Shorts, 7/17.

"What Ever Happened to Queer Cinema?" asks Alonso Duralde at AfterElton.com. "Yes, the success of [Brokeback Mountain] lifted long-gestating projects like The Mayor of Castro Street, The Front Runner, Stone Butch Blues and The Dreyfus Affair out of development limbo, but as of today none of them have a firm shooting date set. And independent cinema, where queer voices have been breaking the rules of cinema and exciting audiences with new possibilities for at least the past few decades, seems content to make one toothless genre picture (lesbian romantic comedies! gay thrillers!) after another." Via Jenni Olson.

Jason Sperb relaunches Jamais Vu.

Girish opens "a series of occasional posts I'm planning on the subject of surrealism and cinema."

At Cinematical, Patrick Walsh has news of a followup to The Golden Age, meaning, yes, Shekhar Kapur and Cate Blanchett would be making a trilogy about Elizabeth I, and Erik Davis hears that Jonathan Demme will be shooting Dancing with Sheba this fall with Anne Hathaway.

For more up-n-coming news, see Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net, the Guardian and Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

For The Big Sellout (Der grosse Ausverkauf), Florian Opitz "travelled to four continents to draw attention to the destructive consequences of the wave of privatisation carried out internationally in the 1980s and 1990s." Bernd Reinhardt at the WSWS: "Opitz graphically and tangibly shows the dramatic consequences of vital services such as water, electricity, healthcare and transport being put into private hands."

Ed Gonzalez on Descent: "Director Talia Lugacy understands how rape can leave a woman without the authority of expression, and so she pitches her feature-length debut as a work of careful instruction and, finally, rebellion—a means for victims of sexual aggression to grapple with, if not necessarily overcome their feelings of powerlessness." Also at Slant, Nick Schager: "With The Sugar Curtain, documentarian Camila Guzmán Urzúa cinematically strives to reconcile herself with her memories, an endeavor motivated by her still vibrantly warm feelings for the Havana of her 1980s childhood and the harsh, depressing reality of its present state."

"Curt Johnson's documentary Your Mommy Kills Animals takes an expansive look at the American animal-rights movement, and all the savagery, nobility, and hypocrisy therein," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. It "makes for a surprisingly level-headed, appropriately balanced primer on the current state of this multifaceted activism."

Dave Kehr's DVD column in the New York Times this week takes on the latest package from Eclipse, Raymond Bernard's Wooden Crosses and Les Misérables: "Mr Bernard, who did his best work before World War II (and then spent the war in hiding from the Nazis), is little remembered today, even in France. But on the evidence of these two very powerful, very personal films, he's a vital figure much worth reclaiming." Also, "excellent new versions of five CinemaScope films of the 1950s featuring Joan Collins, two of which are quite watchable."

Michael Atkinson at IFC News on Harry Kümel's Malpertuis: "Truth be told, no film could quite live up to the decades of subterranean fanboy hype it's inadvertently produced... Kümel's first feature, Les Lèvres Rouges (Daughters of Darkness), released earlier the same year, is a widely appreciated elegant-decadent rejigger of vampire lore set in a bedazzlingly barren off-season seaside hotel. Malpertuis is as inelegant a movie as you can imagine, in your face, lit like a carnival and entranced with its own grotesqueries.... You have to see it, of course, and I'm glad I did, finally, after all these years." Also, Terry Gilliam's Tideland "may be one of those films that require a distanced cultural context, not the demands of the marketplace now, to frame it."

"The term 'Euro pudding' referred to a flood of films from the 1960s and 70s like The Cassandra Crossing, Woman Times Seven and The Fifth Musketeer, combining a melange of international talents such as a German actress, French actor and Italian director in hopes of luring coin (and audiences) from each country," writes Ali Jaafar in Variety. "Now, a new generation of European filmmakers is creating a more organic flavor of Euro pudding. Filmmakers like the Teuton-Turkish Fatih Akin and French-Algerian Rachid Bouchareb are making films that tackle the growing interconnectivity of European society." Via Ray Pride.\

"The opening is that point of the film which is the most purely cinematic. Image, mood and feeling are uppermost, all working on our senses before the narrative drama takes over." Peter Bradshaw introduces yet another list at the Guardian, with honorable mentions going to the openings of The Seventh Seal and Tokyo Story. Xan Brooks then takes over, writing up ten more.

Also, Germaine Greer blasts Richard Neville, his book, Hippie Hippie Shake, the upcoming adaptation and any and everyone that has anything at all to do with it whatsoever. Then there's Graeme Allister's guide to summer counter-programming in the UK.

"Welles's best sequences brim with the sheer ecstasy of simultaneously living and creating, and doing both freely and to the fullest," writes Tom Huddleston at Not Coming to the Theater Near You. "F for Fake is perhaps the most glorious and sustained example of this tendency."

Kamera runs an extract from Colin Odell and Michelle LeBlanc's David Lynch.

What if Harry Potter were black or gay? wonders Malena Amusa at Alternet. Related: Motoko Rich talks with Jim Dale, Harry Potter's voice in the audio versions, for the NYT and two pieces on wizard rock: Joshua Zumbrun and Sonya Geis for the Washington Post and Tim Dowling for the Guardian.

Frank Dietz, an artist whose work is often based on classic horror film characters dreamt up by someone else, has announced that "the selling of my work is apparently illegal, which I did not realize after 12 years of doing so, so I will no longer sell my monster art." Tim Lucas wonders if he's been contacted by this or that studio and writes, "As someone who owns a couple of Dietz originals (a painting and a charcoal portrait), I find the possibility of such bullying both galling and reprehensible. I say this as someone with intellectual property of my own, toward which I feel a sense of vigilance and responsibility."

"[T]he main reason cinemas are going digital is that they are desperate for an edge," argues the Economist. Also: "3-D films can earn three times as much revenue per screen as 2-D versions on their first weekend. They are also immune to piracy... And even the most advanced home-cinema system cannot do 3-D."

David Poland posts the Women's Wear Daily profile of Nikki Finke that she evidently made disappear. Via Eugene Hernandez: "The constant battles and bickering between must-read Hollywood industry bloggers David Poland (The Hot Blog), Nikki Finke (Deadline Hollywood Daily) and Jeffrey Wells (Hollywood Elsewhere) often deliver engaging insider tales from LA."

"The long, sad decline of Robin Williams: a timeline" by Willa Paskin at Radar Online. Via Bookforum, also pointing to Carla Meyer's piece for the Sacremento Bee on journalists in the movies.

Online viewing tip. The Walk: Wiley Wiggins reinterprets David Lowery's The Outlaw Son.

Posted by dwhudson at July 17, 2007 7:30 AM