Shorts, 7/9.

Vulture claims to have a copy of Quentin Tarantino's screenplay for Inglorious Bastards: "If anyone is crazy enough to fund it, this movie is gonna be awesome."

Deutschland 09 is an omnibus film in the works, a state-of-the-nation sort of project that takes as its inspiration Deutschland im Herbst (1978, with contributions from Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Volker Schlöndorff and others). Signed up so far for next year's model: Fatih Akin, Wolfgang Becker, Dominik Graf, Tom Tykwer and Hans Weingartner.

"When two Italian films [Gomorrah and Il Divo] won the top runner-up prizes at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the reaction at home was akin to that usually reserved for victorious national soccer teams. The news media went wild." Elisabetta Povoledo reports in the New York Times.

"Robert De Niro is planning to make two sequels to The Good Shepherd, his 2006 feature about the early days of the CIA starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie." And Gwladys Fouché has more up-n-coming news in the Guardian.

Via Dwight Garner, one exchange from Cameron Martin's interview with Jonathan Franzen for the B&N Review:

BNR: It's been reported that a film version of The Corrections is in development with producer Scott Rudin, who has helped bring other literary novels to the big screen, including The Hours and No Country for Old Men. Some authors have enjoyed writing the adapted screenplays of their works, while others have relinquished control. How involved would you like to be in the screen adaptation of your best-known novel? Have you written or attempted to write anything for film or television before? If so, what unexpected challenges did you encounter? If not, what keeps you from exploring this artistic medium?

JF: Right now I've got my hands full with the artistic medium of the novel. In any case, the problem with "exploring" the artistic medium of film or television is that the screenwriter doesn't get to do much exploring. Movies and TV are team efforts. It might be fun to join the team if I could be team captain, but, with all respect to Scott Rudin and his people, who have been unfailingly nice to me, I think I have a better chance of becoming our country's next Secretary of Defense than of having an artistic say in a major motion picture.

We came this close to a 70mm standard in the late 20s and early 30s; John McElwee on what might have been.

Tom Ruffles reviews Garrett Stewart's Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema for nthposition: "He provides definitions of the two types of cinema. 'Filmic cinema: temporal change indexed by segments, then remobilized frame by frame. Digital cinema: time seeming to stand still for internal mutation.' (This head-scratching sense of vagueness is quite typical of his style.)"

Michael Guillén collects the "Received Wisdom of André Bazin," parts 1 and 2.

Larry Gross's 48 Hrs diaries roll on at Movie City News.

Boyd van Hoeij talks with Ferzan Ozpetek about Saturn in Opposition.

Mark Follman meets Ricky Gervais for Salon: "It's mid-December in Brooklyn, and Gervais is hard at work on the final day of shooting for Ghost Town, a romantic comedy due in theaters this September. Alongside actors Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni, Gervais stars as a misanthropic dentist whose near-death experience leaves him with special powers of perception and caught in a wacky love triangle reaching beyond the grave."

In the Voice:

• Ella Taylor objects to Marina Zenovich's argument in Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired: "[I]t is illegal and morally outrageous to take a 13-year-old girl - whether she's a nun or a nymphomaniac - to a strange house, feed her Quaaludes, and sodomize her. That, and not American prudery, a rotten judge, or a predatory press, is why Polanski is 'wanted' in America, and would be in Europe if the crime had occurred there." What's more, adds Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine, "for scandal-seekers, Wanted and Desired isn't half as illuminating as a trip through the trial's file at the Smoking Gun."

• Aaron Hillis on The Reflecting Pool: "Jarek Kupsc's investigative conspiracy drama wants to be this generation's All the President's Men, but instead of focusing on real characters and events, it's based upon a hypothesis that unsoundly links every discrepancy and omission from the official 9/11 report back to the US government."

• Also, Garden Party "plays like a non-musical Rent, or a faux-edgy Shortbus for kids raised on American Pie." Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine: "A post-millennial copycat of grand, multi-threaded LA films like Short Cuts or Magnolia, Garden Party is bad, obnoxious and too short, in that order." More from Ed Gonzalez in Slant. At indieWIRE, Michael Koresky glances back on a few other multi-story movies that work - and a few others that don't.

• "The long stretches of dead air that, it can only be assumed, were supposed to be filled by laughter provide ample time for pondering what audience Harold, T Sean Shannon's strenuously stale comedy, was intended to find," sighs Michelle Orange. More from Nick Schager in Slant.

• Also: "Groupie Uschi ('ooh-she') Obermaier has a name that's fun to say and a youth that reads like it was even more fun to live, but Eight Miles High, Achim Bornhak's exasperating biopic, is the biggest buzzkill that could possibly come of so much raw material." More from Andrew Schenker in Slant.

• Tim Grierson on The Stone Angel: "A stubbornly affecting drama that's far stronger in its quieter moments, writer-director Kari Skogland's adaptation of the late Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence's 1964 novel would have benefited from a tougher, steely-eyed approach."

• Nick Pinkerton on August. In Slant, Nick Schager finds it "a film that can't provide a single reason to care about its story."

Harald Reinl would have turned 100 yesterday; Tim Lucas looks back over the career of "an outstanding contributor to the fantastic cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, a chief architect of the krimi and the post-Lang Mabuse thriller, and as something he is too seldom acknowledged as being: one of the great Western directors of all time."

Danny Leigh, blogging for the Guardian, looks back "at the moment in the mid 70s when, as Britain teetered on the brink of economic collapse amid a global oil crisis, movie culture became smitten with the sex lives of Nazis."

"Written and directed by Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels is a great example of a film that's loved out of proportion to the degree to which it's been viewed; if you asked a hundred people if they'd seen it, you might get one who had - but, boy, try to shut them up about it." James Rocchi, blogging for SFGate.

For the Derelict's New York in the Movies Blog-a-Thon, the Siren writes up an entry "in which each movie represents something the Siren has observed, experienced or yearned for in New York, some good, some bad. And this is the New York of the mind, not geography."

"Most film writing is movies filtered through the self; I want the self filtered through movies." Jeff Ignatius explains what he's after as he opens up the Self-Involvement Blog-a-Thon, running today through Sunday, at Culture Snob.

Online viewing tip #1. Oliver Laric's Clip Art Movie, via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #2. Scott Macaulay: "At Boing Boing, Joel Johnson interviews designer Syd Mead, whose work includes Aliens, Tron and Blade Runner."

Online viewing tip #3. Bob Westal's been revisiting the work of Michael Caine and is now "in full worship mode," which I can certainly sympathize with; Bob's "now fully in awe of his onscreen brilliance and the craftsmanlike humility and thoughtfulness of his approach, epitomized in a single aphorism of his: 'The work is the rehearsal and the performance is the relaxation.'" And he posts a fun interview.

Online viewing tip #4. Ted Zee posts the trailer for Stacy Peralta's Made in America.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Alison Willmore has more trailers, including the one everyone's talking about today.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The DVblog considers two shorts by Robert Croma.

Posted by dwhudson at July 9, 2008 3:47 PM