July 15, 2008

Shorts, 7/15.

Two-Lane Blacktop "What can one say about Rudy Wurlitzer that doesn't suggest multitudes of overlapping worlds?... After several years in the New York literary and visual arts underground as a participant observer, Wurlitzer emerged with a series of one of a kind novels - Nog, Quake and Flats and the screenplay for Two-Lane Blacktop in collaboration with Monte Hellman in the late 60s and early 70s. He has worked with Sam Peckinpah, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alex Cox, Bernardo Bertolucci and then some." So Lee Hill gets him talking for Vertigo.

"A humanist intellectual, whose layered studies of conflicting social forces and individual fates may have been too subtle for the culture surrounding them, [Helmut] Käutner qualifies as one of the pantheon directors of German cinema, possibly even the nation's finest major filmmaker of the sound era save, perhaps, Fassbinder," argues Christophe Huber.

Also at Moving Image Source: "Recycle It" is Ed Halter's brief but excellent history of the use of found footage from the silent era through Joseph Cornell and Bruce Conner to net.art and YouTube.

And David Cairns, too, makes a stab at reviving an under-appreciated oeuvre: "Celebrated in the 60s and 70s, [Shirley Clarke] seems to have been progressively erased from film history, just as the Eastmancolor sequence of Skyscraper (1959) has faded to pink. Stalinist revisionism or cultural amnesia?"

Jim Emerson sorts through the various colors of blood in the movies.

Inglourious Basterds When DK Holm first read what may or may not be the screenplay for Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, he "hated it." Then he got to thinking, talking with friends and a second read-through: "I've come to the conclusion that Inglourious Basterds would be one hell of a movie, one of Tarantino's best; that its 'problem' is that the movie isn't as much on the page as his previous films; and that it is probably the best marriage of Samuel Fuller and the nouvelle vague since Pierrot le fou."

Meanwhile, Defamer runs "An Open Letter to Quentin Tarantino on the Occasion of His Latest Gross Overexposure" (via Movie City News) and the Playlist has a few casting ideas.

Speaking of Fuller, though: "As a director, Fuller delighted in rubbing America's face in its social and political failures, but he judiciously refused to align himself with any Utopian political movement," writes Chris Dumas in Nextbook. "Fuller's films are typified by a sense of moral urgency, the feeling that the stakes are too high to be polite. This is how he was the opposite of a director like Ernst Lubitsch: elegance of structure and fluidity of style were never his concern. This insolence, this brashness, is perhaps why Fuller has always been more popular with other directors than he has been with critics or film historians, and more celebrated by the French than by us."

Happy birthday, indieWIRE!

Mike Everleth launches the Underground Film Guide.

Animal House Dennis Cozzalio recalls the day he met John Belushi.

Netroots Nation, "a four-day event at the Austin Convention Center bringing together the brightest lights in liberal and progressive opinion and activism," as Wells Dunbar puts it in the Austin Chronicle, takes off this Friday. Alex Gibney will be there, so Marc Savlov talks with him: "I think I'm just going to give a little preview of a new film I've done. It's about Jack Abramoff, and it's called Casino Jack and the United States of Money, and it looks at the Abramoff scandal as a way to reckon with the pernicious influence that money has had in our political process." Meanwhile, blogging for the Guardian, Gibney tells the story behind Taxi to the Dark Side.

In text and audio, Guernica Mia Farrow talking about the ongoing, right now, as-I-blog-and-you-read genocide in Darfur. The presentation took place in April; just yesterday, as the Guardian reports, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has been charged by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court with genocide.

"Can Spike Jonze save Where the Wild Things Are?" Patrick Goldstein "just spoke to Warners chief Alan Horn, who offered, for the first time, his studio's side of the story." Goldstein also asks Bob Shaye about "why New Line was slammed with so many lawsuits about Lord of the Rings profits, how he desperately tried to save New Line and why he still thinks it was a good idea to go off and direct a movie as his company was struggling to survive." Also: Spike Lee's LA Riots is back on.

School of Rock Variety's Tatiana Siegel reports that producer Scott Rudin, director Richard Linklater, writer Mike White and star Jack Black are reuniting for a sequel to School of Rock.

"Beginning in a fairly muted fashion, John Crowley's second feature, Boy A, maintains its restraint throughout, and is the better for it," writes Jacob Powell in the Lumière Reader. More from Maggie Glass at cinemattraction.

