Weekend shorts.

"Tarantino's masterpiece is also the film via which he takes leave of structure," writes Emmanuel Burdeau. "Death Proof sees the fast paced succession of two similar parts which no reason binds, twice the same story... Tarantino contents himself with bouncing from one to the other, unraveling two times two ribbons, language and the road."

Also freshly translated for Cahiers du cinéma, Cyril Neyrat notes that Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone "has the simple confidence of a new start" and Jean-Michel Frodon looks back to Cannes: "After the generalized disappointment in the 2006 edition, the Festival has incontestably succeeded its 60th birthday." And no, currently, there's nothing new in English at the site regarding Juliette Binoche, but isn't she lovely?

An unusual sort of update, but this really is the place for it: Jean-Michel Frodon explains how the project Boyd mentions in the comment below came about. Why now? "The precise circumstance is Juliette Binoche's decision to work with, in a little more than one year, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Amos Gitai, Olivier Assayas and Abbas Kiarostami." But that's just for starters.

"[N]o one working in modern cinema, a culture that supposedly prizes originality (at least outside Hollywood), may be as brave, as politically vital, and as utterly intolerant of the medium's systemic compromises as [Peter] Watkins," writes Michael Atkinson in Good Magazine.

"So, again, can you teach art? Or dreaming? Or cinema?" For the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews meets Stephen Frears, 66, who's working with Josué Méndez, 30, "a Peruvian pupil-protégé," on the younger filmmaker's next feature. They're just one pair in a mentoring project: "Rolex hands $50,000 to each team and tells them to get on with it."

Jason Morehead may be a tad more of shoegaze fan than I am, but if so, only a tad. Regardless, good news: Matthew Solarski reports on a shoegaze doc in the making at Pitchfork.

"Naomi Watts has signed on to star opposite Clive Owen in The International, an action thriller that Tom Tykwer is directing for Columbia Pictures," reports Borys Kit for the Hollywood Reporter, where Gregg Goldstein has this story: "Tim Robbins, Martin Landau, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Harry Treadaway will star opposite Bill Murray and Toby Jones in 20th Century Fox's fantasy City of Ember from Walden Media/Playtone and producers Gary Goetzman and Tom Hanks." Both via Cinematical.

Flickhead reviews Andrew Semans's All Day Long: "Comparisons could be made with some of the ideas found in the works of John Cassavetes, Hal Hartley and Eric Rohmer, but only superficially. Those filmmakers operate from vantage points of idealism, where characters are capable of verbal communication, seduction and deception. With Mr Semans, humanity is tongue-tied by want and desire."

"By the time the last section wraps up with a mighty act of surgical self-destruction, you know you're in the grip of a full-blown Cronenbergian imagination." Phil Hoad talks with György Pálfi about Taxidermia, in which Peter Bradshaw finds "a certain tendency to sub-Rabelaisian scenes of music, dancing and rumpy-pumpy that reminds me of Emir Kusturica's recent movies: much surface activity that masks a lack of ideas. Kusturica could well be an influence. One to be wary of. Aside from this, Taxidermia is a visually striking, provocative dish served up with the most horrid ingredients imaginable: greed, revulsion, alienation and loneliness."

Also in the Guardian:

• "[I]f you are looking for a sober documentary that explains what has been happening in [Haiti] in the period from the Duvalier dictatorships to the ousting of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, [Ghosts of Cité Soleil] ain't it," writes Duncan Campbell. "Nor did [director Asger] Leth ever intend it to be.... Too many documentaries, he says, are made for people who already know the arguments." More from Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

• Alex Rayner has a backgrounder on Daft Punk's Electroma, which Alfred Lee caught for the LA CityBeat. "Judging by the ensuing walkouts and boos over the final credits, the movie didn't go over too well."

• "I find a good deal of my film-related pleasure these days in books rather than on the screen," writes John Patterson, who then lists several surely terrific volumes. "But still I'm not happy. All I notice are the gaps, the spaces on the shelves where unwritten books about subjects that obsess me would sit if only some lazy bastard would just write them."

• Bradshaw on Molière, a "very moderate sub-Stoppardian speculation about the great French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, or Molière, played by Romain Duris.... You need a very sweet tooth for this kind of thing." More from Tim Robey in the Telegraph: "After Olivier Dahan's galumphing La Vie en rose, it's certainly a pleasure to see a French blockbuster that's so assured and light on its feet, even if [director Laurent] Tirard allows it to dawdle just a little in the second half." And yet more from Ray Bennett.

• Bradshaw also reviews the "deeply pointless adaptation of Macbeth, in which the original play is transferred to modern gangland - perhaps the biggest cliche imaginable," and Last Tango in Paris: "Nobody makes sex films like this any more, with the exception of France's Catherine Breillat, who actually has a minor acting role here." More from the Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm.

• Rob Mackie on Flags of Our Fathers and Letter From Iwo Jima: "As a pair, the films paint a grim but memorable picture of the last days of a war which had a clearer objective than any since." Also: "A shame that The Illusionist has to follow the more celebrated but less satisfying The Prestige."

For the Times of London and Sky Movies, James Christopher treks to the set of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People to talk with Kirsten Dunst and producer Stephen Woolley not about the movie but about what makes a modern classic. And then he names his top 8.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Davies tallies Telegraph readers' votes: "Because of the huge diversity of the films put forward, it's been impossible to compile the top 100 list I originally intended. So here are the top 54 films (with quite a few ties)."

