonist, much less make sense of these crimes," writes Andy Beta for Stop Smiling. "Told in a choppy verité style of flashbacks and interrogations, Vengeance instead casts a wide net, until every character becomes culpable, complicit."

France beyond Cannes:

Le Lit de la vierge

  • Acquarello reviews Le Lit de la vierge: Philippe Garrel's fusion of iconic cultural history and allegorical social commentary also provides the prescient framework for what would become the inevitable mythologization of the events of May 68, where personal memory has been tinted by the idealized nostalgia of unrealized history, and irreparably altered by the intoxicated haze of (trans)formative years lived under the influence - creating an illusive (and delusive) romanticism borne of a need to reconcile a generation's spiritual desolation with a sense of irrecoverable enlightenment that has been obscured (if not extinguished) by its own reclusive, escapist, and self-destructive behavior."

  • Chris Fujiwara in the Boston Phoenix on Private Fears in Public Places: "Alain Resnais's ineffable film has the hallmarks of his marvelous late style - above all, an airy atmosphere in which the human body and the human presence lack weight and appear to drift.... [T]he end brings calm, if not reassurance. It's the most Resnais can offer, and it's as rarefied as its context - in a word, sublime."

  • LK translates extracts from a 1992 interview with Serge Daney in which he "talks of the difference between cinema and television as the difference between projection and broadcasting."

  • "What if the Swiss Alps were permanently closed to the public? If a 'last tour' of the world's parks became a viable marketing scheme? What if a landscape became nothing more than a strategic ground for war?" asks in the Philadelphia City Paper. "A new trilogy by French filmmaker Marine Hugonnier examines these questions in vivid detail, as she takes audiences on a journey through a conflicted present and a dystopian future."

Rolling Like a Stone A 1965 home movie reemerges to become the backbone of Rolling Like a Stone. "Think of it as a variation on Michael Apted's Up series," suggests Aaron Hillis in the Voice. And at Slant, Rob Humanick: "This is a film acutely aware of its own power over life, affirming the fact that even the most seemingly trivial piece of celluloid is, quite possibly, the stuff dreams are made of."

"[T]he rather unique structure of Masters of Horror transforms the series into an intriguing framework to test auteur theory," proposes Marco Lanzagorta in PopMatters. "Unfortunately, the results do not support a concrete application of the directorial authorship concept. If anything, this series reinforces the notion that a good horror movie is a multifaceted construction resulting from a pool of unique talents that all converge at the right place and time."

Severance "want to rub your face in dirt or poke your ribs as much as put you in a headlock and give you a noogie until you say uncle," writes Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot. More from Eric Kohn for the Reeler.

"The news that Elijah Wood has signed on to play Iggy Pop in a biopic to be helmed by Nick Gomez is amusing for a lot of reasons, but I think an anecdote related by Please Kill Me punk scandalmonger Legs McNeil in a recent issue of Spin magazine is my favorite one." Glenn Kenny retells it, reminding us once again that that was then and this is now.

"Over the past three years, the making of the thriller The Human Trace has nearly severed thumbs, smashed marble tabletops, burned cars, scratched an actor's retinas and sent its writer-director, Jason Satterlund, to the hospital with exhaustion after filming an against-all-common-sense underwater sequence - all on a budget that wouldn't buy a new Toyota Corolla." Jim Ridley tells the story in the Nashville Scene.

Chalk Chalk "has been well-reviewed by Variety, Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter and is the first theatrical release under the label Morgan Spurlock Presents. And on the eve of Chalk's theatrical release in Austin, the place of its birth, cast and crew - several of them my close friends - look back on their long journey." With Toddy Burton.

Also in the Austin Chronicle:

"The film's unafraid of its contradictions, and aware of its multiple fascinations." What's more, argues Susan Gerhard at SF360, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait needs a US distributor.

Our Daily Bread

Ray Pride on Our Daily Bread: ""[D]eeply rooted in landscape and duration, it is hypnotic and magisterial, about moment and passage, about the industrialization of food and the necessity of nurture."

"If many arthouse films nowadays seem destined to divide audiences into generational camps, the absorbing Canadian drama Away from Her has the welcome effect of bridging the age divide in several senses at once," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly.

Recent takes on David Lynch's Inland Empire: Nick Rombes ("Watching the film was like remembering a nightmare, frame by frame. And I mean that as a compliment.") and Matt Riviera ("Perhaps Lynch has made a film we're meant to dream about at night, a film which can only be interpreted once it seeps into our own subconscious.").

Looker points to two entries at WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Kliph Nesteroff's appreciation of Akim Tamiroff - and truck driving movies.

As part of the LA Weekly's bookish issue, Nathan Ihara talks with Miranda July about her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You.

At PopMatters, Bill Gibron presents an annotated list of "10 Tell-All Tomes for the Film Fanatic."

Why has Gina Gershon been going to so many Hollywood funerals lately? For the Los Angeles Times, Chris Lee asks her.

Online viewing tip. Via Fimoculous, Worst Movie Scenes Ever.

Posted by dwhudson at May 17, 2007 10:21 AM