July 2, 2007

Shorts, fests and such, 7/2.

I Walked With a Zombie "Val Lewton held on to integrity, but little else. He was a talent to admire, but forget about emulating him if you wanted a future in movies." John McElwee traces the rise and fall at Greenbriar Picture Shows.

"I will offer no apologies or explanations." Peter Nellhaus presents his list of "100 Films, 100 Filmmakers." And Dennis Cozzalio shows us his: "I hope you enjoy it, I hope it drives you crazy, I hope it inspires you to comment on what I included and what I left out, and I hope it reminds you of movies you love as well as movies you have yet to see."

"Morocco is my favorite movie, and I've visited it on a regular basis over the last 35 years," writes Dan Sallitt. "When a movie becomes so much a part of one's life, one watches it differently: it becomes a psychic space to explore, and whole viewings might be devoted to coaxing details out of the background, or creating a new schema and seeing how extensively one can apply it."

Mike builds an index at Esotika Erotica Psychotica and posts a list of rare titles he's trying to track down.

Oliver Stone was hoping to make a doc about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the Iranian president has turned him down, calling him "part of the Great Satan," reports Robert Tait in the Guardian.

Venice Eric Rohmer? Claude Chabrol? Claude Miller? "While Venice Artistic Director Marco Muller will be in Paris this week, rumors are reaching fever pitch regarding the French contenders at the 64th Venice Film Festival (August 29 - September 8), whose program will be revealed on July 26," reports Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa.

More fests and events:

"[P]rotests against films - such as those against Phenomenon, which featured Scientology-member John Travolta, 11 years ago - and the refusal of filming permits are the most disastrous and most typically German of all possible responses," argue Malte Herwig and Lars-Olav Beier in Der Spiegel.

Glenn Kenny comments on the whole Germans-n-Scientologists brouhaha - but the real problem facing Valkyrie will be its director, argues Bill Gibron at PopMatters: "Bryan Singer is a hack. In a flummoxing fanboy realm where every movie he's helmed has been deemed an instant classic, he's barely better than a dozen far more despised directors."

Despair "The film Despair is focused on a man's consciousness, focused on a divided self, a self that becomes amoral, and disturbed, but rather than being partly haunted by the trauma of the German political past - which was my assumption - a man is partly haunted by the trauma of the present, his personal present and the German political present," writes Daniel Garrett of Fassbinder's 1977 film in the Compulsive Reader. "My misunderstanding made me think about how meaning is constructed when watching a film."

Senkyo (Campaign) has been a hit at festivals all year long. At Midnight Eye, Jason Gray calls it "a riotously funny, but also disturbing portrait of the mechanisms behind party politics in Japan" and interviews director Kazuhiro Soda.

"As far as excellent cat and mouse thrillers go, Death Note rates up there with the best I've seen in recent memory (alongside Infernal Affairs II)." Blake talks with director Shusuke Kaneko for Twitch.

For SF360, Michael Fox talks with Jasmine Dellal about Gypsy Caravan.

Slant's Ed Gonzalez on Dynamite Warriors: "The same delayed adolescence that responds to Transformers may get a kick out of the main character's ability to travel across long distances on dynamite sticks ignited by his spark-producing fingers, or the idea of menstrual blood being used as a form of fuel. Everyone else, though, will recognize that Dynamite Warrior runs on the same brand of empty." Also, "The Devil Came on Horseback both explains the rationale for the chaos in Darfur in terms we can all understand and asks us to follow [Brian] Steidle's lead by demanding our leaders to act now in order to save the helpless people of Darfur. God help us if we don't."

"I want to have one foot in the United States and the other in my culture," director Nicolás López tells Lorenz Muñoz in the Los Angeles Times, whose superhero comedy, Santos, has been made in Spanish, while his next, a romantic comedy produced by Salma Hayek's company, Ventanazul will be shot in English.

Acquarello reviews a collection of short films by Rose Lowder.

Passenger "[T]he formal structure of [Andrzej Munk's] Passenger that we have now, with its gaps and hesitations, its dissonances and ambiguities, the way it repeatedly draws near and pulls away again, is in perfect accord with its subject matter: the Holocaust." Ian Johnston. Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Adam Balz on Radiant City.

The Independent runs a story from Woody Allen's Mere Anarchy, "Nanny Dearest."

Online viewing tip. "Wanna see a NSFW trailer for a heist movie staring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and a naked Marisa Tomei? Okay." Rex Sorgatz points to the trailer for Sydney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. You'll also see Albert Finney, but for the time being, you won't see this film in a theater near you.

Posted by dwhudson at July 2, 2007 4:01 PM