"Latter-day cinephiles and movie reviewers (and I number myself in this concord) should, it can be argued, preserve their morale and remain in perpetual flight from the reality of what they're doing," argues Tom Sutpen. "But when our enthusiasm, our true and everlasting love for cinema becomes so omnivorous, so all-embracing that even crap like Skidoo starts looking good to us, then I sometimes wonder if it might not be time to honor the medium at the center of our souls and find another, slightly less honorable preoccupation."

Niagara Also at Bright Lights After Dark, Erich Kuersten: "A strangely soothing, a sun-drenched proto-neo-noir, Niagara is one of my favorite Marilyn Monroe movies, up there with Don't Bother to Knock and The Misfits in its ability to capture the sociopathic allure of Monroe (this is the film with her infamous 'longest walk'), and Niagara Falls makes the perfect backdrop for her dangerous sexuality; the cascading water forms a cthonic curtain that drapes around Monroe's Venus in a ceaseless embrace."

"[T]here is one movie moment that endures more than all others for me, if only because it hit me like a bolt of thunder - and also nearly made me lose my lunch." The Toronto Star's Peter Howell, via Movie City News.

"[T]he Maysles Cinema, a nonprofit theater in Harlem founded by [Albert] Maysles, who, with his late brother David, made such landmark films as Salesman (1968) and Grey Gardens (1975), aims to show nothing but documentaries, and intends to build an audience through them, not in spite of them." Benjamin Mercer reports in the New York Sun.

"I've been given the cool opportunity to participate in a mass group review of Randy Olson's latest science mockumentary, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, joining approximately fifty other science and environmental bloggers," writes Chuck Tryon. "It's a cool idea, one that will likely help to promote Sizzle, but one that can also - hopefully - serve to provoke a conversation about our discourse on global warming."

For the Telegraph, Chris Hastings talks with Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane, about the 900 boxes of material from the archives that she's donated to the University of the Arts.

"The end of the 1980s and the early 1990s represent a turning point in Cuban cinema and a departing point for a 'revolutionary' approach to gender representation." Br'gida M Pastor in Eurozine.

Room For Michael Tully, writing at Hammer to Nail, Kyle Henry's Room is "one of the more effective true indies to depict the struggles of a working-class American trying to survive in a politically and economically disturbed early 21st Century America."

"Exactly when did cinema get sanitised?" asks Andrew Pulver in a piece on the "coffee-table-isation of film," when "it became fashionable to go to see something like Betty Blue or My Life as a Dog - the latter being the prototype for a seemingly endless parade of sappy European movies with a cute little tyke in the lead. These two films both reached our shores in 1986, so it's fair enough to nail that year as the key moment."

Also in the Guardian:

Ingmar Bergman
  • Gwladys Fouché reports that Ingmar Bergman's home on the Baltic Sea island of Fårö may well be auctioned off "unless sponsors can be found to fund a cultural centre that would preserve the home as it is." Yesterday in the Berliner Zeitung, Jan Brachmann wished Bergman a happy 90th, wherever he may be, and Jerry Lentz sends along a bit of related online viewing.

There are rumors "that Ingmar Bergman named it one of his favourite films, and Liv Ullmann, who plays the role of Kristina, considered it one of her finest." Pacze Moj on Jan Troell's The Emigrants.

Barbara Ellen talks with Jaime Winstone for the Observer, where Philip French remembers Rita Hayworth and is "bludgeoned into submission by the energy and exuberance and came near to embracing the camp frolics and calculated pseudo-artlessness" of Mamma Mia!

"From the New Wave to the New Hollywood: The Life Cycles of Important Movie Directors from Godard and Truffaut to Spielberg and Eastwood" is a paper issued in June by David Galenson, author of Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, and Joshua Kotin. For Portfolio, Zubin Jelveh writes up a little quiz. Look at his list of ten directors, then: "Decide whether each director is a Conceptual or Experimental innovator." Via Movie City News.

X-Files: I Want to Believe The X-Files: I Want to Believe, "is, in X-Files argot, a stand-alone," reports Mark Harris: "a self-contained story reminiscent of several beloved early episodes in which Mulder and Scully were dispatched to a remote (but always vaguely Canadian looking) location to confront an undefined, menacing presence. [Chris] Carter promises not only scares but also a beginning, middle and end, none of them overly entangled in back story. Everyone, including newcomers, is invited to jump aboard." More from Gina McIntyre in the Los Angeles Times.

Also in the New York Times:

August
  • Jeannette Catsoulis on August: "Set in New York City in August 2001, in the tense climate of a dot-com startup where stock price and corporate morale are plummeting, the movie unspools with an unrelieved cynicism and a metallic aftertaste." More from Meghan Keane (New York Sun), Eric Kohn (Cinematical), Nathan Rabin (AV Club) and Steven Zeitchik (Hollywood Reporter). And Eric Kohn talks with director Austin Chick for Cinematical.

