December 12, 2007

Shorts, 12/12.

Southland Tales Southland Tales "is not only a brilliant film, but an extraordinarily important one, in that it is one of those rare works that is 'as radical as reality itself,' and that reflects upon our real situation while at the same time inserting itself within that situation, rather than taking a pretended distance from it," writes Steven Shaviro. "The film is a demented fabulation, but in such a way that it can best be described as hyperreal. Its 'science fiction' is scientifically and technologically unsound, and could best be described as delirious - but that is precisely why it is directly relevant to a world that has increasingly come to be 'indistinguishable from science fiction.' Southland Tales makes nearly all other contemporary movies seem inadequate, outdated, and guilty of fleeing our actual social world in search of nostalgic consolations."

So what's Errol Morris up to, really, in the New York Times? "I believe it should appropriately be called... 'Cartesian Blogging.'"

Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell talk Beowulf - and the future: "So far, the more blatantly 3-D something looks on the screen, the less it makes 3-D seem like something we want to watch on a regular basis. Think of the best films of this year: Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Ratatouille, Across the Universe, and so on. Would any of them be better in 3-D? Probably not."

Les Blank's "All in This Tea delights on myriad levels, from history to humor to simple human interest," writes Dennis Harvey. "It's all of 69 minutes long and packs in more information (not to mention pleasure) per celluloid foot than just about anything you'll see this year, fiction or non." Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Silent Light lacks the bracing pairings of the sacred and profane that characterize Battle in Heaven, but its starry-eyed beginning and end prove that that [Carlos] Reygadas's scrutiny of the ineffable is far from complacent," writes Johnny Ray Huston. "If cinema is a corpse, his kiss just might bring it back to life."

"I've supposed the word 'didactic' to always possess a slight whiff of disparagement. Perhaps I've been mistaken." Girish on "Didactic Cinema."

Now you've heard everything: "Producer Thomas Schuehly (Alexander) has acquired the remake rights to Fritz Lang's Metropolis and is partnering with Mario Kassar on an updated version of the 1927 silent sci-fi classic," reports Ed Meza for Variety.

A People's History of the United States This is more like it: "Production is finally set to begin on a long-delayed TV version of Howard Zinn's landmark 1980 tome A People's History of the United States." As Michael Schneider reports, this has been a long time coming.

And: "Gabriele Salvatores will start shooting in February on Come Dio comanda (As God Commands), the Oscar-winning Italo helmer's second film based on a book by best-selling novelist Niccolò Ammaniti," reports Nick Vivarelli.

"Impressive as his shape-shifting talents are, it may well be that [Joseph] Mankiewicz's protean ability to work with any type of material is precisely the quality that has excluded him from the pantheon of Great American Directors," suggests Kevin Jackson. "To put it in marketing terms, he failed to establish a recognisable brand identity. In film-speak, he has never quite cut it as an auteur."

Also in the Guardian:

  • "Randall Poster has one of the best jobs in Hollywood, compiling soundtracks for some of the coolest movies for over a decade." Damon Wise asks him about ten of the best films he's worked on.

  • "[D]oes underground film still exist? If so, where is it, and what does it actually do?" Andrea Hubert goes looking.

Anouk Aimée

Peter Nellhaus remembers Eleonora Rossi Drago, 1925 - 2007.

Accepting an award from Women in Entertainment last week, Jodie Foster "thanked her nearest and dearest, including 'my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through all the rotten [sic] and the bliss,'" notes Andrew Gumbel in the Independent. "What was striking was not the acknowledgement itself. (Websites that breathlessly proclaimed Foster had 'come out' were surely overstating their case.) Rather, it was the sadness of everything that had gone before and the peculiar agony of being anything other than a straight up-and-down heterosexual in a town as supposedly progressive and forward-thinking as Los Angeles." Also: Hermione Eyre on the current crop of child stars.

"Film is a form of resistance, but you have to identify clearly what you are fighting against and what are the principles you are going adhere to. You must realise the world has changed," Chilean director Miguel Littin tells T Ramavarman in the Hindu.

"Two years ago a young executive at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company, hungry for some good scripts to read over the holidays, asked 100 peers to send him their 10 favorite new screenplays that would not make it into theaters before the New Year," reports David M Halbfinger. "He whipped up a spreadsheet ranking the responses, titled it 'The Black List,' emailed it around and then watched it become a Hollywood phenomenon, the kind of underground document that writers with projects stuck in development pray will mention their script." And from that page, you can download the lists for 05, 06 and 07. What's more, Nikki Finke'll point you to this year's screenplays themselves.

