GreenCine Daily: Shorts, 2/15.

February 15, 2008

Shorts, 2/15.

"For five centuries Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper has stood majestically still on the walls of a Milanese friary, the only disturbance the slow flaking of its priceless paint," writes Robert Booth.

"Now Peter Greenaway, the iconoclastic British filmmaker, has been granted permission to wheel in projectors and bring to life the hidden stories he sees in the masterpiece."

Also in the Guardian:

"Built inside a converted railway carriage, and located in a back garden in Gorseinon, South Wales, La Charrette has been screening movies to packed houses of 23 people since 1953." And Mark Kermode's helped to give it a proper send-off by arranging for a screening of Danny Boyle's Alien Love Triangle, complete with a special appearance by Kenneth Branagh, on February 23.
Phil Hoad interviews Fatih Akin.

"The Bank Job is just the latest in a long line of British films that, sometimes successfully, sometimes disastrously, try to capture the essence of an actual crime or a real criminal," writes Duncan Campbell. Related: For the Telegraph, Will Lawrence talks with screenwriter Dick Clement.
"Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC who resigned in the wake of the Hutton inquiry, has been appointed chair of the British Film Institute," reports Xan Brooks. "He takes over from Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient and Cold Mountain, whose tenure saw the launch of the new BFI Southbank centre in London."

Brian Darr's been busy. But he's finally gotten around to that list: "My top ten new-to-me and new-to-Frisco films of 2007 are as follows, in alphabetical order with superficial commentary but more substantial links."

On that note, the Skandies have now counted all the way down (or up) to #1: There Will Be Blood.

Another list? Ok: Dan Sallitt's "favorite Japanese films of the last decade."

And another, via several folks out there: Tom Roston's "Top 10 Sexiest Documentaries."

"Bollywood is still ignored, regardless of quality or success," tsk-tsks Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "Part of the problem is that the distributors have no incentive to appeal to a wider audience when their fan base is so loyal and lucrative. The pictures are rarely screened for critics, which is why I visited a London multiplex to see two current Bollywood hits, Sunday and Taare Zameen Par: Every Child Is Special." Related: Laura Irvine at SF360 on the best spots to see Bollywood features in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Le Doulos "is made of elements Melville said he came to love in the B&W American crime movies of the 1930s: shadows, night, trench coats, guns, tough guys, cigarettes, slinky dames, cocktail bars, crooked cops, betrayal, loot and a plot shutting out the world and confining the characters within their own lives and space," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Jason Scott claims that The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters is "loaded with falsehoods. And by loaded, I mean packed, and by packed I mean like the last Japanese subway car before they have to shut down the line." Via Megan McArdle at the Atlantic.

In the New York Times:

Caryn James has an overview of the documentary feature category in the Oscar race. "This year all five nominees [No End in Sight, Operation Homecoming, Sicko, Taxi to the Dark Side and War/Dance] are politically charged, four are about war, and amazingly, only one feels like homework. Spurred by global conflict and by technology that allows filmmakers to turn out movies in months rather than years, these works carry urgent messages. With their pointed arguments, though, this year's nominees also raise an inescapable question: Can they have any real political impact?"
"It would be a mistake to assume that the 10 movies nominated this year for best live-action and animated short film in the Oscar sweepstakes are the kind of cinematic amuse-bouches often shown before the main feature at film festivals," writes Stephen Holden. "Most are not trifles, and some range from 30 to 40 minutes long." More from Sam Adams (Philadelphia City Paper), Kevin Crust (Los Angeles Times) and S James Snyder (New York Sun).

Matt Zoller Seitz: "The star-crossed romance David & Layla tells of a beautiful young Iraqi Kurd named Layla (Shiva Rose) who is threatened with deportation from her adopted home, Brooklyn, and pins her hopes of staying on a suitor named David (David Moscow), an American-born agnostic Jew who has a public-access cable show about sex and is trapped in an unsatisfying relationship with a snooty fiancée (Callie Thorne of the television series Rescue Me)." More from S James Snyder in the New York Sun.
Jim Shepard reviews Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, "which focuses on the nominees for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night (the eventual winner) and Doctor Dolittle. Yes, you read that last title correctly. For [author Mark] Harris, a columnist at Entertainment Weekly, that array is not just a historical 'collage of the American psyche' but also well beyond diverse, 'almost self-contradictory'; a movie like The Graduate was seemingly designed to demolish the values on display in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The generational divide could not have been starker, and the central issue was what an American movie was supposed to be."