Shorts, 8/23.

For an Austin Chronicle cover story, Marc Savlov dips into "life in Kat Candler's cinematic world: The wiry thrum of teenage misfit melancholy - so much like the whine of the titular insects in her 2000 breakout feature, cicadas - is never far from her characters' hearts and minds, no matter how good they are. Death happens, communication breaks down, tears flow, and then getting your film distributed and out to the public turns out to be the toughest hurdle of all. And then, as if by sheer, grappling humanity, her characters go on, her films garner awards, become guideposts for other people, other filmmakers. They survive. They get better." Following up on jumping off bridges, she's currently braving capital letters, working on a comedy, Brain Brawl, and teaching at the Austin School of Film.

On a related note, a few words on New Day Films, "a sort of proto-feminist correction to the nominally available Hollywood distribution and exhibition channels."

Also in the Chronicle: Spencer Parsons talks with Julie Delpy about 2 Days in Paris.

Brett Morgen's Chicago 10 "brings to life the various voices of dissent - including Yippie founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, peace activists Rennie Davis, David Dellinger and Tom Hayden, and Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale - that have come to define the multivalent nature of the opposition," writes Nancy Spector. "These individuals and organizations embodied the spectrum of countercultural resistance, from pacifism to an Absurdist theatre of pure revelry to armed militancy. What comes across most clearly in Chicago 10 is their ability to cause a momentary breach in the political system, which simultaneously underestimated and overreacted to this call for change. Almost 40 years later such mass disturbance is impossible to imagine. The political machinery of the neo-con right, born out of the anarchy of 1968, has come to anticipate and control most forms of political protest."

Also in frieze, novelist Brian W Aldiss considers the long tradition of apocalyptic scenarios in literature and film and then writes, "The future itself has receded like a departing tide, leaving us on the dangerous sands of the present, where authors such as Geoff Ryman, Ken MacLeod, Iain Banks and Philip Pullman write of much that is happening now: if not a present, then an alternative present. It is no longer science fiction as we used to know it. The present has become our contemporary launch pad. Never has the transitory seemed more permanent."

Why are we "drowning in quirk," as Michael Hirschorn puts it for the Atlantic? "David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985 - halfway between his 'Psycho Killer' beginnings with the Talking Heads and his move to global pop - when he sang the song 'Stay Up Late': 'Cute, cute, little baby / Little pee-pee, little toes.'... Jon Cryer's 'Duckie' Dale in Pretty in Pink came a year later, and quirk was on its way." All your Sundance-launched favorites then come in for a good drubbing, though particular attention is paid to the ways Wes Anderson has wandered astray. Via Chris Barsanti.

"Condemning the Fox News Channel as a warmonger that's agitating for a US attack on Iran, documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald and independent US Sen Bernie Sanders announced an 'online viral video campaign' Wednesday calling on television news organizations 'not to follow Fox down the road to war again.'" For the AP, John Curran reports on Fox Attacks.

For the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams talks with Annie Sundberg about The Devil Came on Horseback. Also: "An Inconvenient Truth is a much better movie than The 11th Hour, but The 11th Hour is a far more important one." More on that one from Jennifer Merin in the New York Press.

Also in the NYP, a take on the first three quarters of 2007 from Armond White: "Because the best movie this year so far has been Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, the next-best entertainments from Norbit to I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry plus the audacity of both Resnais's Private Fears in Public Places and Verhoeven's Black Book, then several brilliant segments of The Ten and the expected excellence of The Simpsons Movie all give the impression that we are experiencing a renaissance of both high and low comedy. But now Death at a Funeral opens and wrecks the party."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Jon Voight "about September Dawn and his thoughts looking back over an illustrious, and ongoing, career."

Matthew Hays tells the story behind Manufacturing Dissent. Also in the Guardian, Ronald Bergan: "The most glamorous of the studios, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, which made 'beautiful pictures with beautiful people,' was where William Tuttle, who has died aged 95, worked for 35 years. He was head of the makeup department there from 1950 to 1969."

"Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose acclaimed short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, VT," writes Margalit Fox for the New York Times. "She was 84 and lived most of her life in Manhattan before moving to Vermont in 1988."

The BBC: "Oscar-winning Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore is in hospital after being attacked and mugged on a street in Rome, according to local reports."

Suddenly, I'm modernly fabulous. Or at least I hope to be some day. Gabriel Shanks interviews me for his terrific Modern Fabulousity.

Online listening tip. For NPR, Karen Grigsby Bates reports on Bruce Watson's book Sacco & Vanzetti and Peter Miller's doc of the same name. Related: Novelist Andrea Camilleri in the New York Times.

"Listen and see." From Marc Lafia, Daniel Coffeen and Michael Chichi, the creators of artandculture, comes 3THINGS.

What is it? Lafia explains at Vinyl Is Heavy.

Online viewing tips, round 1. How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made. Via Coudal Partners, also pointing to Saul Bass's title sequence for Seconds.

Online viewing tips, round 2. "Two short films by Maya Deren's husband [Alexander Hammid] are now available for viewing at Ubuweb," notes John Coulthart. "Of the pair of films, Na Prazskem Hrade (At Prague Castle, 1931) is the most interesting for this Prague fetishist, a disjointed study of the architecture of the city's castle which turns the building into an expressionist collage."

Posted by dwhudson at August 23, 2007 3:19 PM