June 28, 2008

Shorts, 6/28.

The Common Review: Woody Allen "[H]e's Kierkegaardian without the leap of faith, or Sartrean without the existential ethics of action," suggests Lennard Davis in an essay on the education and philosophy of Woody Allen in the Common Review.

Also via Bookforum, David Riedel's odd criteria for choosing a film critic to trust. In the New York Review of Magazines.

"That Eloge de l'amour, roundly heralded as a contemporary Godard masterpiece, fetishizes Robert Brasillach while turning up its nose at the Liberation is certainly... um, provocative?" Glenn Kenny gets a conversation going at Some Came Running.

"Wong Kar-wai has been an incessant reviser of his work," writes David Bordwell, who's been gathering information on "a fugitive, somewhat hallucinatory cut" of Days of Being Wild.

Pedro Almodóvar snaps back at the Guardian: "It is deeply unfair, and also rather silly, to blame me for an absence of Spanish films at UK cinemas." Further down that same page, Catherine Shoard, editor of guardian.co.uk/film, responds, but Almodóvar is right to object to the needlessly sensationalistic hook of Paul Julian Smith's piece, "The curse of Almodóvar."

Meantime:

I Spit on Your Grave

  • Kira Cochrane's been watching rape-revenge movies lately, specifically, "those in which a woman wreaks revenge. These convey very mixed messages, particularly for a female audience: on the one hand, they often show multiple images of sexual assault, which can seem exploitative; on the other, they give female protagonists the chance to fight back. Are they empowering for women, or quite the opposite?"

  • "Steve McQueen [Hunger] has been chosen as the artist who will represent Britain at the 2009 Venice Biennale - the most important combined festival, exhibition, tribal gathering and party in the international art world calendar, and an indicator of new developments in contemporary art." Charlotte Higgins: "He is the first artist working primarily in film selected to represent Britain for the event."

  • Toby Rose has a brief preview of Antoine de Caunes's Coluche, "which lifts the lid on politically-engaged French comic Michel Colucci, better known as Coluche, a boulevardier with brio who made a run for the presidency in 1981."

  • "What's the point of deleted scenes?" wonders Xan Brooks.

  • John Patterson talks with Frank Darabont about The Mist.

  • "The film historian John Barnes, who has died aged 87, was a leading authority on pre-cinema and early cinema, and co-founder - with his twin brother William - of the Barnes Museum of Cinematography, which opened in St Ives, Cornwall, in 1963," write Frank Gray and Stephen Herbert. "Their collection filled two whole floors of a house in Fore Street and, as one of the first film museums, it became a focal point for scholars worldwide."

Nick Dawson presents a lively history of "naughty cartoons" at FilmInFocus. Also: an excerpt from Schrader on Schrader, in which Kevin Jackson talks with Paul Schrader about Auto Focus, and Heather Chaplin on Grand Theft Auto IV as a "near-brilliant satire" on "American consumerist culture."

"Sometimes received ideas become reinforced and cemented by being brought up repeatedly as critical short-hand," writes Girish. "For example: Samuel Fuller's films are 'primitive'; Lang is all about fate; Ozu celebrates quiet resignation, and keeps his camera low and static; Chabrol makes Hitchcockian films that are bourgeois satires; Bresson is austere and minimalist; Peckinpah's films revel in ultraviolence, etc, etc. Now, these pronouncements aren't exactly false, but by no means are they the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The problem is that they 'fix' filmmakers too easily and quickly, thus constraining our thinking about them to certain pre-determined pathways."

EW: New Classics At Bright Lights After Dark, C Jerry Kutner lists the AFI's "10 Top 10 Genre Omissions." Meanwhile, Glenn Kenny offers a "(weak) defense of Entertainment Weekly's 'The New Classics' lists." And Jim Emerson asks, "What's your definition of 'classic'? Record-breaking? Precedent-setting? Influential? Enduring?"

