Shorts, 6/6.

"I know I'm going to sound a bit like a fanboy here, but there's no denying it: When you've seen a good number of your Hollywood projects fall by the wayside over the years, you're thrilled to see even a single one actually get made, much less to watch its creation at the hands of people the caliber of [Johnny] Depp, [Christian] Bale and [Michael] Mann." The book is Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933 - 34 (the film, of course, is simply Public Enemies) and the author is Bryan Burrough, who's begun a series of pieces for VF Daily. From the second entry: "They handed me a 1934 Reporter's Notebook, a 1933 mechanical pencil, and told me to 'find my mark.'"

"I was the screenwriter, fundraiser, second-biggest investor, PR hack, extras coordinator, and a sometime producer of the largest, most expensive locally produced film ever made in Seattle. It took five years, it cost $1 million, and its extremely slow projected return may have broken the bank for local distribution-quality films for the foreseeable future. It ruined my health, driving me to the brink of suicide twice, and from sobriety back down into a drinking life (and, briefly, the cocaine life below that), and aggravating a chronic muscle condition that addicted me to painkillers." Grant Cogswell on the making of last year's Cthulhu.

Also in the Stranger, Charles Mudede profiles 22-year-old filmmaker Zia Mohajerjasbi: "Seattle, from his view, is about an interaction (center/periphery) and an emergence (the new voices of the global youth)."

At indieWIRE, Jason Guerrassio checks in on five independent films currently in production.

McSweeney's recently hosted a contest entitled "A Convergence of Convergences" in conjunction with the publication of Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Walter Murch introduces his entry: "What follows is the astonishing outpouring of a great writer's first impressions on encountering a new medium. Maxim Gorky (1868 - 1936) saw a program of Lumière films at a Russian fair and published this article in a local paper a few days later, on July 4, 1896. It is written on a completely clear slate, by someone who had not already been taught how to regard the cinema by a thousand other writers, and the newness of it all leaps from the page." Via the House Next Door.

Somehow, I missed AJ Schnack's to Jonathan Marlow's "They didn't build their sales model for you" when he ran it a few days ago; but his latest entry on further responses has caught me up.

"Munyurangabo was one of my favorite films of 2007 and was far and away the best debut I saw all year." Darren Hughes interviews director Lee Isaac Chung for Sojourners.

Joseph Lanza's Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films is reviewed in the London Times by... Ken Russell. Via Movie City News. Also: Kevin Maher talks with Joseph Fiennes.

"The Duchess of Langeais, at a little more than two hours, of course is not unconventionally long, nor it is experimental in the overt sense of many earlier Rivette films," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "Yet it seems not to contradict but to subsume and affirm the tendencies of his previous work, and it does that in a way that recalls an axiom of the past century's art: Scratch an iconoclastic modernist and underneath you'll find a confirmed classicist."

"Maybe Darling is a little too commercial to make a big festival splash," writes Dan Sallitt in the Auteurs' Notebook. "But [Johan] Kling is commercial in the way that Lubitsch, Deville or Mike Leigh could be called commercial: he gives audiences pleasure, his control of pace and rhythm is exceptional, he's a natural at comedy and knows how to use music for narrative propulsion. I can imagine him having an international hit, but audiences would have to enjoy him on his own quirky terms."

Then: "I accidentally created an interesting double bill when I attended back-to-back screenings at MOMA of Yasushi Nakahira's 1956 Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit, aka Juvenile Passion) and Roger Vadim's 1959 Les Liaisons dangereuses." A meticulously illustrated entry.

"It's a crusade largely forgotten today, but when director George Stevens took on Paramount and NBC for the latter's distorted, truncated, and segmented broadcast of A Place in the Sun, he was striking a blow for filmmakers appalled by television's habitual abuse of theatrical motion pictures." John McElwee looks back on a mid-60s tussle.

At Stream, Eric Kohn has a good long talk with Joe Swanberg "about his unique professional trajectory, the philosophies behind his output, and upcoming projects, including a collaboration with Oscar-nominee Noah Baumbach."

"[T]he singular brilliancy of I Spy was its way of deepening escapist fantasy by sketching both the red star of communism and the color line in America," argues Troy Patterson in Slate.

"John le Carré's hit thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is to hit the big screen," reports Francesca Martin. The author's working on the screenplay with Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon).

Also in the Guardian:

• "The original Get Smart TV show, and The Party, the movie to which Mike Myers's [The Love Guru] owes its greatest debt, were part of an amorphous mass of mediocre, yet for some reason now fondly remembered, popular culture from the mid to late 1960s that was largely made by people old enough to be the embarrassingly hip uncles of the flower children and the war protesters," writes John Patterson in the Guardian. "Which is why my vote goes to dependable, crazy old bourgeois French Maoism of the soixant-huitard variety. Mainly because it's 40 years since 1968, and I've just seen Jean-Luc Godard's newly available La Chinoise for the first time." He's also just read "a fabulous, foot-deep new biography of the inscrutable JLG himself by the New Yorker writer Richard Brody... You get the movies, the critical thinking, the politics, the gossip and the sex. And it's about time: I certainly need to hear about JLG slapping his girlfriends in public, talking darkly of 'the Jews,' and being a gigantic pain in the ass on a regular basis. For a start, it makes him a lot less inscrutable."

• Also, a look back at Charles Burnett and the "LA Rebellion": "They were consciously anti-Hollywood, caught up in a wave of political activism and social transformation, and managed to construct a body of work now widely admired by critics and in-the-know African-American filmmakers, but still largely unseen by the public."

• Stuart Jeffries talks with Anne-Marie Duff.

• Bidisha on sex; that is, what works and what doesn't onscreen.

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon": Dead Man.

