August 29, 2007
Shorts, 8/29.
"More than two decades ago, in his well-known book The Culture of Time and Space (1983), Stephen Kern wrote that 'the two pioneers of Cubism, Picasso and Braque, incorporated the innovations of Cézanne and the cinema and brought about the most important revolution in the rendering of space in painting since the 15th century,'" recalls Malcolm Turvey in Artforum.
"What the PaceWildenstein show [Picasso, Braque, and Early Film in Cubism] did for the first time was put this claim to the test by placing early films and Cubist paintings side by side; the evidence, however, was unconvincing.... Universal Language and the Avant-Garde at Maya Stendhal Gallery, meanwhile, was a smaller, more modest endeavor than the PaceWildenstein exhibition - and much more successful. The main part of the show was devoted to [Viking] Eggeling and [Hans] Richter, who began collaborating around 1918 in drawings, scrolls (not one of which, unfortunately, was on display here), and eventually films before Eggeling's premature death in 1925."
The September issue has at least a few other pieces you'll likely want to know about but which are, unfortunately, not online: P Adams Sitney on Robert Beavers and Scott MacDonald's interview with James Benning. Both Artforum and frieze, by the way, cover the big art world events of the summer - the Venice Biennale, Documenta 12 and the Sculpture Projects in Münster - and both, in fact, have the same cover: Bruce Nauman's Square Depression, 1977/2007.
Filmbrain reviews "a major document in the history of German avant-garde cinema.... Perhaps owing to its use of non-actors, People on Sunday has a remarkably modern feel to it, and the cast never employ the exaggerated gestures or acting style one tends to find in silent cinema. If anything, the film has more in common with the French New Wave than it does the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) that was dominating German cinema at the time (Lang, Pabst, Jutzi)."
"It's so refreshing to read a Hollywood book about somebody with such a jaunty, head-first spirit," writes the Shamus, who's just finished Douglas Fairbanks, Jr's The Salad Days:
It's almost as if he decided to live the life that his more famous father played on screen.... He took steam baths with Charlie Chaplin and played tennis with Maurice Chevalier. Worshipped John Barrymore and helped a destitute Ethel pay off a hotel bill. Confided in Noel Coward. Laughed off a seduction attempt by Clifton Webb. Played footsie with Jean Harlow. Bumped into Lawrence of Arabia - twice. Became good friends with "Larry" Olivier and David "Niv" Niven....
Fairbanks had the kind of high-gloss life that you read about in Fitzgerald stories: summers overseas, writing casuals for Esquire and Vanity Fair, trips across the country on the Super Chief, sailing across the Atlantic, attending opening nights and endless cocktail parties and spending weekends at country estates with titled Brits, or at the White House, where buck-toothed Eleanor would sit on the bed and chat with Fairbanks and his wife. It's the kind of world that will never be seen again.
"Paul Verhoeven's next project to actually get before cameras is to be an adaptation of Pete Dexter's The Paperboy," announces Brendon Connelly. "We can expect The Paperboy to shoot early in 2008, while Verhoeven's '19th Century Basic Instinct,' The Winter Queen and another Dutch production, an adaptation of Jan Siebelink's Kneeling on a Bed of Violets are apparently still on course, and likely to follow in the next couple of years."
Michael Fleming reports that Oliver Stone will likely direct Pinkville, "a drama about the investigation of the 1968 My Lai massacre," with Bruce Willis in the lead. Stone will be in San Francisco on October 11, by the way. And the Guardian's Ed Pilkington reports that Stone's doc on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be back on after all.
More up-n-coming news from Variety:
"I've watched countless horror films and thrillers in my lifetime and I rarely get the urge to look away from the movie screen or turn a film off before I'm finished watching it, but the events depicted in [Yoshitaro Nomura's] The Demon are so realistically presented and relentlessly horrific that the film became incredibly hard for me to watch all the way through," writes Kimberly Lindbergs.
"Now that The Frodo Franchise is out, I've started a separate blog for it," announces Kristin Thompson.
"[W]hose fault is it that [Glenn] Close and [Holly] Hunter are on television? Or Lili Taylor, Parker Posey, Mary-Louise Parker or Kyra Sedgwick?" asks Mary McNamara. "A few years ago, these were all film actresses and now they each have their own series. Even Susan Sarandon is back as the bodacious babe on Rescue Me. Which is, don't get me wrong, totally terrific for us, the audience members, but unless the movie industry has made peace with being the purveyors of blockbusters, Judd Apatow comedies and not much else, why are they letting go of some of their best talent?"
