Shorts, fests, etc, 5/24.

"Academic theologians with a taste for obdurate Brechtian aesthetics, say hello to your new favorite film!" Nathan Lee in the Voice on Magic Mirror, the latest from Manoel de Oliveira, born 1908. "Unlike Jean-Luc Godard (born in 1930), who has long equated his own mortality with the lifespan of cinema, de Oliveira has a sense of humor about his role in the Long Goodbye of the Seventh Art."

"According to Asian Popcorn, the new film by Jia Zhang-ke, entitled Shuang Xiong Hui, will star none other than the sensational Maggie Cheung," reports Aaron at Kung Fu Cult Cinema.

"Remaking Little Dieter Needs to Fly as a fictional feature always seemed a project doomed to unflattering comparisons, as Werner Herzog's 1997 documentary about the titular German-American fighter pilot and his escape from a Vietnam POW camp remains one of the purest and most moving evocations of the director's belief in man's violent relationship to the natural world, and the difficulty in rising above one's past," writes Nick Schager. "And yet here is Rescue Dawn, a stunning film that - despite criticisms that it's an example of Herzog succumbing to easy, uncomplicated convention - radiates with the same haunting unreality and quirky poetry that marked Little Dieter's non-fiction footage of American planes bombing Vietnamese forests, images which commence this fictionalized version of Dieter Dengler's lengthy saga inside (and then in the jungles surrounding) a Laos prisoner-of-war facility."

"I present the people I film with a lot of love; you have to be very patient towards human beings when you shoot them, because documentary characters are individuals and you deprive them of their privacy." David Perlov on his page for Diary - which acquarello reviews.

"The legacy of the concentration camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal is one of unimpeachable bravery, but I Have Never Forgotten You, a new documentary, is a suspect monument to his courage," writes Matt Zoller Seitz; more from Jesse Sweet in the L Magazine and Julia Wallace in the Voice.

Also, "In the documentary Orange Winter orange blooms throughout Kiev, Ukraine, the epicenter of dissent over that country's stolen 2004 presidential elections"; more from Aaron Hillis in the Voice and, at Slant, Rob Humanick: "One can't help but think about it in comparison to most American's meek acceptance of the contrived 2000 election results, but this is a story that remains truly that of the Ukraine's, with [director Andrei] Zagdansky's attempts to chart it amidst artistic representations of the countries' history proving to be a somewhat double-edged sword."

And also in the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis on Dying at Grace: "Allan King's wrenching record of five real deaths is a potent reminder of the fearful gap between fiction and reality." And: "9 Star Hotel may strive to make the political personal, but it does so via subjects who seem just as willing to question their own culture as the one that excludes them." More from Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"The immodest, celebrity-hound [Henry] Jaglom is the filmmaker others love to loathe, especially if they've seen him operate," notes Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix. "Hollywood Dreams, which opens this Friday at the Kendall Square, is - even for Jaglom - an enervating satire, the tale of a needy, hysteric, semi-homely crybaby from Iowa (the very irritating Tanna Frederick) who's arrived in LA seeking her fortune as an actress." Related: Alonso Duralde interviews Jaglom for Film Independent.

"Sarah Polley's directorial debut, Away From Her, is the kind of movie you want to get behind, sort of in the way Brokeback Mountain was," writes Andrew Chan. "Like Brokeback, the film is an adaptation of a New Yorker story, one that tempers its inherently melodramatic subject with an admirable degree of emotional restraint. But, also like Brokeback, the film doesn't fully transfer to the screen what made its source material so moving."

Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly on Into Great Silence:

The monk is praying and we are watching: just that. No drama, no argument, no momentum. This is what the whole film will be like, it quickly tells us. And thus we begin to understand, even if we can't articulate it at first, that the silence we're voyaging into, the great silence, is not just the monastery's and this monk's, but our own - if we will hear it.

Even from this initial compositional scheme, however, you might correctly infer that [Philip] Gröning is also inviting us to ponder something else, too: the spiritual implications of the great voyage of Western visual art, from painting to photography to cinema.

Dave Micevic: "The most notable aspect of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is [William] Greaves's decision to strip himself of authoritative control."

Jim Ridley in the Voice on Barry Lyndon: "Stanley Kubrick's magisterial Thackeray adaptation now stands as one of his greatest and most savagely ironic films, not to mention one of the few period pieces on celluloid so transporting that it seems to predate the invention of cameras."

At Koreanfilm.org, Darcy Paquet interviews Family Ties director (and Memento Mori co-director) Kim Tae-yong.

At Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, Scott Balcerzak offers background on the evolution of the forthcoming collection, Presence of Pleasure: The Work of Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction.

Talk to Me is a 23-minute doc on 20 years worth of one man's answering machine tapes. That man is Mark Craig and he tells his story in the Guardian.

"Humble though it seems, Once has the grand ambition of restoring real life to the musical, or vice versa," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix, where Brett Michel talks with Glen Hansard and John Carney.

Dr George Hardy and Michael Stephenson, co-stars of Troll 2, have set up a website, Best Worst Movie - and they're looking to make a doc by the same name as well. Cheryl Eddy talks with Hardy.

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

• Jason Shamai on Zoo.

• Cheryl Eddy: "It's not as scary as last year's The Descent (nor as funny as [Shaun of the Dead]), but Severance is yet another indication that the UK horror invasion ain't ebbing anytime soon." Related: "Severance isn't your garden-variety torture porn; it slices and dices with a wink and a nod to the Economist crowd," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly.

• Dennis Harvey: "[T]he 12 features in the Pacific Film Archive's new series Czech Modernism, 1926–1949 show why Nazi invaders sensed a celluloid threat: these films are full of playful social critique as well as imaginative stylistic leaps."

"The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival announced its lineup Tuesday for the 2007 event, to be held June 14 - 24," and Susan Gerhard has an overview at SF360. "The world's oldest LGBT film festival, it's still the largest among a growing number of such festivals." Also: Robert Avila looks back on the Mendocino Film Festival.

At the WSWS, Joanne Laurier looks back on films from and about Africa screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

The Austin Chronicle has the lineup for the Paramount Theatre Summer Film Classics Series. Also: Carson Barker talks with Herschell Gordon Lewis; and Shawn Badgley on the Planet Earth series: "The science and the scenery embarrass us with their dignity: Quietly, they make it clear how unfair it is that the fate of the world depends on otherwise so inconsequential a species."

William Speruzzi calls for an "Ambitious Failure Blog-a-Thon": "To participate there is only one requirement: write a convincing essay that will provoke thought on why your chosen film is considered an ambitious failure, deserved or otherwise, and some thoughts on what went wrong, if hindsight worked in the film's favor and/or what was the fate of the film's creators etc."

Online viewing tip. At the Daily Reel, the trailer for the Found Footage Festival.

Online viewing tip #2. Miranda July in the video for Blonde Redhead's "Top Ranking."

Posted by dwhudson at May 24, 2007 8:50 AM