With War, Inc in theaters and Grace Is Gone out on DVD, Slate's Dana Stevens assesses John Cusack's career: "His is not a Tim Robbins-style activism, clomping solemnly through big-budget issue pictures and dampening the mood at awards ceremonies. Cusack's mode of protest is both subtler and more savage than that." As for Grosse Pointe Blank, Cusack is believable both as the bemused wanderer in a universe of Kafka-esque absurdity and as a total catch for Minnie Driver (one of the few female leads since Ione Skye who's seemed smart enough to be his match)." Meanwhile, in the Los Angeles Times, Tina Daunt reports that War, Inc "has survived bad reviews to find an audience in its very limited theatrical release."

Brian Gibson, writing in Vue Weekly, likes the idea of The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians Through Film, but: "Unlike a good library, or maybe like a badly underfunded library, this low-key film doesn't neatly order or cross-reference its various parts, lacks a strong, solid core to its collection of information and raises more questions than it helps answer."

"Maciej Drygas's The State of Weightlessness is a clear-eyed, thoughtful, and articulate survey of the human cost of the Cold War-fueled space race, and the moral vacuum left in the wake of geopolitical upheaval," writes acquarello.

"One of the merits of Errol Morris's new documentary on the Abu Ghraib photographs, and even more of the excellent book written by Philip Gourevitch in cooperation with Morris, is that they complicate matters," writes Ian Buruma, reviewing both incarnations of Standard Operating Procedure for the New York Review of Books. "The pictures don't show the whole story. They may even conceal more than they reveal. By interviewing most of the people who were involved in the photographic sessions, delving into their lives, their motives, their feelings, and their views, then and now, the authors assemble a picture of Abu Ghraib, the implications of which are actually more disturbing than Sontag's cultural critique."

"Caravan/Prague is a first person documentary account of a 500-mile bicycle caravan across Europe." At the House Next Door, Jeremiah Kipp talks with filmmaker Zack Winestine.

"Director Eric Guirado's The Grocer's Son is a small, self-assured film that moves at its own pace, always staying one graceful step ahead of its reluctant protagonist," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. Adds Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "For 18 months [Guirado] focused on mobile grocers in Corsica, the Pyrenees and the Alps. As the movie affectionately observes the gruff, self-reliant customers, some of whom hobble to the van on canes, it has a documentarylike realism. You grow to respect these hardy, weather-beaten people who lived their whole lives close to the land."

Julia Wallace in the Voice on On the Rumba River: "As a filmmaker, [Jacques] Sarasin has an extraordinarily light touch - a good thing for those who want to sit back and enjoy the music (the toe-tappingly spirited rendition of [Papa] Wendo's biggest hit, 'Marie-Louise,' is a highlight), a bad thing for viewers unfamiliar with Congolese history and in need of a little context with their rumba." More from Jeannette Catsoulis (New York Times), Rob Humanick (Slant) and Noel Murray (AV Club).

"I caught a lot of flack, most of it out of New York, for my negative review of Sex and the City." So Ella Taylor responds.

In the Austin Chronicle, Josh Rosenblatt talks with Danny McBride about The Foot Fist Way, while on a very different note, Anne S Lewis talks with Kieran Fitzgerald about The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez and "the perils of having the military on the border."

In the Age, Craig Mathieson talks with "Danish-born, Italian-based television director and documentary maker Christina Clausen" about The Universe of Keith Haring, while Stephanie Bunbury talks with Mike Leigh about Happy-Go-Lucky.

In the New York Sun, Nicolas Rapold talks with Guy Maddin about My Winnipeg, which opens next week.

"Its conversational song structures and lovely chamber-pop arrangements (both by Alex Beaupain) building toward a truly joyous rapproachment, Love Songs ends up a truly gay musical utterly devoid of camp," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "Jacques Demy might be a trifle shocked, but he would still be proud." More from Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Its crushworthy final half-hour is touching and sometimes magnificent. But much of its initial hour is maddening."

Hollywood is "a town that is constantly on the look-out for the next big thing. And at the moment, the next big thing is young, little-known British actors." Alice Jones matches names and faces. Also in the Independent, Lesley O'Toole interviews Jena Malone.

"Miss Conception isn't so much a movie as an extended sitcom - it looks like one, it acts like one, it reduces everything to the lowest common denominator like one," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Me.

Paramount "its faux indie division Paramount Vantage's marketing, distribution, and physical production and combining those three into big Paramount," reports Nikki Finke. "But I'm also assured that Paramount Vantage will still be an ongoing brand that will still be developing and acquiring specialty product with dedicated creative staff." Anne Thompson follows up, sorting rumors - some are true, some aren't.

Online scrolling tip. "As has been noted elsewhere, particularly in David Bordwell's writings, [King] Hu's elliptical editing of close inserts during fight sequences gives the illusion of lightning quick, almost incomprehensible skill that is faster than the eye can see." Daniel Kasman introduces a series of stills from Come Drink With Me in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Online listening tip #1. Werner Herzog is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online listening tip #2. Ambrose Heron talks with Ben and Casey Affleck about Gone Baby Gone.

Online viewing tip #1. Muto by Blu, via Richard Lacayo.

Online viewing tip #2. Mike Everleth is just wild about Jeff Krulik.

Online viewing tip #3. Kevin B Lee has "Paul Schrader and Ed Lachmann interviewed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of the Ed Lachmann retrospective at BAM." Plus accompanying notes on Light Sleeper.

Online viewing tip #4. "Geoff Edgers, an excellent arts journalist here at the Globe, is making a documentary about The Kinks. Or trying to, anyway. (Maybe he's making a documentary about not making a documentary about The Kinks.)" Joshua Glenn has a sneak peek.

Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2008 10:25 AM