Also in the New York Times:

  • The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles is treating its archive of video art, "larks and all, with the seriousness that befits a significant slice of art history," reports Carol Kino, and its new "Long Beach acquisition suddenly transformed its collection into one of the world's largest. And since then, as a tiny team of institute staff members carefully catalog and conserve these holdings, they have in several cases rediscovered and reunited artists with long-lost work."

  • Patrick Healy talks with Ian McShane just before "he opens as the patriarch Max in Harold Pinter's Homecoming, a man-monster of diminishing powers and, of course, many vulgarities."

  • "There's precious little to laugh at in The Sasquatch Gang, a sad attempt to board the loser-nerd comedy bandwagon," writes Jeannette Catsoulis.

  • "Not since his nice-guy turns in Thelma & Louise (1991) and Free Willy (1993) has Michael Madsen, ever the designated heavy, played someone as huggable as Sean Kelleher, the Irish ex-boxer and tragic hero of Strength and Honour," writes Laura Kern. More from Allison Benedikt in the Voice.

Desert of the Heart

More on that one from the Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who's got a clip: "[Robert] Greenwald is aiming to create an environment which mobilizes outrage in populist and intelligent ways, and makes these titans of greed and their money toxic. Look for the next three in this series of short films to feature interviews with workers around Martin Luther King, Jr's Birthday; workers screwed by Kravis on Valentine's Day; and promoting actions to take around legislation to close the loophole, culminating with an April 15 demand to make the richest among us pay their fair share."

"A reverent, humbling, and impassioned observation of life among the landless, peasant farmers of the semi-arid Carriri region of Ceará in northeastern Brazil, Jean-Pierre Duret and Andrea Santana's poetic ethnographic documentary Romances de terre et d'eau bears the deep humanism and trenchant, sociopolitical commitment of its venerable producers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne," writes acquarello.

At Film of the Year: "Aware that Pearl Harbor Day was quickly approaching I redoubled my efforts this week at searching for DVD versions of films made in Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II that might provide broader perspective on how the war was presented in cinema by both sides." And Thom's search has paid off.

"Like a rolling blackout, Hollywood is shutting down," reports the Los Angeles Times. "Fallout from Friday's collapse of negotiations for a new contract between writers and studios will in the weeks and months ahead leave audiences with dwindling entertainment choices. If the five-week-long strike by the Writers Guild of America continues, it's also poised to affect the awards season, the annual ritual of self-congratulation and promotion that runs through the winter." More from Patrick Goldstein and, in the NYT, Michael Cieply.

Also in the LAT:

  • "There are no laughs to be found in writer-director Michael Traeger's would-be comedy The Amateurs, but there is one big mystery: how actors of this caliber could have been convinced to take part," writes Dennis Lim. "The movie's one-joke premise is of the Decent Folks Doing Naughty Things variety, familiar from such whimsical Brit-coms as The Full Monty (unemployed steelworkers strip), Saving Grace (old ladies grow pot) and Calendar Girls (old ladies strip).... It's no surprise that The Amateurs... has been languishing on the shelf nearly three years." Related: At ScreenGrab, Leonard Pierce lists five of the best non-porn films on porn.

  • "There's a smart, hip, perhaps even necessary film to be made about a sophisticated African American coming out to his small-town Georgia family, but Dirty Laundry isn't it," warns Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. More from Matt Zoller Seitz in the NYT: "[Maurice] Jamal's direction ranges from clumsy to competent, and the film's overwhelming desire to be loved blunts any edge it might have had. Fortunately, even as Mr Jamal's characters hit notes reminiscent of a half-baked television pilot, they disclose eccentricities that his cast spins into comic gold." And more from Julia Wallace in the Voice.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

"In spite of the apparent flourishing of adaptation study, Thomas Leitch predicts a bleak future for the field, if it continues down the road already taken," writes Thomas Van Parys, reviewing Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ for Image and Narrative. "In his first chapter, he argues that adaptation theory has not only had little connection with film theory over the years, it has consistently tended to privilege literature over film as well.... According to Leitch, the failure of adaptation theory and study is caused by the notion of fidelity, and the underlying assumption that the original is a touchstone of value."

Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture "Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture is an edited collection resulting from a conference on the topic held in Buffalo in April 2004," writes Sarah Worth for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. "But this collection is not just another group of essays connecting various aspects of popular culture to philosophical topics. This is meta-philosophy of pop culture - philosophy about philosophy of pop culture." Also via Bookforum: Andy Fogle at PopMatters on Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "[T]his should be a compelling book, but it's not. Intellectual, scholarly, and academic to a fault, the language is often impenetrably fluffed (a truly frustrating paradox), and the ideas generally unfocused."

Nick Pinkerton on The Singing Revolution, documenting Estonia's struggle for independence: "It seems an odd fit for theatrical release, but the film offers a functional primer in Baltic history, as well as choice video footage of one small country as it weathers a tectonic shift in world politics."

Also in the Voice:

  • Julia Wallace on The Perfect Holiday: "[T]he actors distinguish themselves mainly by their ability to make the material, directed and co-written by Lance Rivera, seem even more painfully awkward and unfunny than it already is - which is very." For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, it's "so modest and good-natured that its flaws are hardly glaring," but the NYT's Stephen Holden finds it to be "that most dispiriting product, a formulaic movie that doesn't believe in itself."

  • "A film setting out to tell of the unlikely friendship between an Orthodox Jew and a devout Muslim must struggle mightily to avoid building-bridges PSA terrain," observes Nick Pinkerton. "Arranged simply surrenders to expectation." More from David Pratt-Robson in Slant and Michael Joshua Rowin in indieWIRE.

"Atonement is a film out of balance, nimble enough in its first half but oddly scattered and ungainly once it leaves the grounds of the Tallis estate," writes Christopher Orr. Also in the New Republic: "Ian McEwan is one of the most gifted literary storytellers alive--where storytelling means kinesis, momentum, prowl, suspense, charge. His paragraphs are mined with menace," wrote James Wood in 2002. Even so, he wasn't 100 percent pleased with the way Atonement ends.

"[Rhys] Ifans is perhaps the most rock'n'roll actor working in Britain today, which isn't saying much, but it's a role he plays with relish," writes Sean O'Hagan in his profile for the Observer.

Rob Gonsalves inducts Mickey Rourke into the Hollywood Bitchslap / eFilmCritic Hall of Fame.

Frank Bidart, "An American in Hollywood." A poem in the New Yorker.

"This spring, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) is revealing the reality of the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. In what will be history's largest gathering of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors, eyewitnesses will share their experiences in a public investigation called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan."

Those hundreds of hours of video the CIA's destroyed? "They were and are critical to proving - in a way that could not be denied or buried - that we have a war ciminal in the Oval Office," argues Andrew Sullivan. Also blogging for the Atlantic: Matthew Yglesias on how that "National Intelligence Estimate on Iran wound up getting released when it... (a) made the administration look ridiculous, (b) pissed off the administration's key pyschotic warmonger allies, and (c) the administration has stated earlier that NIEs weren't going to be released in the future."

"Orson Welles's personal working script of Citizen Kane sold for almost $100,000 Tuesday, but his Oscar for the 1941 film was withdrawn after bidding failed to rise above the seller's minimum price," reports the AP.

New blog on the block: Luc Sante's Pinakothek.

Online browsing tip #1. Richard Beymer's Twin Peaks gallery. Via Jason Kottke.

Online browsing tip #2. Woudnitbecoolif pop-up books at Something Awful. Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Joris Ivens: Rain Online viewing tip #1. "Quickly rising to the top of my bedside stack, Joris Ivens's The Camera & I presents a sometimes wonky but always fascinating portrait of the early days of documentary," writes Derek Jenkins. "Situated somewhere between the Russians & Flaherty, Ivens had a major impact on the art from his very first film experiment: a meticulous account of the daily operations of an Amsterdam bridge. His second film in the documentary mode, Rain - later canonized by Erik Barnouw in his seminal history of the genre - was at the time dubbed a 'cine-poem,' a descriptor that neatly characterizes the heady seriousness of the times."

Online viewing tip #2. Matthew Yglesias comes across The Case Against Kant.

Online viewing tip #3. It's 1982 and America's best band at the time was getting a little bloated. But goldenfiddle's got a nifty soundcheck video.

Online viewing tips, round 1. In Anhedonia, Aleksandra Domanovic lays Getty stock video over audio from Annie Hall. Via Jason Kottke. Related: Woody Allen: A Life in Film, made for TCM in 2002.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The Guardian's Kate Stables has a handful.



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Posted by dwhudson at December 12, 2007 2:23 AM

Comments

Did he say demented fabulation?

Posted by: Piper at December 12, 2007 10:03 AM