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij has an update on Lars von Trier's Erik Nietzsche: The Early Years. Also, a "Quick Chat with Julie Delpy about 2 Days in Paris."

"Chinese Cinema 101" is a quick rundown of the essentials from Tribeca's Artistic Director, Peter Scarlet.

The New Statesman runs Wim Wenders's talk about "Europe's soul" you'll have seen mentioned here before.

You know there's more to cinema in India than Bollywood, but do you know how much more? "A country of more than a dozen official languages, India has several different 'ollywoods' scattered across the subcontinent, churning out movies that cater mostly to regional audiences," writes Henry Chu. "Almost as prolific [as Bollywood] are 'Kollywood,' the Tamil film industry based here, and 'Tollywood,' its Telugu-language counterpart in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. Combined, the two entertainment powerhouses released nearly twice as many feature films last year as Bollywood."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "Lady Chatterley is the most frankly sensual movie in memory," writes Kenneth Turan. And Kevin Crust reviews Lights in the Dusk and Dr Bronner's Magic Soapbox.

Stuart Klawans in the Nation on Live Free or Die Hard: "Did you need more proof that September 11 did not, in fact, change everything?" Also, Knocked Up "belongs to the genre that Stanley Cavell brilliantly defined as the American comedy of remarriage: films about a woman and man who have separated because their original union was false, and who now must work out a true way to live together.... But even though Knocked Up respects the conventions... it also departs from them by taking this deeply adult genre and regressing it toward childhood."

Ray Pride: "Steeped in many of the political and economic developments of the decade in Hong Kong since the 1997 handover of the former British colony, a supple parable of the absorption of Hong Kong and Macau into the Chinese dragon, the eyes-wide, visceral, fluent, violent Triad Election is one of director Johnny To's most accomplished. (Comparisons to the French master Jean-Pierre Melville, a major influence on John Woo, are not misplaced here, either.)"

In the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz finds Hula Girls to be "an encyclopedia of clichés." Also, Jeannette Catsoulis: "Though hyped as a torture movie, Captivity is really the extreme revenge fantasy of every (slightly damaged) guy who ever lusted after a woman far out of his league." More from Robert Abele in the LAT and Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

"Iraq in Fragments is a nearly flawless film, a still-timely documentary shot in a war zone with cinematography of a caliber rarely seen even in a controlled studio product," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger.

For Stop Smiling, Justin Picco reviews Criterion's release of Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara: "Among several questions the set wonderfully complicates is to what extent these films can be considered the work of a discrete identity in the first place. Each is the result of a unique collaboration between blossoming filmmaker Teshigahara (who'd come to previous fame for his work in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement) and novelist Kobo Abe. World-class Japanese film scholar Donald Richie... cannot compare this creative lockstep between filmmaker and working novelist to any other partnership in film history."

Paul Matwychuk talks with John Dahl about You Kill Me and DK Holm's notion of "film soleil."

Gill Pringle profiles Michelle Pfeiffer for the Independent.

"The Shamus watched Coal Miner's Daughter for the first time in years, and I was struck again by the sheer force and magnetism of Tommy Lee Jones's performance as Doolittle Lynn, the husband of country star Loretta Lynn. Sissy Spacek won the Oscar as Loretta and it remains a fine, sturdy performance. But it would be nothing without the grounding wire of Tommy Lee's presence."

"Technology plus economics equals the current sorry state of the mainstream cinema." For the Literary Review of Canada, Geoff Pevere reviews The Decline of the Hollywood Empire, by Hervé Fischer, whose argument he doesn't quite buy whole: "While there is no doubt there are major changes afoot, and that these changes, whether they are based in digital production, distribution or exhibition technologies, represent seismic shifts for the movie industry, it is far from a done deal that they will incur Armageddon for Hollywood." Via Bookforum.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Jeff Ignatius

"Film director Richard Franklin, known for the thrillers Patrick and Road Games, and more recently the compelling dramas Hotel Sorrento and Brilliant Lies, has died in Melbourne aged 58." Matthew Clayfield points to Sandy George's obit in the Australian and to Aaron W Graham's profile in Senses of Cinema.

"Jim Mitchell, who helped bring eroticism into the political and social consciousness of San Francisco and later was imprisoned for the sensational killing of his own brother, died apparently of a heart attack, at his home in western Sonoma County, investigators said Friday," report Peter Fimrite, Jaxon Van Derbeken and Steve Rubenstein in the San Francisco Chronicle. "The porn impresario, whose lime-lit life and tragic downfall were featured in a book and television movie, was pronounced dead at around 8 pm He was 63." Via Movie City News.

Online browsing tip. Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog: "This series of side-by-side comparisons of frames from various Disney films (via Wired's Underwire blog) is meant to show how Disney recycles frames from one 2D animated flick to another in order to save time, money and labor value."

Online viewing tip #1. At AICN, Quint's got a clip from Todd Haynes's I'm Not There with Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan and David Cross as Allen Ginsburg.

Online viewing tip #2. "Making a movie is hard. Cohabitation is harder." Tight Shots is a new webisodic series from Lena Dunham. Speaking of Nerve Video, did you catch all of Season 2 of Joe Swanberg's Young American Bodies?

Online viewing tips, round 1. The Hollywood Reporter's Steve Bryant: "Thought it might be worthwhile to pull together links to some of my reviews of web-only shows. There's some amazing stuff out there."

Online viewing tips, round 2. Voyeurs at SiouxWIRE.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Apple's just added dozens of new trailers to its collection.

Posted by dwhudson at July 14, 2007 3:26 PM