Shorts, 5/16.

In the Auteurs' Notebook, Daniel Kasman writes an entry on "something from Cannes, that's not at Cannes. With all praise due to Olivier Assayas's technophiliac/technophobic recent films that bend and twist space and time as befits this globalized, postmodern world, his latest film Summer Time is a breath of fresh air, if only because it is grounded in an old age: that of objects, and the memories and history kept in them."

"Eight decades or more, you would have thought, is time enough to let bygones be bygones. But in this sad, remarkable but all too human instance, the answer appears to be, no." Rupert Cornwell reports in the Independent on the ongoing rivalry between sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland.

"'Oh, it'll be just another job,' Sean shrugged. 'Then I'll be waiting for the phone to ring again as usual.'" In the Telegraph, Joan Collins looks back to the days when she and just about everyone else were first hearing about a British spy named James Bond. "I had my own flirtation with the Bond casting cartel - twice, as a matter of fact."

"Some movies are too personal to be shared with a crowd." Jim Emerson's been reading Steve Erickson's Zeroville.

"When will Variety and the Hollywood Reporter Credit Online Websites for Breaking a Story?" Collider's Frosty wants to know. Examples are given, a call to action issued. "And the reason it really gets under my skin is pretty simple... unlike Variety and the Hollywood Reporter which are given their major scoops by the people in the stories... all of us in the online community work extremely hard to get anything. It's not like George Lucas decided to let Collider break the news about his new live action TV show. And it's not like Steven Spielberg's publicist picked up the phone and told me he was dropping Chicago 7. I frackin' worked to land those exclusives." Via the Playlist.

"The works of prominent film studies and visual arts scholar Angela Dalle Vacche - such as The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema and Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film - have consistently offered original and revealing insights into images of all sorts," writes Carmen Siu in Film International. "This time, she and co-editor Brian Price shift their focus to the study of film colour - a subject that has yet to be honed at the theoretical level, at least compared to its recent and notable renaissance in film aesthetics proper - with their newly published Color: The Film Reader, the first anthology of its kind to 'approach color from different perspectives, providing scholars with a sense of the myriad of ways in which color in film can be described.'"

"[I]f there's one early [Dreyer] work that satisfies most completely on its own terms, it's probably the filmmaker's 1920 feature The Parson's Widow and that's largely because, until a sudden late shift in the narrative, it's played pretty much as comedy, an approach that seemed more amenable to the young Dreyer than the epic solemnity he would undertake in [Leaves from Satan's Book] or the heavily educed melodrama of Michael, and allowed him to narrow (as well as deepen) his focus by shifting his attention to the smaller scale lifestyle of a tiny Norwegian village." Andrew Schenker at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

"While shadows and empty spaces pervade Naomi Kawase's search for her absent father in Embracing, the images in Katatsumori are tactile and suffused in light - a stark contrast that conveys Kawase's deep affection towards her 80 year old maternal great aunt and adoptive mother, Uno." Acquarello. Also, a review of Hiroshi Shimizu's Japanese Girls at the Harbor, "a film that, like his early masterpiece, Ornamental Hairpin, is propelled by a moment of carelessness that would have far reaching consequences for its characters."

Pacze Moj on Tadeusz Konwicki's Zaduszki: "The point of it all seems to be that not only can there be no art after Auschwitz, but, even more vitally, there can be no love - at least for those who were directly affected."

"[A]nyone in the Miami, NYC, and Boston areas — cities with large Haitian immigrant populations — is likely to run into someone at a flea market or thrift store collecting goods to take home to Port-au-Prince," writes Joanne McNeil, introducing an interview at Tomorrow Museum. "Secondhand (Pepe) (clip) is a short documentary showing this remarkable trade in goods, as it explains the history of secondhand clothing in our country. Filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell, a PhD in the History of Science at Harvard, and Vanessa Bertozzi, a graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, who now works at Etsy, were curious about the tradition of secondhand clothing. From 2003 - 2007 they visited ragyards in Miami, went through archives in London and Washington DC, and traveled to Haiti to see the pepe markets for themselves." Via Jason Kottke.

The latest additions to FilmInFocus's special section on Mexico City are a guide by Nick Dawson and an interview with Under the Same Moon director Patricia Riggen.

"El-P, the founder of the definitive underground hiphop label of the 00s, Def Jux, and former member of the trio that helped establish the underground in the 90s, Company Flow, regards Blade Runner as the best movie ever made," writes Charles Mudede. "More than any other rapper and producer, El-P has translated the themes and images of the most prophetic science-fiction film of the 80s into the sounds of late-hiphop - a period that proceeds from the postmodern moment in hiphop, between 1993 and 1997 (the modern period of hiphop is between 1984 and 1992)."

Also in the Stranger: Mudede on Mister Lonely, Jon Frosch on Jellyfish and Jen Graves on Alice Neel.

"Barbet Schroeder, a dry, elegant director, has always had a taste for regal horror and a willingness to stare ugly facts in the face (past subjects include Idi Amin and Claus von Bülow)," writes Ryan Gilbey, reviewing Terror's Advocate for the New Statesman. "He purposely resists coming down too hard on [Jacques] Vergès, but then he doesn't need to. When a man's most effusive character witness is Pol Pot, there's not much damning left to be done." Related: Angelique Chrisafis talks with Vergès for the Guardian.

