Weekend shorts.

For FilmInFocus, Paul VanDeCarr watches hundreds of extras march through San Francisco during the filming of Gus Van Sant's Milk. The real Cleve Jones, an activist now as well as back in Harvey Milk's day, "tells the crowd the original marches happened in response to the repeal of gay rights ordinances in Florida and Kansas. It was bad enough that gay rights were being curtailed elsewhere, but the bigots were headed for San Francisco.... 'So the mood on the street was pissed off,' explains Jones. 'And that's what you are tonight. You're pissed off!'"

"Werner Herzog will write and direct The Piano Tuner, a lush Victorian-era drama about a Brit's journey to war-torn Burma, for Focus Features," announce Gregg Goldstein and Borys Kit in the Hollywood Reporter. "Based on Daniel Mason's 2002 debut novel, the story centers on Edgar Drake, a man sent to a remote village in the late 1800s to repair an eccentric military man's piano. Drake falls in love with a Burmese woman and her country, but as the officer wins over locals through music and medicine, things grow treacherous when his troops begin to suspect him of treason."

Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky opens in the UK on April 18 and, while it doesn't seem a date's been set for its US run, however limited or expansive it may turn out to be, Ray Pride is very, very much looking forward to seeing it. So he's put together a whopper of an entry with current linkage, earlier reviews and interviews and more.

"Is auteurism useful, then, for discussing Jean Negulesco? After watching two excellent films in a row, the Siren says yes. She once described him as a guilty pleasure, but no more. The more she sees of Negulesco's movies, the more the Siren thinks she should trust her taste on this one."

John McElwee's latest at Greenbriar Picture Shows: "Pre-Code Horror: Doctor X."

"For his eighth (and quite possibly greatest) film, Night and Day, Hong [Sang-soo] once again incorporates a classical work as a central theme, though this time he's upgraded to the orchestral swells of the Allegretto from Beethoven's 7th Symphony," writes Filmbrain. "It's an apt choice, for just as the [Arvo] Pärt piece lent itself to the simplicity of Turning Gate's structure, Night and Day is Hong composing, for the first time, in an orchestral vein. More mature in many respects, it's a complex work that moves beyond his regular pieces for duos and trios, including a handful of characters on the periphery critical to the film's composition."

Adam Hartzell on Happiness: "Looks like in the case of my experience with the films of Hur Jin-ho, the fourth time's a charm." Also at Koreanfilm.org, Darcy Paquet: "Kong Su-chang received both critical praise and commercial success with his debut R-Point (2004), about a company of Korean soldiers serving in Vietnam who are sent to a remote location to investigate a vanished squadron.... The Guard Post is a roller coaster that wears its genre credentials more prominently on its sleeve, and despite its setting [in the DMZ], offers a less developed political subtext.... Viewers beware: The Guard Post is gory!"

"I was asked last week about whether I thought all of these [critics'] firings (with plenty more to come) really hurt independent film," writes David Poland. "And the answer is more complex than I would like it to be."

Variety's Anne Thompson: "My USC film criticism students - who are film-obsessed and hardly representative of their non-cinephile peers - can't name a working critic other than [Roger] Ebert, and that's thanks to his TV fame.... They admire the auteurs Anderson and Coen, can parse Hitchcock's Psycho with the best of them, and have studied Truffaut and Godard. But they don't read newspapers, and never will."

"The past few months have brought us many estimable books on film, including two Otto Preminger biographies, Mark Harris's acute, ingenious Pictures at a Revolution and Steve Erickson's headspinning Here Comes Everymovie novel of deranged cinephilia, Zeroville," writes Glenn Kenny. "But I have to say their places in my own personal heart have been supplanted by a peculiar little item that I happened to stumble across, of all places, in my favorite New York record store (yeah, I still call 'em 'record stores'), Downtown Music Gallery. A stocky, thick volume with a cover photo whose naughty bits were not entirely covered up by the title Commedia Sexy All'Italiana - the 'Sexy' in extra-large, raised letters - sat on top of a few boxes on the store's always-sorta-cluttered checkout counter."

The Guardian interviews a handful of Britain's tastemakers - buyers, programmers and the like.

Also:

• "It's debatable, of course, why anyone would want or need to remake Fritz Lang's M in any form when the film itself is such a classic," writes Jon J Muth. "The question that drove me to turn it into a graphic novel in 1990 was: 'What else is there to find?'"

• "It sounds odd maybe, callous even, to say that the 18 months I spent preparing and directing The Year of Magical Thinking were professionally among the happiest of my life," writes David Hare.

• Charlotte Higgins talks with Kevin Spacey.

In his upcoming L'Armée du crime (The Army of Crime), Robert Guédiguian "will tell the story of the Manouchian Group, a WWII resistance movement led by the Armenian worker Missak Manouchian," reports Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "Besides regular Guédiguian actors Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Yann Tregouët in supporting roles, L'Armée du crime will star Virginie Ledoyen (The Valet) and Louis Garrel and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, the lovers from Les Chansons d'amour (Love Songs). French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian (who voiced Marjane's father in Persepolis and also had a small role in Casino Royale) will play Manouchian."

