Shorts, 5/21.

"Man of Aran has been labeled a naturalistic documentary, a romantic documentary, a mockumentary, and cinematic ethnography," writes Thom at Film of the Year. "Looking at the film's starkly beautiful images, and noticing the way it mixes fiction and documentary filmmaking techniques, I think it's best described using [Robert] Flaherty's 1927 term, 'camera poem.'"

"Are all sequels in the arts automatically second-rate?" asks David Bordwell and calls in "the Badger squad, the ensemble of email pals drawn from various generations of UW-Madison grad students and faculty. I asked them if we can’t understand sequels in a more thoughtful and sophisticated way—historically, artistically, in relation to other media. The result is another virtual roundtable, like the one on B-films held here a few months ago."

Girish points to a talk with Chris Fujiwara and Mark Roberts at Flower Wild: "The conversation ranges widely: 'thieves' and 'theft' in cinema; the phrase 'film noir'; Jacques Becker; Hitchcock; postmodern nostalgia; comparisons of citation in Tarantino and Godard, etc." As Girish says, "Lengthy but all eminently worthy reading."

Michael Guillén talks with Richard Barrios, author of A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film and Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall.

"[G]enre trailers are compelling short films that create atmosphere, establish character and offer specific visual and aural cues, promising audiences the repetition of known genre pleasures." For Film International, Keith M Johnston takes a long hard look at a set of trailers for 30s-era Universal horror films. "What I want to suggest here is that the tools of analysis used to deepen our appreciation of the longer feature film can be applied just as profitably towards an examination of the two-to-three minute trailer."

"Critics will argue, as they always have, that Hollywood Dreams is overly self-indulgent, the cinematography and sound could be better, and the acting is too loosey-goosey," predicts Gary Dretzka at Movie City News. "The vast majority of reviews will take the safe, well-trot route, by recommending it only to his loyal fans (aka, 'cult-like following'), while advising newcomers that '[Henry] Jaglom's films aren't for everybody.' Whose are, though?"

"For several years now, he has been developing a devoted following as the film and video curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. And his current run of arguably the very best art films produced in the last year is a phenomenal coup for a venue competing with nearby San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the many high profile international film festivals in the Bay Area." Sean Uyehara talks with Joel Shepard for SF360.

"[C]an anyone ever make a great film about music?" asks Ted Hope out loud at the Filmmaker blog. This is more than a rhetorical question. He's about to produce The Passenger, the Iggy Pop biopic, so he's been doing quite a bit of thinking about the matter.

With Ad Lib Night, Lee Yoon-ki "has returned to the powerfully patient form that gripped many of us with his debut This Charming Girl," writes Adam Hartzell at Koreanfilm.org.

In the New York Times:

• "Comedy and business, it turns out, go together quite well - and in many media." A brief history, by John Schwartz.

• "Perhaps the case has not lived up to its advance billing as the biggest Hollywood scandal in decades," admit David M Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner, sorting through the Anthony Pellicano case file. "Still, the evidence so far — 150,000 pages of documents and hundreds of recordings Mr. Pellicano made of his own phone calls, many of which include discussions of wiretapping — is a rich sourcebook of show-business manners, mores and argot, a vicarious tour through the dysfunctional heart of Hollywood."

• Laura M Holson asks where Hollywood moguls go once they're "pushed out the door." Also, this is an age of more modest-budgeted premiere bashes.

"All across the country, newspapers are cutting book sections or running more reprints of reviews from wire services or larger papers," wrote Motoko Rich in the NYT a few weeks ago, and you'll like have heard by now that Richard Schickel has responded in the Los Angeles Times by lashing out at bloggers. Response has been predictably fast and furious, but Chuck Tryon's piece for newcritics reads as if he took a good deep breath before hitting the keyboard. Worth a read. For a bit more fire, see Ed Champion.

Also in the LAT:

• "Maybe The Good German will find an audience on DVD," suggests Susan King. "Despite its flaws, there is a lot to admire, including Thomas Newman's evocative music, which was Oscar-nominated for best original score, [Tobey] Maguire's terrifying walk on the wild side, and [Cate] Blanchett's near-perfect channeling of Marlene Dietrich."

• At 9 am on Wednesday, "more than 2,500 fans are expected for the first-ever American theatrical screening of all six Star Wars films in story order." It'll happen at the Los Angeles Convention Center and take all of 17 hours, as Geoff Boucher reports.

Posted by dwhudson at May 21, 2007 12:51 PM