Shorts, 6/19.

"In the 1970s, Hal Ashby made a series of films so brilliant and yet so utterly different from one another that if you didn't know who the director was, you might not think they were made by the same person.... It is not surprising that Ashby's films feel relevant at the moment, since our fragmented political climate isn't that different from the post-Vietnam-and-Watergate years in which they were made." Jennifer Wachtell introduces a feature at Good Magazine that includes Alexander Payne on The Landlord, Jason Schwartzman on Harold and Maude, Wes Anderson on The Last Detail, David O Russell on Shampoo and Judd Apatow on Being There.

Just up at Moving Image Source:

• Tom Charity: "Just as many of the most arresting 21st-century filmmakers (Jia Zhangke, Pedro Costa and Abbas Kiarostami, for starters) have taken a deliberate step back from the sensational overload of the late Hollywood commercial model and toward a more minimalist Lumièresque aesthetic (static camera, long takes, 'real time'), the critical anthology Defining Moments in Movies (Cassell Illustrated) attempts to extract singular insights from the flux of cinema history - to take a view, as it were, as all active spectators must."

• Mark Asch on Tomu Uchida: "He was skeptical about social hierarchies and sympathetic toward those on the low end, their marginalization often reaching a boiling point in climactic sequences of violence or amour fou."

• "Peter Lynch is the great wanderer of contemporary Canadian cinema, traversing wide swaths of physical and psychological terrain in search of what he calls the 'deeper myth,'" writes Adam Nayman. The series Weird Science: The Idiosyncratic Archaeology of Peter Lynch runs at the Cinematheque Ontario from June 20 through 28.

• Jonathan Rosenbaum on Marcel L'Herbier: "The founder of l'IDHEC (l'Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques), the most famous French film school, which he headed for over a quarter of a century (1943-1969), as well as a onetime director of the Cinémathèque Française (1941-1944), author of hundreds of articles, and a pioneer in French television who produced over 200 documentaries, he's still better known today as the writer-director of about 50 films, mostly features. Yet none of these is easily obtainable in the US."

"If you really want to go where this film thinks its ideas are, watch Stan Brakhage's The Wold-Shadow." Craig Keller on Shrooms and many other things.

Abé Mark Nornes's Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema offers "an expansive, insightful and thoroughly entertaining picture of how translation practices over the past hundred years have helped and hindered the global flow of moving images," writes Tom Mes at Midnight Eye.

"Vern's Seagalogy is the definitive statement of film writing by a member of my generation," declares Michael Tully. "Laugh if you want, but it's true."

Vadim Perelman tells Cinematical's Kim Voynar that he will not be directing the Angelina Jolie-starring adaptation of Atlas Shrugged after all.

By now you'll have heard...

• Sienna Miller will play Maid Marion to Russell Crowe's Sheriff in Ridley Scott's Nottingham; he Playlist has more.

• "Spike Lee will co-write and direct Time Traveler a feature adaptation of a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the nation's first African-Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics," reports Variety's Michael Fleming.

• "The black airmen whose lives will be the basis of a George Lucas movie know the picture will highlight their record of successfully escorting thousands of US bombers in World War II. They also feel it should tell of the trials they encountered stateside, like seeing German prisoners of war being treated better and afforded rights that were withheld from black American citizens." The AP reports on Red Tails, currently in preproduction. (That's about 40 words, by the way.) At Cinematical, Christopher Campbell assures us that Lucas won't be directing - he's an executive producer.

"Directing is a job I'm very new to," writes Chiwetel Ejiofor. "We're shooting the last sequence of a short film I wrote, called Slapper. Time is tight, it's just gone midnight, and we have plenty left to do. I pull off my headphones and walk over to the guys. 'Really good,' I say, 'it just needs ... more.'"

Also in the Guardian: "Kevin Spacey is delving into the personal turmoils of Hollywood's rich and famous in the drama Shrink," reports Gwladys Fouché. "The Oscar-winning star will play a pot-smoking psychoanalyst to Tinseltown stars who, unable to come to terms with a recent personal drama, believes he can no longer help his patients get better. Spacey will be joined by an array of Hollywood stars portraying his patients, including Robin Williams, Saffron Burrows, Jack Huston and Griffin Dunne, as well as the writer Gore Vidal."

"[W]hile Hou [Hsiao-hsien]'s name remains little known to the US public, among critics his renown has reached the point where one senses that he receives raves that are more automatic than considered, even if they reflect an understandable desire to educate audiences about an important filmmaker," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "That kind of knee-jerk acclaim, I'm afraid, explains the widely sympathetic, sometimes gushing reviews that Flight of the Red Balloon has received. Hou is a genius, it is said; therefore every film of his is a work of art. In this case, though I'm a longtime admirer and defender of the director, I must beg to differ. Hou's latest strikes me as a trifle, more perplexing than interesting, with inherent problems that are bound up with the fact that it's the first movie he has made outside of Asia."