In the New York Times:

• "A spoonful of fashion helps the feminism go down in Nana, a delightful pop fairy tale that speaks to young women in the language of sisterhood and self-direction," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. More from Rob Humanick in Slant: "[T]he film is most impressive as that rarest of creatures: a crowd-pleaser with a genuinely artistic touch."

• "A year after an uproar over pollution forced a turnaround in plans for 19 new coal-fired power plants around the state, the battle has been recounted in a documentary, Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars, commissioned by [Robert] Redford's Sundance Preserve," reports Ralph Blumenthal. "It spotlights the unlikely coalition of ranchers, big-city mayors and environmentalists that stymied Gov Rick Perry and spurred the record $45 billion takeover of Texas's biggest electric company, TXU."

• "More disgusting than scary, The Ruins is the latest in a long line of horror films about upper-middle-class travelers being terrorized in unfamiliar environments," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "It is also, unfortunately, a movie that is nowhere near as original as its monster, a strain of malevolent, seemingly intelligent jungle vine with a taste for human flesh." More from Jeffrey M Anderson (Cinematical), Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times) and Nick Schager (Slant).

My Brother Is an Only Child "is not the masterwork Best of Youth was, but it still satisfies in ways much of today's pygmy cinema cannot," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Wally Hammond (Time Out), Andy Klein (LA CityBeat) and Kevin Maher (London Times). And David Jenkins talks with Daniele Luchetti for Time Out.

Medicine for Melancholy "could be a great tool, a soft introduction, for a discussion and or debate regarding individuality, race, slavery, gentrification, and capitalism," writes Sujewa Ekanayake. "On a less grand level, it is a great low key movie to watch with your girlfriend after a busy week, and perhaps a good opportunity to re-connect with your curious, creative, and yes, hipster, self."

Peter Bradshaw finds Park Chan-wook's I'm a Cyborg to be "a frustrating and unsatisfying piece of work." More from Wendy Ide (London Times) - and David Jenkins, who also talks with Park for Time Out.

"If the world were a high school cafeteria, history would look a lot like Stefan Nadelman's brilliant Food Fight, an abridged history of modern warfare - from World War II to Iraq - re-imagined through the signature cuisines of the countries in conflict," writes Austin Bunn, who talks with Nadelman for Stream. "German bratwurst launches deadly sausage links into unsuspecting fish and chips (Britain). Kebabs (Palestine) and bagels (Israel) take each other out in pyrrhic combat, and hamburgers keep showing up to launch deadly pickle and bacon attacks or lob patties onto sushi (guess)."

According to Nick Catucci at Vulture, Anywhere I Lay My Head, Scarlett Johansson's collection of Tom Waits covers, is actually pretty good.

Cathleen Rountree talks with Lisa Jackson, whose The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo airs Tuesday on HBO.

Alexandra Bullen talks with Dean Budnick about Wetlands Preserved for Identity Theory.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Arbogast.

ScreenGrab's latest list: "The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies," parts 1 and 2.

Alice Jones interviews Anton Corbijn for the Independent.

"So why does Nim's Island feel so charmless and rote?" asks Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Perhaps it's because the film feels like an amalgam of other movies' plotlines; I started ticking off Romancing the Stone, Play It Again, Sam, The Swiss Family Robinson and Home Alone in my head when my attention wandered. And it wandered often." More from Jeffrey M Anderson (Cinematical), Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT), Brandon Fibbs (cinemattraction), Keith Phipps (AV Club) and Nick Schager (Slant).

Updates to other entries worth noting here, too:

• In a longish, footnoted New York Times blog entry - evidently the first in what'll be a series - Errol Morris addresses the issue troubling most critics of Standard Operating Procedure by again looking back to The Thin Blue Line: "It wasn't a cinema vérité documentary that got Randall Dale Adams out of prison. It was film that re-enacted important details of the crime. It was an investigation - part of which was done with a camera. The re-enactments capture the important details of that investigation. It's not re-enactments per se that are wrong or inappropriate. It's the use of them. I use re-enactments to burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth."

• Grady Hendrix looks back over Wong Kar-Wai's oeuvre and finds a slow slide into stagnation. In Slate: "He still has the potential to be the world's most transcendent director, but wake me up when he stops repeating his past movies and attempts something - anything - new."

• "Time has revealed Kubrick's masterpiece to be a kind of celluloid enzyme, a herald of our graduation as a species, the epicenter of a cultural force that changed the very face of our planet," writes Tim Lucas. "It lives on as a kind of moveable milestone, a touchstone that we can revisit throughout our lives to keep track of how much we have grown or remained the same. If the black monolith represents an inscrutable source prompting quantum leaps in human growth and discovery, I ask you, what film better fills that definition than 2001?"

Online viewing tip. Posting at New York's Vulture, Bilge Ebiri suggests that Ry Russo-Young "could carve a pretty successful career for herself making awesome experimental horror flicks."

Online viewing tips, round 1. The Mike Wallace Interview, a collection from 1957 and 1958 at the Harry Ransom Center, via Movie City News.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Eliza gathers another batch of music videos for Creative Review.

Posted by dwhudson at April 5, 2008 12:47 PM