New York. NYFF.

"For the first time in a long while, the New York Film Festival, which opens this Friday, is truly a New York film festival," announces, yes, New York in a cover package fronted by Andrew Eccles's shot of Joel and Ethan Coen, Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson. Other New Yorkers in the NYFF lineup: "Peter Bogdanovich, Abel Ferrara, Murray Lerner, Sidney Lumet, Ira Sachs and Julian Schnabel. Filmmakers from Hollywood: one. You may not have noticed that you are living in a new heyday of New York film, but you are."

Bilge Ebiri's got a timeline, "A Short-Cuts History of New York and Film."

David Amsden takes a train ride with Anderson, entering "what those close to him affectionately refer to as 'Wes's world,' which resembles a vaudevillian family by way of Evelyn Waugh." As for The Darjeeling Limited, the opening night movie, David Edelstein finds it "hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained." He seems to prefer the short that precedes it, Hotel Chevalier. And just about everyone who's reviewed Darjeeling has remarked that it's a shame that that 13-minute short won't be shown in theaters as well. Turns out, as Peter Sanders reports in the Wall Street Journal, it'll be available for free via iTunes starting Wednesday. Via Jason Kottke, who comments: "Three words: Natalie Portman nude. Portman, Anderson, and Jason Schwartzman will be at the Apple Store in NYC to premiere the short. If you go, expect a freakin' mob scene of twee hipster horndogs."

Back to New York: David Edelstein recalls bouncing insights off the Coens; they came back as nothing. "Their cinematographer at the time, Barry Sonnenfeld, told me, 'Topics are incredibly unimportant to them - it's structure and style and words. If you ask them for their priorities, they'll tell you script, editing, coverage, and lighting.'"

Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh "are clearly aiming for something different from their parents' lives (she's the child of artists who split up as well): marriage as an idyllic, never-ending brainstorm among supportive equals." Emily Nussbaum probes.

"I think it's a great time right now for New York film, actually," Lumet tells Logan Hill.

John Homans: "Below us and slightly to the north is the meatpacking district, where Jack Schnabel, Julian's father, spent much of his working life. Jack died of prostate cancer in 2004 at the age of 92, and lived with Schnabel for the last year of his life. Schnabel drew heavily on that experience in making The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In one scene, Bauby's children play ball on the wide Normandy beach as he sits mute and bundled in a wheelchair, his face a fearsome Cubist mask. Another flashes back on a visit to his own invalid father, in which the younger shaved the older, as the older lectured him on his failed marriage. There's a disturbing physicality to these images, the forced intimacies that infirmity imposes on people."

Posted by dwhudson at September 24, 2007 6:33 AM