Weekend shorts.

"For nearly a decade, director Alexei Balabanov and producer Sergei Selyanov have ridden a rising wave of nationalism in Russia to box office success with tales of local heroes triumphing over Chechen separatists, American crime bosses, and underworld hit men," writes Andrew Osborn in the Wall Street Journal. "But their latest film, set in 1984, has left audiences feeling uncomfortable by taking aim at a new target: the Soviet Union. The gritty thriller, set in 1984 in the USSR's twilight years, has triggered controversy with an unremittingly bleak and violent portrayal of the period." The film: Gruz 200 (Cargo 200).

"For all of its wonders, anime is all too often riddled with cliches, hackneyed plots, unoriginal characters, and shallow eye candy," writes Jason Morehead. "Of course, not everything can be a Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, or Satoshi Kon title, but even so, one has to wade through an awful lot to get to the good stuff. Which is why it's always refreshing when someone new comes along, someone who feels like breath of fresh air. Someone like Makoto Shinkai." And he points to trailers for the upcoming 5cm Per Second, headed for theaters before a release on DVD in December.

With the addition of "Montage," by Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques Rivette, The Order of the Exile now has the complete Rivette: Texts and Interviews, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, online. And this is just one of many new features on the site, including Peter Harcourt revisiting his 1977 piece on Rivette's early films and Tom Milne's 1969 piece on L'amour fou.

Joni Mitchell, filmmaker. Jim Emerson argues the case.

DK Holm, blogging at ScreenGrab, hears how Kenneth Anger livened up Curtis Harrington's funeral - in ways Harrington might not have appreciated.

The Los Angeles Opera's 2008-09 season will open with a trilogy of one-act operas by Giacomo Puccini known as Il Trittico. The first two acts, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica, will be directed by William Friedkin, which isn't much of a surprise. But the third, Gianni Schicchi, will be directed by... Woody Allen? The BBC reports and quotes him: "I have no idea what I am doing. But incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm."

"I went to a screening of Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn fighting off one of those desperately lonely, uncertain states we all find ourselves in at times," writes Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "Two hours later, I came out of the theater flying, simply too in love with life to fret over some ground-level personal nonsense. Herzog's film about torture and starvation is the feel-good movie of the summer."

John Patrick Shanley will be directing an adaptation of his play, Doubt. Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman are on board and, according to Danielle Hine at Time Out, Amy Adams may take the lead.

"The Weinstein Co is going into business with 24 producer Tony Krantz and Infernal Affairs co-director Andrew Lau for a trio of Hong Kong action pics." Steven Zeitchik reports for Variety. Via Peter Martin at Cinematical.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince has a long talk with Malik Bader about Street Thief.

"Most of the stuff in Mexican Sunrise is based on personal experience and some near-death experiences that I've had," filmmaker Rowdy Stovall tells Carson Barker in the Austin Chronicle. The film's done quite well at festivals and will screen next week at the Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek. Speaking of which, Marc Savlov bids farewell to the original Downtown location.

"At 74, he is ever the provocateur, the man who kickstarted the blaxploitation genre, the man who once punched out an audience member who insulted his film, the infamous Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song." Sarah Hepola talks with Melvin Van Peebles for Nerve.

For the New Statesman, Daniel Trilling listens to the radio: Christopher Eccleston "pays homage to the films that became known as the British new wave" in Angry, Sexy and Working Class and, in his radio debut, Blackpool: The Greatest Show Town, Ken Loach conjures a world that "has long since vanished, but these fleeting glimpses created a kind of intimacy that radio so often fails to deliver." Also: Ryan Gilbey reviews La Vie en Rose and Paris, je t'aime.

Longing "intrigues because it presents an outwardly decent man falling equally in love with two women but eschews simplistic judgments and doesn't pander to viewers by telling them whom they should root for or why the characters do what they do," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. More from Daniel Kasman. Also in the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis: "Firmly anchored by its protagonist's love of the land, The Real Dirt on Farmer John offers one man's extraordinary life as a gateway to a larger history of tragedy and transition. It's an unflinching account of what farming takes - and, more important, what it gives back."

Ryan Fleck tells the Telegraph about his favorite Robert Altman movie, McCabe and Mrs Miller. Also: Benjamin Secher talks with Sydney Pollack and Frank Gehry.

Nigel Andrews profiles Guy Maddin for the Financial Times.

For the London Times, Stefanie Marsh profiles Antonio Banderas and Alan Franks talks with Marianne Faithfull.

Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot on Hostel: Part II: "[Eli] Roth's tactic isn't really to scare viewers, to create new frissons in movie watching, or even to gross them out necessarily, but to play ever escalating games of one-upmanship. In other words, he asks how he can top what he and other genre directors have previously done; filmmaking becomes a pissing contest, a frattish clique in which the biggest castrated cock wins."

"Once has something for everyone: a scrappy indie sensibility for the aesthetes, a sex-free romance for the prudes, a smart-as-a-tack script for intellectuals, and sympathetic characters for the rest of us," writes Gabriel Shanks. "Let's not dismiss the songs, however; 'When Your Mind's Made Up' reveals a startlingly talented composer in [Glen] Hansard, whose impassioned voice and fragile performances form the film's emotional center."

For the Guardian, David Thomson calls up Robert De Niro to talk about The Good Shepherd.