David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook on Yôkihi: "[A]s a fairy tale, it's an Ugetsu companion piece: power and happiness may be mutually exclusive, but both are fleeting; love, as always in Mizoguchi, may make life worth living, but it also makes it a hell of a lot more tortuous."

Also, Glenn Kenny on why The Gang's All Here is "just small-s surreal" rather than full-blown Surreal: "[Busby] Berkeley's visions are, among other things, uniquely American, having more to do with the fantastic gigantism of Winsor McCay, expressed to the most eye-popping effect in popular comics series Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland, than the lonely, sometimes erotically charged landscapes of di Chirico and Ernst."

"[W]hat's most striking about The Third Part of the Night is how, in his very first film, [Andrzej] Zulawski's themes and aesthetics are already full-formed," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon on My Winnipeg and Encounters at the End of the World: "Both of these pictures are funny and mournful by turns, and both are episodic affairs, narrated in voice-over by their directors (that's nothing new for Herzog, but a first for Maddin), that make almost no effort to tell a conventional story. You can use critical buzzwords like 'distinctive' and 'visionary' to describe both of these guys, and I probably have. But that only serves to conceal how fundamentally different they are."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian: Dennis Harvey on Savage Grace and, briefly, Maria Komodore on Tuya's Marriage and Johnny Ray Huston on Mother of Tears.

"An outgrowth of street photography, inspired by Open City and The Bicycle Thief, New York Neo-Realism was the main independent tendency of the post–World War II decade," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Little Fugitive won a prize at the 1953 Venice Film Festival (and was generously credited by François Truffaut with inspiring the nouvelle vague), but [Morris] Engel would never repeat its success, either critically or aesthetically."

Acquarello: "The coronation of Queen Beatrix on the eve of May Day in 1980 provides a salient point of departure for Johan van der Keuken's The Way South, a cultural interrogation into the intertwined sociopolitical landscape of immigration, dislocation, underprivilege, and class division."

Revisiting To Die For: Marilyn Ferdinand and Ed Howard.

Brian Gibson in Vue Weekly on The Singing Revolution: "Once the film calms down and defers to the basic power of its subject matter, it offers some powerful archival footage and intriguing undercurrents."

"Film acting is the least skilled of all the performing arts and the one that needs least training," argues Ronald Bergan.

"Film preservation does not begin and end with the safeguarding of original materials." Brian Darr notes that, while none of the original archival prints were lost to the recent fire at Universal Studios, the "duplicates" will most certainly be missed. He sorts through the damage.

"Critically acclaimed films about provocative subjects struggle to make money all the time, but rarely have so many lauded documentaries consistently failed to connect at the box office," reports John Horn in the Los Angeles Times. "The recent nonfiction returns have been so bleak that several distributors are growing wary about taking on such highbrow works."

At the House Next Door, Elise Nakhnikian talks with Sara Taksler and Naomi Greenfield about cobbling together their own distribution package for their "balloonamentary," Twisted.

"It may be premature to change our hometown's name from Music City to Movie City, but there's little doubt that filmmaking has been on the rise here, aided by recent incentive programs the Tennessee Film, Entertainment & Music Commission (TFEMC) has introduced," writes Jack Silverman in the Nashville Scene. "Naturally, more filmmaking means more jobs—that is, if you have the requisite skills. To that end, Columbia State Community College has developed a 12-month film crew technology program, to be taught at the school's Franklin campus."

"Beyond the Rave is the first film co-released by Hammer in 20 years," and as John Lichman reports in Stream, this release is like no other in Hammer history. He talks with Lance Weiler, who's handling the Alternate Reality Game.

"As ThinkFilm's Cash Crunch Continues, Urman and Company Try to Keep Filmmakers, Creditors at Bay." Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE.

Lists:

• David Schwartz, chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, picks his top ten Criterion releases: "I decided to go with the pleasure principle - the great movies that would be the most fun to watch over and over."

• At Screengrab, the "Gay Pride Top Twenty," parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

• Flickipedia offers an Independence Day list in time for you to actually pick a movie or two and line up for the July 4 weekend.

• And, in that celebrate-America spirit, Christopher Campbell lists "15 Films That Offended Religious Groups" at the SpoutBlog.

New blog on the block: Film Industry Bloggers.

On or offline reading tip. With everyone pointing to the new (and highly appreciated) HD version of the trailer for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Jonathan McNicol is giving us a little something to do while we wait the half a year for the film itself: He's proofreading and reformatting the original short story by F Scott Fitzgerald and posting individual chapters. Beautiful. Via Jason Kottke.

Online scrolling tip. "A Visit to Naruse's Grave: Essay & photos by Bruce Goldstein, Director of Repertory Programming, Film Forum." Via Kevin Lee.

Online listening tip. Errol Morris is a guest on the Bat Segundo Show.

Online viewing tip. "Toe Jam." Brighton Port Authority, featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal, via popnutten.

Posted by dwhudson at June 19, 2008 3:27 PM