More lists? Ok:

  • Flickipedia's got some end-of-the-school-year movies.

  • Screengrab's "15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S."

  • The SpoutBlog's "10 Most Critically Acclaimed Action Movies of the Past 10 Years." Also at the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell lists "10 Awful Matrix 'Bullet Time' Spoofs."

  • And from Stephen Saito (IFC): "Rockin' the Reel: Musicians Turned Moviemakers."

In ShortEnd Magazine, Noralil Ryan Fores talks with Bret Wood (Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films, Psychopathia Sexualis) about screenwriting and many, many other things. Via Ray Privett.

Fatty Arbuckle John McElwee on Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle: "His comic pioneering seems all the more remote for old rags and hanks of hair that pass for surviving prints. Watch those ghostly figures steeple-jumping over splices and sections missing, then try convincing your doubtful audience that such things once delighted millions."

Dan Callahan's "5 for the Day" at the House Next Door revisits the work of another Hollywood figure perhaps not remembered as well as he should be: Lew Ayres.

Clara Bow gets Nathaniel R thinking: "It's easy to assume, perhaps cynically, that it's merely the unfamiliarity of their images that gives them so potent and so alien a life force on the screen: the black and white, the unnatural speed of the footage, the disintegration of the image. But I think it's more complicated than that. I think it's also the magic, as it has ever been between true stars and cameras, and the silence itself."

In the second edition of Best Pictures from the Outside In, Nick of Nick's Flick Picks, Nathaniel of the Film Experience and Mike of Goatdog's Movies discuss The Broadway Melody (1929) and The Departed.

Volker Briegleb at Twitch on Infernal Affairs director Andrew Lau's Hollywood debut, The Flock, starring Richard Gere and Claire Danes: "What a mess."

"Jamaa Fanaka is the creator of some of the maddest, baddest filmmaking ever to come from a black man rolling bones in a rigged white man's game." And Marc Savlov interviews him. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Spencer Parsons talks with Jeff Nichols about Shotgun Stories.

"Spending 80 minutes with Alby Cutrera (Matt McGrath), the insufferable protagonist of Full Grown Men, a serious road comedy about arrested development, is excruciating enough," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But it is hard to imagine why any sane woman would actually marry and have a child with this unemployed 35-year-old cartoonist, who has the emotional maturity of a 10-year-old." More from Ed Gonzalez in the Voice: "For better and for worse (at least for a story about a man struggling to behave like an adult), Full Grown Men feels and thinks with the heart and mind of a child." And more from Ashna Ali (New York Press) and Noel Murray (AV Club). IndieWIRE talks with director David Munro.

Also in the Voice:

Gunnin' for That #1 Spot

Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on Chris & Don: "The subtitle of the film is A Love Story The picture makes the worn term fresh, moving." Kauffmann also notes that Isherwood's Prater Violet "stands with Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon in the front rank of fiction about film."

The Paper Will Be Blue "enfolds the audience in the dead of night during which most of the film takes place, adding a slightly surrealistic element to the absurdity of the actions," writes Marilyn Ferdinand. "But the daylight that eventually ends the film does not increase comprehension in this riot-torn city. If anything, it makes human actions seem more senseless than ever."

You Don't Mess With the Zohan "Israeli protagonists in American film, I realize now, belong to two basic groups," writes Liel Leibovitz in a Nextbook piece on You Don't Mess With the Zohan:

The first - Paul Newman's Ari Ben Canaan, say, or Kirk Douglas's Mickey Marcus - consists of strong and silent men whose chiseled shoulders carried beautiful blondes, large guns, and the entire weight of Jewish history. The second - think of Richard Dreyfuss as a somber commando in Victory at Entebbe or of Avner, Eric Bana's character in Munich - consists of men who differ from their brethren in that they seem to prefer brunettes and follow up the killing with a debilitating shot of self-doubt, guilt, and shame.