Also in the Los Angeles Times: Amy Kaufman on the Inner-City Filmmakers summer program, "an intensive, eight-week film boot camp for underprivileged youth. ICF gives a select pool of just-graduated high school seniors access to professionals and elaborate technical equipment, allowing those interested in movies to further their passion without concern for finance."
"Gotham may be famous for its indie films, but the exhibition landscape is an increasingly contentious and competitive space, with too many movies struggling to stay alive on too few screens." Anthony Kaufman draws a map.
Also in the Voice:
Lynn Rapoport in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Featuring a score by Jonathan Richman and real-life footage of protesters and riot cops, [Miles Matthew Montalbano's Revolution Summer is lightly plotted and heavily atmospheric."
"Delirious (2006) is one the worst movies I've ever sat through, at least one that was compounded by someone old enough to shave, and should be recommended only to connoisseurs of abjection," writes Ray Pride for New City Chicago. "It's so bad, I've got a 3000-word draft of this review filled with insults that still does not do justice to the rank incompetence, cultural ignorance and sullen lack of comedy on display. There are positive reviews of Delirious. They are wrong. [Tom] DiCillo's latest, in a career littered with dolorous work, offers an insult to the merely incompetent of the world."
In the Philadelphia Weekly, Sean Burns reviews Them, "a well made, if extremely hollow, technical exercise. Truth be told, this French/Romanian chiller from first-time co-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud is so wafer-thin, I'm a little wary of calling it a movie. It's more like a photographed premise."
"I'm a Cyborg But That's OK indulges in the cute and silly, but Park [Chan-wook] always keeps one foot firmly planted in the horrible reality his characters are trying to escape," writes Jürgen Fauth.
"While as much of a celebration of movie fakery as his debut, Tears of the Black Tiger, Wisit Sasanatieng's Citizen Dog might be more easily embraced by those who were put off by the violence of the previous film," writes Peter Nellhaus. "A film about the magic of the world, of finding love in a candy colored environment, Citizen Dog is like the contemporary version of the kind of film one might have seen from Jacques Demy or Vincente Minnelli."
"[T]here is only one entertainment entity that completely understood what living inside a gloomy Gothic reality was all about," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "And its name was... Dark Shadows."
While Rowan Atkinson developed a "cult following" in the US with his Blackadder series in the 80s, Mr Bean's Holiday hasn't performed nearly as well stateside as in just about every other part of the world. In the NYT, Dave Itzkoff considers "the baffling question of why a taciturn comic character who communicates in the international language of pratfalls and sight gags hasn't been able to attract the attention of a wider American audience."
Owen Wilson is "a good-time shaman; when he appears, you smile, because know you're about to have fun," writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. "He makes good films better and bad films tolerable. Onscreen, he's a human sunbeam.... Wilson might have been sad as hell about any number of things, but comic actors aren't inherently more depressive than dramatic actors, novelists, police officers, schoolteachers or bus drivers. People are people, and each one is unique.... I wish Owen Wilson good luck in his ascent from the abyss, which I am sure will be willful and permanent."
StinkyLulu's hosted another round of "Supporting Actress Smackdown." This time, the year is 1971.
"Hilly Kristal, who founded CBGB, the Bowery bar that became the cradle of punk and art-rock in New York in the 1970s and served as the inspiration for musician-friendly rock dives throughout the world, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. He was 75," reports Ben Sisario for the New York Times. Matt Dentler has an online listening tip.
Robert Cashill bids farewell to the DVD Journal.
Online browsing tip. Paintings of Klaus Kinski for movie posters, posted at Scarecrow by Laird, via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.
Online browsing and reading tips. Endangered Machinery: The Industrial and Industrial Heritage Photography of Haiko Hebig. Via Joel Johnson at the newly launched Boing Boing Gadgets. Also, at the newly relaunched Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow points to a site for Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, edited by John Joseph Adams.
Offline reading tips. Jason Sperb and Jonathan Lapper have a few.
Online gazing tip. Magnum shoots Ingrid Bergman.
Posted by dwhudson at August 29, 2007 4:16 PM
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