May 26, 2007
Long weekend shorts.
"Lars von Trier's 2000 film, Dancer in the Dark, is going to be turned into an opera for Denmark's Royal Theater," reports the AP.
"Dutch actress Carice van Houten, so brilliant in Paul Verhoven's recent Black Book, has signed up to star in Smoke and Ochre, a biopic of revolutionary South African writer Ingrid Jonker," reports Time Out's Chris Tilly.
At Twitch, Todd points to news that Peter Jackson has asked Stephen Fry to write the screenplay for Dambusters. Here's a little background on the story.
In the Los Angeles Times, Richard Schickel beats up on Raymond J Haberski Jr's Freedom to Offend: How New York Remade Movie Culture:
The unlikely hero of Haberski's work is, yes, [Bosley] Crowther [New York Times film critic from the early 40s to the late 60s]. I do not gainsay the valuable work the Times' critic did in defending movies as disparate as The Bicycle Thief and The Miracle from the censors. He was a liberal and humane man. Unfortunately, he was also possessed of the most viscous prose style in criticism, which perfectly conveyed the limits of his aesthetic. He was OK with earnest Hollywood efforts that deplored racism, for example, and he came to optimistic, inspiring conclusions. But to watch poor Bos struggle with, say, a film by Godard or Bergman was to witness an anguish of incomprehension.
Also: Karen E Bender on Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You.
Michael Guillén has a fascinating entry on Jean Malin, a pioneer I hadn't known about before who, in the 30s, "gained notoriety for being 'a pansy playing a pansy.'"
Reminder: Chris Cagle's been working away on his 1947 Project, and it's been fascinating looking over his shoulder.
Andy Klein talks with Werner Herzog about Rescue Dawn and the doc it's based on, Little Dieter Learns to Fly. Also in the LA CityBeat, David Ehrenstein chats with Zoe Cassavetes about Broken English.
The Chicago Reader's JR Jones finds Chalk to be "a riotously funny mockumentary in the style of The Office about fledgling teachers at a middle-class public school in Austin, Texas."
"Playfully didactic and wittily digressive, Ten Canoes is about aboriginal storytelling inside storytelling, roaming the Australian swampland and finding not one story but many," writes Daniel Kasman.
"A gentler, more wistful Henry Jaglom wrote and directed Hollywood Dreams, his 15th and perhaps most accessible film," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "Filled with movie memories and gender confusion, the story shows one of our most polarizing independent filmmakers in a nostalgic mood, musing over the burdens of fame and the price of success - which would be love, as if you didn't know."
Also in the New York Times:
The cinetrix has not taken to The Puffy Chair: "When the film ends - and I do mean ends - the cinetrix suspects that viewers are supposed to wrestle with the abruptness and the ambiguity, but she just felt relieved to leap out of the Chair and bid the whole lot good riddance." Also, notes on Will Ferrell.
David Lowery on Fay Grim: "[W]hat caught me off guard was how dramatically satisfying the film was as a sequel; it's a massive bit of revisionism that (I think) that feels like a natural extension."
"Poison Friends is at once a sly satire on the pretensions and aspirations of academia and an intellectual suspense-thriller that builds and builds but never loses credibility," writes Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times. Emmanuel Bourdieu's strength as a director precisely matches his instincts as a screenwriter: He loves to watch groups interact," adds Stuart Klawans in the Nation, where he also reviews Paprika and considers Ido Haar's 9 Star Hotel and "the horrid absurdity of his story."
"How will Sarkozy change France?" Patrick Barkham asks Jean Reno, who's a close friend of the new president's: "'Less socialism. He will be good for the economy, because we have to work a little bit more. I think we are the only country where we have a 35-hour working week, that famous law, and it is forbidden to work more.' He chuckles. 'C'est incroyable. It's unbelievable. So he will change the taxes and we will be more involved in Europe. Yes, we have to be.'"
Also in the Guardian:
Posted by dwhudson at May 26, 2007 2:34 PM
I post the following comment because the LA TImes is unable to run letters to the Book Review Editor.
In Richard Schickel's curious though revealing review of "Freedom to Offend," he strongly suggests that I defend the notorious Legion of Decency, Hollywood’s disastrous Production Code, and the twiddle-dee and twiddle-dumb of censorship Joseph Breen and Martin Quigley. I don't.
Schickel thinks the hero of the book is Bosley Crowther, the critic that other critics of Schickel's generation are required to hate. He's not.
The greatest fault of my book, though, is the fact that I am not sufficiently awed by Schickel and his colleagues. I failed to do justice to his memory of a glorious time.
I am not a memoirist; I am an historian. As such, I try to avoid falling for that all too common delusion that memory trumps critical thought. It doesn't.
Originally, I had intended to entitle this project "The Heroic Age of Moviegoing," assuming that Schickel and his generation had overcome arcane cultural codes with passion and verve. What I found was a much more complicated and interesting story in which characters like Crowther and others who worked prior to the "heroic" 1960s helped open up movie culture by constantly attacking the purveyors of cultural containment. Thus my book is not a eulogy to a past remembered by Schickel.
I too respect my elders--pace Mr. Schickel--I just don't trust their memories of their heroic selves.
Raymond J. Haberski, Jr.
Author, "Freedom to Offend: How New York Remade Movie Culture"
Marian College
Posted by: Raymond Haberski at June 4, 2007 10:56 AM
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