Also:

• "While Hollywood enjoyed its 70s renaissance, while new German cinema flourished and the Italian and French cinemas continued to produce groundbreaking work, British cinema, so vibrant throughout the 1960s, seemed to keel over and die," writes John Patterson. "It didn't - not quite - but it takes some dedicated cinematic archeology to disinter several gleaming threads of endeavour that suggest British cinema didn't die after all, but went into a form of internal exile."

• "It was 1968, so what more natural time to make a film about Che Guevara?" Duncan Campbell has a fun story to tell about Richard Fleischer's Che!

• "Esteban Sapir's La Antena, or The Aerial, is a monochrome movie from Argentina, that is silent, or almost silent," writes Peter Bradshaw. "The film was much admired when it opened the Rotterdam film festival last year; it wants to challenge the prevailing realist ethic of cinema and it sports with the conventions of the medium.... Try as I might, I couldn't make friends with La Antena, despite its distinctiveness and self-possession."

• Tony O'Neill on the giallo.

• Interviews: Ed Pilkington with Thomas Haden Church and Simon Hattenstone with Ewan McGregor.

"Well now, if this isn't just the cutest thing I don't know what is," beams Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "Quantum Hoops, a documentary by Rick Greenwald, tells the story of the California Institute of Technology's men's basketball team - a topic that in the context of college sports is approximately as farcical as the history of aspiring semioticians among the contestants on America's Next Top Model."

In the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas talks with Claude Lelouch, whose Roman de Gare "has on both sides of the Atlantic been garnering the 70-year-old filmmaker some of the best reviews of his career."

"Matt Wolf's Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell isn't your typical documentary experience," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "For Wolf doesn't just tell the life story of the immensely gifted Russell. He resurrects him." Also: "What makes XXY such an impressive debut is that, considering its subject matter, it can never be mistaken for a work of exploitation. It's a tenderly wrought drama that uses an abnormal situation to explore the universal, end-of-the-world emotions spawned by adolescence."

"Appropriately enough for a movie titled How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer, writer-director Georgina Garcia Riedel's sharply observed and sympathetically detailed dramedy proceeds at the pace of someone drifting aimlessly through a hot August afternoon," writes Joe Leydon in the Houston Chronicle. "You really have to downshift your moviegoing metabolism if you want to get into the measured rhythms of this spare yet insightful movie about three generations of Mexican-American women in the sleepy border town of Somerton, Ariz."

"The Outsiders works as a silent film primarily because of the physical acting." An accidental experiment, conducted by Sarah D Bunting and recalled at the House Next Door.

Nikki Finke hears that David O Russell's Nailed has been shut down. Again.

For In These Times, Akito Yoshikane talks with Margaret Cho about the new reality show she'll be doing for VH1 in August.

With Bad Lieutenant on our minds again, now's a good time to revisit read Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of Brad Stevens's Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision.

"Recently I posted a review of a new short film about to enter the festival circuit daringly, some might argue vulgarly, titled I F*cking Hate You (2008, hereafter IFHY). Produced by the self-described 'interdependent' filmmakers at Los Angeles based Sabi Pictures, the nine-minute ironic comedy is fueled by a mixture of humor and heartache highlighted by a song performance that you'll either love or hate, but will probably laugh at in either case." Thom Ryan talks to the film's makers.

"One of the real pluses of Up the Yangtze, aside from its empathy with its subjects, is its striking visual quality," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Beijing-based cinematographer Wang Shi Qing has an impeccable eye, often coming up with haunting images that show both the beauty and uncertainty of this pivotal time."

Jason Sperb forges ahead in his PT Anderson Month.

Latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Gautam Valluri.

A few new pieces from the Spring 08 issue of Filmmaker are up, primarily of interest to, well, filmmakers. Let Scott Macaulay be your guide.

First Run Features is being folded into Icarus Films. Ray Pride: "The company lives, but a familiar micro-distribution label disappears."

Nice headline from Quint at AICN: "Daniel Plainview drinks up Anton Chigurh's role in Rob Marshall's Nine! He drinks it up!"

Vanity Fair hands its "Proust Questionnaire" to John Cusack.

Online viewing tip #1. Bilge Ebiri introduces Luke Matheny's Earano.

Online viewing tip #2. Paul Moore: "In honor of SpoutBlog's Presidential Zombie Contest, the best zombie film I've seen in a long, long time."

Online viewing tip #3. Nicholas Rombes: "The first time seeing this, thinking: a mistake. Someone forgot to edit. 1980. Reagan. The New Era. Morning in America. De Palma."

Online viewing tip #4. Matt Dentler's got the video for Coldplay's "Violet Hill," noting, "Filmmaker Mat Whitecross (co-director of The Road to Guantanamo and editor of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man) directed the clip, which meticulously edits images from a multitude of political figures getting their groove on."

Posted by dwhudson at May 16, 2008 3:52 PM