Shorts, 6/12.

Donald Spoto's The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures appeared in 1976 and was, as DK Holm puts it in the Vancouver Voice, "at one time the longest and most sympathetic analysis of the director's films." 1983 saw the publication of Spoto's "quasi muckraking bio," The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. And now, currently via the UK only, comes Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies. "The portrait of Hitchcock is much like the one put forth in Dark Side, only darker," writes Doug. A sampling of cringe-inducing details follows. "One almost pines for a time when one didn't know so much about celebrities," but then, "it is better to know the truth, if it is knowable at all."

Well, along that line, at Slant, Kim Masters follows up on her last report about changes to the ending of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Seems the original version wasn't that far off from the truth; that is, if Polanski were to return to the US in 1998, he would have likely had to agree to some sort of media attention.

Back to Hitchcock for a moment. Catherine Shoard, blogging for the Guardian, comments on a study that would seem to "provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds." More in Science Daily.

"Four films into her career, [Yasmin] Ahmad is already known as the godmother of the new Malaysian digital cinema, and Mukhsin's May premiere at MoMA (as the first of Ahmad's films to receive a weeklong engagement in New York) marked another notable stateside appearance of the Malaysian new wave - which, despite festival acclaim, has seemed all but unexportable," writes Andrew Chan at the House Next Door. "It's unfortunate that Mukhsin would never stand a chance of attracting today's distributors, on the one hand because it is about Malays (an ethnic group most Americans know almost nothing about) and, on the other, because it lacks the air of aesthetic and thematic gravity that wins over the cinephilic press. But at a time when questions about Barack Obama's biography have brought Southeast Asian Islam under the microscope, Mukhsin might be just what American audiences need: a positive, deeply personal view of a religion whose followers are far more diverse in ideology and ethnicity than our government would have us presume."

Once he wraps the documentary he's working on, Garbage in the Garden of Eden, Fatih Akin will start shooting his first comedy, reports Bénédicte Prot for Cineuropa. Soul Kitchen will star Adam Bousdoukos, Birol Ünel (Head-On) and Moritz Bleibtreu.

Beauty in Trouble is "a romantic fable about a beautiful working-class wife and mom (the amazing Ana Geislerová), torn between a filthy rich and perfectly lovely older man who offers her a future and the bad-boy criminal she married who offers her a little of what she needs Right Now, if you know what I mean and I think you do," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But along with this downscale Sex and the City plotline comes a ruthless and hilarious portrait of contemporary Czech society as a realm of bottomless hypocrisy and corruption, as well as a roster of ludicrous yet somehow compelling supporting characters."

Lauren Wissot at the SpoutBlog on Wild at Heart: "Lynch's typically bizarre noir contains one of the steamiest foreplay scenes ever to grace the indie screen. Strangely, this kinky non-sex scene involves not Laura Dern's Lula and Nicolas Cage's Sailor Ripley (whose love scenes are saturated with such hyper-real color and artistic angles as to overshadow the screwing), but the childlike Lula and Willem Dafoe's greasy, so-creepy-he's-charismatic Bobby Peru ('Just like the country,' he drawls, introducing himself to Lula and Sailor outside the hotel they're all staying at, sliding snakelike into Wild at Heart nearly an hour and twenty minutes fashionably late)."

With [Duelle (une quarantaine)], Rivette's filmmaking is at its most obtuse and enigmatic, but also, perversely, at its most lushly sensual," writes Ed Howard. "Between the fluid camerawork and the film's gorgeously understated color palette, subdued to a twilight mix of rich blues and pale reds, the look of the film is stunning, creating the atmosphere of an eternal urban evening."

"Inasmuch as Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour examines the impossibility of translation in articulating the weight of tragedy, Nobuhiro Suwa's H story also aligns with Arnaud Desplechin's Playing 'In the Company of Men' in illustrating the inherent limitations of adapting source material to convey the essential story," writes Acquarello.

Nextbook editor Joanna Smith Rakoff looks back to the critical reception of Helen Hunt's directorial debut, Then She Found Me: "Largely omitted are any mentions of the heroine's ethnic and religious identity, never mind that the film's denouement consists of a moment of spiritual anguish, rather than, say, a montage of breakup scenes. The odd silence on these matters can perhaps be attributed to discomfort or bafflement that the blonde, sharp-nosed Hunt is playing a devout Jew (though Hunt, like [Matthew] Broderick, is half-Jewish), but more likely it's because narrative features about faith, particularly about Jewish faith, are so rare that critics don't quite know what to make of them."

Shawn Levy is working on a biography of Paul Newman and "it's a pleasure to share my brain space with him. Funny, upright, smart, brave, moral, talented, faithful, honest, manly, wise, humble: he's simply good people. A mensch, in fact and deed." As for the news that he's battling cancer, "just this, then: Godspeed."

Related: An observation from Joe Leydon.

In the LA Weekly, Ella Taylor profiles Mongol director Sergei Bodrov.

For the Independent Weekly, Douglas Vuncannon talks with Errol Morris about Standard Operating Procedure.

IndieWIRE interviews Kicking It director Susan Koch.

For NPR, Anthony Giardina recommends "Three Books About Our Affair with Movies."

Online viewing tips. "Yesterday we learned that a bunch of Disney movies will be available for free online, each for a limited time, this summer," writes Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. "Now, because everyone wants in on the streaming video game, Fox Searchlight has also put up three of its own films for free." Click here for the freebies; just so you know, the films are 28 Days Later, Quills and Sideways.

Posted by dwhudson at June 12, 2008 2:21 PM