Amazingly, Adam Sandler has just forced on Hollywood an entirely new category of Israeli hero, and in doing so he and his co-screenwriters, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow, along with director Dennis Dugan, may just have created the first film that strips the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of its distorting filters and instead presents the century-old battle in all its raw absurdity.

More from Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "Extensive critical analysis has revealed to me why Zohan succeeds where [Get Smart fails.... The secret is hummus, hacky sack, cheap electronics stores and the descending falsetto pentatonic denial ('No, no no no no'). In short, the secret (don't tell the spies) is specific intelligence about the characters and their world - including the verifiable information that a great many Israelis, like the expatriated Zohan, prefer to love their country from a good, safe distance."

"Three female detectives rummage around in their own lives as much as in the lives of others in Icíar Bollaín's Mataharis, the director's first film since her laurelled domestic abuse drama Te doy mis ojos (Take My Eyes)," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"A sustained encounter with a disturbed personality, Frownland is nothing like a conventional comedy," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "But funny moments are the engine of this extraordinary 16 mm film, capable of mounding observations together into something like an experience, of turning repulsion so far inside out that it starts to feel like empathy." Also: My Winnipeg, Fugitive Pieces and When Did You Last See Your Father?

"As a portrait of the justice system's penchant for embracing media-circus hype at the expense of performing its duty, and of journalists' preference for tabloid scandal rather than truth, [Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired] is reasonably damning," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Its indictment, though, ultimately feels like a secondary issue to Polanski's apparently incontrovertible guilt, which makes him - in this instance - still more victimizer than victim."

Alan Yentob talks with Werner Herzog for the London Times.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Andrew Bemis.

Punch-Drunk Love The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Punch-Drunk Love.

Back in the NYT:

  • Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl is set to open wide over the July 4 weekend, and if it's a hit, "there will be the usual expressions of surprise from some movie industry analysts and cultural commentators," predicts AO Scott. "This is always the reaction when a previously underserved segment of the population turns out in large numbers for a movie, whether it's African-Americans lining up for the latest Tyler Perry film, evangelical Christians flocking to The Passion of the Christ, or, just last month, women of various ages and backgrounds embracing Sex and the City." And high on the list of the underserved would be, of course, American girls.

  • Dave Itzkoff talks with George Lucas about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, "which Warner Brothers will release on Aug 15 and which will introduce an animated television series with the same title that will have its debut on the Cartoon Network this fall.... [H]is enduring interest in Star Wars hints at a lesson that his filmmaking peers have already learned: that it is sometimes easier for them to make big movies than small ones. As his longtime friend and collaborator Steven Spielberg wrote in an e-mail message: 'All of us would like to make these little personal films that sneak into theaters under the radar. Sadly, for George and myself, and others who have enjoyed and endured great success - "under the radar" has become a no-fly zone.'"

  • "Labor unrest continues to dominate the landscape in Hollywood, and the possibility of a strike by actors has large movie studios planning to shut down production after Monday and has television studios rushing to complete episodes of series scheduled to return in the fall or January." Edward Wyatt reports.

  • Rome is hoping that Angels and Demons, Ron Howard's second adaptation of a Dan Brown bestseller, will revive a tourism industry hurt by the weak dollar, reports Elisabetta Povoledo.

For the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab profiles "some of the leading power brokers who keep the British film industry juggernaut in motion."

John Rogers plays the one-word game.

New blog on the block: The Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein's Big Picture.

Online viewing tip #1. The DVblog has the video for Grizzly Bear's "Knife."

Online viewing tip #2. Another excellent video essay from Matt Zoller Seitz, this one on Sharky's Machine. It'll make you want to track down this movie.

Online viewing tip #3. A doc (in German) on Fritz Lang. Many thanks, Jerry!

Online viewing tips. Michel Gondry's top 25 music videos at the Playlist.

Posted by dwhudson at June 28, 2008 2:23 PM