Also: "[Tom] Stoppard is in Moscow to oversee the production of his trilogy The Coast of Utopia, and I am here to see what a Russian director and Russian actors bring to plays written by a foreigner about their own radical thinkers of the 19th century, Belinsky, Bakunin and Herzen. Nina Raine asks him, "What is the Russian theatre like? 'It's romantic,' he says. 'It's all sloping wooden floors and overflowing ashtrays. It's everything you want it to be.'"

"Jhoom Barabar Jhoom is, so far, the best of 2007's mainstream Hindi films. For all of the family reunions, however, it disappoints a bit in comparison to [Shaad Ali's] last effort [Bunty aur Babli]. Still, it's diverting," writes Laura Boyes. Also in the Independent Weekly, Godfrey Cheshire on La Vie en Rose and Crazy Love.

"One to Another cannot be appreciated without some measure of guilt," writes Ed Gonzalez. "This oh-so-French account of a pretty boy's murder makes a spectacle of its young twentysomething cast's plump buttocks, pert nipples, uncut sausage, and striking Gallic features." Also at Slant, Eric Henderson on Criterion's release of Chris Marker's La Jetée and Sans Soleil.

"Watch [Last Tango in Paris] today, and you can't help but be slightly surprised by the trail of controversy it left in its wake," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "'This is a movie that people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies,' [Pauline] Kael wrote back in 1972. Three decades on, as it is re-released, Last Tango in Paris remains a fascinating case study, but Kael's remarks appear a little overstated. Was this really the 'most liberating film' ever made? Does the debate about it continue? By contemporary standards, the sex scenes no longer seem extreme."

"What may be most amazing about Panic in Needle Park is to look back, knowing that this film came from a major studio," writes Peter Nellhaus. "Even today, the so-called independents would be nervous about making a film as downbeat or as marginally experimental."

David Marin-Guzman on Deja Vu: "Tony Scott's latest isn't just a simple time travel film. It's actually a thinly veiled apology for George Bush incompetence over Hurricane Katrina."

"[O]ne of the basic joys of Gigi is pure escapism," writes Farisa Khalid for PopMatters. "The picture has a buoyancy and playfulness that few movie musicals have. The glorious saturated Technicolor of [Vincente] Minnelli's images: the oxblood red of the brocade walls of Mamita's apartment; the vivid green and purple tartan of Gigi's dress; the sleekness of the men and women all taken from images out of Renoir's paintings, (the stately tour of Parisian high life is like a two-hour slide show for art-history majors); Cecil Beaton's lush costumes, all lace and crinoline (he transferred his memories of Edwardian England onto 1900s Paris); the energy and dynamism of the score, jaunty and robust in its musical depiction of fin-de-siècle Paris, which evokes Bizet and Offenbach."

"[N]atural mysteries and their entwinement with the mechanical cinematic recording, selection, and editing of [James] Benning's film are what is most intriguing and even sensorially affecting about Ten Skies, the refinement of a view one may take for granted and an appreciation for the metaphysical subtleties of cinema through such a simple focus," writes Daniel Kasman.

"Unlike Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986), Killer of Sheep has been seen too rarely to influence as many filmmakers," writes Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog. "John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood (1991), for example, also takes place in South Central, but that's where the comparisons end. David Gordon Green's George Washington (2000), however, was clearly influenced by it—too clearly for my taste."

Variety: "10 Screenwriters to Watch."

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Evan Waters.

Interviews in German: Thilo Wydra (Der Tagesspiegel) with Werner Herzog and Günther Lachmann (Die Welt) with Wim Wenders.

"It's the time of reflection on what matters, the time of the political artist. This summer's great stage belongs to them. And they get to play twice - at the Venice Biennale and the Documenta in Kassel." Signandsight translates Hanno Rauterberg's piece for the June 14 issue of Die Zeit. More on Documenta 12 from Holland Cotter in the NYT.

Related Artforum diary entries: David Velasco: "If you leap headfirst into the decadent fray of Venice or Basel, Documenta - with its serious (so German!) demeanor and this year's notable dearth of private parties - is frequently approached with trepidation. 'No one wants to be the Documenta scout,' noted one New York dealer.... Once a bastion of the Enlightenment (Documenta's central exhibition site, the Fridericianum, was the first public European museum), and heavily reconstructed after World War II, Kassel is an uneven city, with pockets of dismal, austere buildings offset by some serious Caspar David Friedrich-worthy Landschaften." And Nicolas Trembley and Sarah Thornton have been running around Basel.

Ray Pride snaps shots of directors with movies currently in theaters.

Online grinning tip. The second installment of Matthew Guerrieri's Strauss and Mahler Re-Enact Your Favorite Movie Moments, via Alex Ross.

Online viewing tip. Jem Cohen directs Patti Smith covering "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Supposedly. I can't be sure: "We're sorry, content protected by Digital Rights Management is not available on the Macintosh." How very AOL. Anyway, that's via Rex Sorgatz, who also has an online browsing tip, a Steampunk slide show at Wired News, introduced by Gareth Branwyn.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Kate Stables has half a dozen at the Guardian.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Boyd van Hoeij's got five trailers at european-films.net.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Momus has found clips from John Berger's "brilliant, polemical 1972 television series Ways of Seeing." Via Owen Hatherley, who suggests, "Lines could be drawn from here to Chris Marker and Adam Curtis."

Posted by dwhudson at June 23, 2007 1:14 PM