  • "Harold (Spencer Breslin) is a chubby 13-year-old afflicted by hemorrhoids, crotchetiness and a flagrant case of male pattern baldness. If the milk of hilarity just blew out your nostrils, have I got the movie for you!" Nathan Lee on Harold. More from S James Snyder (New York Sun).

  • Eight Miles High "follows, with refreshing lack of judgment and titillating brio, the überbohemian peregrinations of a wild child born to a drab Munich household but destined for flamboyant London orgies and spectacular third-world slumming," notes Nathan Lee. More from Sam Adams (AV Club) and Andrew O'Hehir (Salon).

  • "Death Defying Acts, a fictionalized love story involving Harry Houdini, could be a sweet little discovery if only the relationship at the core of it were more convincing," writes Neil Genzlinger. More from Dana Stevens (Slate).

"Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired will not convince you that Polanski is a good or bad guy, it won't argue that his having sex with a minor was wrong or OK (as far as matters, it was against the law) and it won't prove that Polanski was innocent or guilty (he already admitted guilt in his plea in 1977)," writes Christopher Campbell in Cinematical. "But it may get you thinking about why exactly he couldn't be here to accept his Oscar, what is the fault of his having to flee. Does it go back to [Sharon] Tate's murder? Or further? Was it the media? The legal system? The corruption of [Judge Laurence] Rittenband? Or a deep conspiracy administered by Susan's actress mother? The answer is not exactly found in the film, though, which is fine when you think about what an exhaustive and riveting narrative [Marina] Zenovich and company have compiled out of the events." More from Noel Murray (AV Club).

Surfwise "Most producers of reality-TV series can only dream of finding subjects as fascinating as the family examined in Surfwise, a provocative documentary about a man who dropped out to follow a dream that gradually evolved into something not unlike a nightmare." Joe Leydon in the Houston Chronicle.

Andrew Schenker on The Exiles: "Yes, it's regrettable that alcohol played such a large part in Native-American life, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be documented and it doesn't mean that a filmmaker shouldn't draw on all his available resources to achieve this documentation. Clearly a little perspective is needed."

"Apparently I'm less above juvenile humor than I was when I was actually a juvenile, during [Adam] Sandler's heyday," sighs Mark Asch at Stop Smiling. "But hey, You Don't Mess with the Zohan is what it is; Get Smart and The Love Guru aren't even that."

"At its best, War, Inc reaches the level of a biting—and courageous—political satire," writes Joanne Laurier at the WSWS. Nonetheless: "The Hollywood 'left,' even its most conscientious elements, remains extremely limited in both its social thinking and its artistry. The years of immense wealth and vapid content have not left anyone unscathed."

For the Stranger, Roxanne Emadi talks with Jonathan Levine about The Wackness, reviewed by Bradley Steinbacher. Also: Annie Wagner on Monsieur Verdoux.

James Mottram talks with Colin Firth for the Independent.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Jeremy Richey.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

"Hazy, lazy, crazy - our choices here, from a million possibilities, recall beach days, hot nights, childhood matinees, sweaty exotica, and, notably, the sun-scorched way American movies captured summer heat in the 1970s." A Flickipedia list.

"100 Online Sources for Good, Free-As-In-Beer, Feature-Length Films." An Internet Service Deals list.

Watch the blinking gif: Nathaniel R's "100 Favorite Actresses."

What're your favorite films of 08 so far? asks Eugene Hernandez.

"In the fall of 2007, filmmaker and Hollywood actor Edward Burns made history by choosing to premiere his romantic comedy Purple Violets on iTunes." At Stream, Eric Kohn asks producer Aaron Lubin how it's worked out.

Paul Harrill lists and links to "iPhone WebApps for Filmmakers."

Online browsing tip. Via Coudal Partners, movie posters by All City Media. For example, Alice in the Cities.

Online listening tip #1. At the House Next Door, John Lichman and Vadim Rizov talk with Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

Online listening tip #2. If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger... has Hitchcock and Truffaut, talking of Vertigo (and in the room the women come and go).

Online viewing tip #1. Kermesse Fantastique ate filmtagebuch.

Online viewing tip #2. Watch and learn all about the making of that video for Radiohead's "House of Cards."

Online viewing tip #3. Ray Pride posts an "hour with [Cinetic's] Matt Dentler on digital distribution."

Online viewing tips. David Friedman's 60 Seconds series; S James Snyder has background in the New York Sun.

Posted by dwhudson at July 15, 2008 1:51 PM