Fests and events, 3/30.

"This year, Tribeca Film Festival organizers have announced a new embargo policy for reviews of festival films. Accredited journalists, many of whom may see TFF films at pre-fest screenings next month, are asked to hold reviews of films until the movie officially screens at the festival." Eugene Hernandez sparks a series of comments.

Ebertfest's set its screening schedule and list of guests.

Like Dave Kehr before him, the New York Sun's Bruce Bennett takes Film Forum's five-week-long celebration of United Artists' 90th anniversary as an opportunity to delve into the history of the studio.

Gilbert Adair, who wrote the screenplay for Bertolucci's The Dreamers, based on his own semi-autobiographical novel, in the Guardian on May 68:

What its detractors have always failed to comprehend is that the real bombs that were hurled in the streets of Paris were time bombs. They exploded later, sometimes decades later. It was, in France at least, out of May 68 that the liberalising ideologies and reformations that we now take for granted were born: modern feminism, the ecological movement, homosexual liberation, the outlawing of cultural censorship, the rejection of national service. If, for all its disfiguring scars, ours is a rather more civilised world than that which our parents and grandparents knew, it's in some part due to those posturing rebels.

This month, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the événements, BFI Southbank is screening Pop Goes the Revolution, a short season of films released in France just before, during or after the riots. In a way, such a season is doubly appropriate. In the first place, film has always been, of the arts, the most powerful (if, on occasion, distorting) mirror of social textures and trappings, often simply at the not so very trivial level of permitting later generations to see what the past actually looked like. In the second place, May 68 began with the cinema.

That'll be April 11 through 30. On a somewhat related note, 68: Brennpunkt Berlin, an exhibition accompanied by a series of talks, book presentations and such, is on through the end of May in Berlin.

"[Franco] Zeffirelli represents an era of grandiose, sumptuous opera direction that, while still strongly represented at the Met, is fading," writes Daniel J Wakin in the New York Times. "Yet a healthy number of Mr Zeffirelli's works - eight - remain in the Met's repertory and are generally beloved by its audiences. The Met is making known its appreciation during a four-day Zeffirelli-fest."

"Bill Viola and his wife and collaborator Kira Perov are coming to Sydney in early April at the invitation of Kaldor Art Projects, to present 3 major video works from The Tristan Project."

"I thought it was some kind of avant-garde prank when I first saw a poster advertising a special showing of Roger Corman's X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes accompanied by the legendary Cleveland, Ohio band Pere Ubu, performing a live score." It wasn't. Jeff was there last Tuesday and reports at Movie Morlocks.

"Artful and highly informative views of a life behind and inside the music, Daniel Lanois's new film Here Is What Is and self-released album of the same title had their Los Angeles premieres with a screening and live performance at the Vista Theatre on Thursday," reports John Payne in the Los Angeles Times. "A roving travelogue of the producer-engineer-guitarist's experiences recording in five locations, the film encapsulates the musical philosophies and detailed particulars of Lanois's approach to a new sound for contemporary music, as told by himself and his cast of high-profile collaborators, including U2, Brian Eno and Sinéad O'Connor."

For the Observer, Sean O'Hagen attends the opening of Patti Smith: Land 250, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris through June 22:

This major show - she has never exhibited on this scale in Europe before - spans the years 1967 to 2007, and consists of short Super-8 films, photographs, drawings, notebooks, installations, recordings and personal objects that possess a talismanic quality for Patti Smith. It's all very boho, of course, a bit Lower East Side, but back when the Lower East Side was edgy and alternative rather than affluent and ironic. I spent an hour and a half wandering around the exhibits and left feeling oddly unsatisfied.

The underlying problem is similar to the one that dogged the David Lynch show at this same gallery last year: would these strange childlike drawings and rather mundane photographs be on these walls if they were not made by Patti Smith? The French fans present seem rapt and reverent as they move silently through the rooms.

Blake Ethridge introduced a screening of Stuart Gordon's Stuck at AFI Dallas and led the Q&A afterwards. Then he learned why Gordon couldn't make it: Lionel Mark Smith, who plays Sam in the movie, had recently passed, and Gordon was attending his funeral.

Posted by dwhudson at March 30, 2008 7:22 AM