July 30, 2008
Shorts, 7/30.
"Objectified is a documentary about industrial design; it's about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them." And Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) is working on it right now. Via Coudal Partners.
"Love Story is a fine introduction to the bittersweet career of an utterly unique band - newcomers will be piqued to dig deeper - and it's likely nothing better will be made." For Artforum, Andrew Hultkrans on a doc about Arthur Lee, "indisputably the first black psychedelic musician, and his boundary-smashing, interracial, psych-folk-Latin-rock band," Love.
"With perpetually delayed projects like Chinese Democracy, Inglorious Bastards and Where the Wild Things Are now closer than ever to near-existence, Terry Gilliam must be feeling left out," notes Vulture. "According to Hello! magazine, the hapless film director is allegedly making plans to revive The Man Who Killed Don Quixote - the movie whose first hilarious problem-plagued attempt resulted in the excellent documentary Lost in La Mancha - with Johnny Depp purportedly interested again."
Depp may also play the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's 3D version of Alice in Wonderland.
What could happen if Goethe's Faust, Bagdad Cafe and a wild machismo kitsch fantasy filled with mother-whore dichotomies clashed together?" asks X at Twitch. "Quite likely something as insanely pretty as Go Eun-Gi's [My Love, Yurie).
"The very strange saga of Tony Jaa and his disappearance from the set of Ong Bak 2 appears to have come to a tearful end." The tale is told by Wise Kwai and Twitch's Todd Brown.
Girish has been revisiting films "that are (1) either well-reputed, or (2) ones for which I have a special affinity" and then diving into analyses of each. After offering several examples of various match-ups, he asks: What about you?
"Trailers began slow and silent. At first mere glass slides, they were colorful and sometime objects of art in themselves." But John McElwee's terrific overview begins in 1964.
"For the past several months I have waded through mounds of research, marked countless pithy [Paul] Newman quotes, and sat and talked with his friends and colleagues," writes Patricia Bosworth, introducing her profile in Vanity Fair. "What follows is, for lack of a better word, a tribute to this singular artist and philanthropist. It's a kind of Newman collage, highlighting some of the most memorable incidents in this remarkable man's unique existence." And there's an accompanying slide show.
"Max Linder and the Death of Bourgeois Respectability," from Cullen Gallagher: "He tore down pretension and ridiculed respectability. The very symbols of social refinement - clothing, manners, marriage, propriety - are the targets for his humor. The greatest victim, however, is always Linder himself: his transgressions always end with his expulsion from the class he strived to attain. It is this liberation from respectability that is the archetypical Linder scenario." Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Adam Balz on You the Living
"[Mike] Mills features prominently in NYC gallery curator-turned-director Aaron Rose's Beautiful Losers, an entertaining doc celebration of the DIY talent (Shepard Fairey, Harmony Korine, Ed Templeton, the late Margaret Kilgallen, et al) who took part in Rose's titular museum exhibition," writes Aaron Hillis for IFC. "Emerging from the fringe of subcultures like skateboarding, graffiti bombing, hip-hop and punk, these passionate outsiders became art stars entirely by accident, but who's complaining? In support of the film, Mills spoke with me about art, LA wildlife, and pirate school."
At FilmInFocus, Richard T Kelly talks with Alex Cox about true independence.
"[Alex] Ross is fond of a scene that begins Lawrence Levine's Highbrow / Lowbrow, which describes Shakespeare performances on the 19th century American frontier," notes Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times. "'There were scrambled programs,' Ross said, 'with a Rossini aria, then a vaudeville pianist, and then a movement from a string quartet, and then dancers, and then something from Shakespeare.' That kind of mix, he said, 'is very deeply rooted culturally,' and today's eclecticism is just a return to the way things were before culture became sacred." Timberg also talks ruffled brows with novelist Steve Erickson, essayist Pico Iyer and critic Laura Miller.
"With their hopes for conventional movie deals increasingly dead on arrival, more and more indie filmmakers are opting for a do-it-yourself model: self-distribution, once the route of the desperate, reckless or defiant, has become an increasingly attractive option for movies otherwise deprived of theatrical exhibition." John Anderson reports: "Ballast, Wicked Lake, The Singing Revolution and Last Stop for Paul are among the indies currently or recently taking the maverick route."
Also in the New York Times:
"Fanny, in the end, made the Siren take a look at how much emphasis she places on direction. On that score, you have to flunk the movie.... But the Siren can't lie and say she disliked Fanny, when in fact she enjoyed it very much."
Lauren Wissot at the SpoutBlog on A Clockwork Orange: "[W]atching [Malcolm] McDowell's performance one begins to understand how cult leaders and serial killers could have so many females wanting to bed them. Bad boys with high IQs and their own set of rules, rebels writ large, all belong to the seductive brotherhood of Alex."
"[A]ny reduction in coverage of books that matter is particularly hard to swallow," writes Sara Nelson at Publishers Weekly, responding to news of layoffs and general shrinkage at the Hartford Courant and Los Angeles Times:
But here's the reality. Complaining and worrying aren't going to make a difference. The newspaper business is in free fall and book coverage is only a tiny part of the problem. If you want to get really depressed, consider what it means that, say, the New York Times had massive layoffs earlier this year and that the reorganization at the LA Times is paper-wide. It's not just "book culture" that is endangered, it's culture in general - political, economic, social, ethical.
Ed Champion's got some thoughts on all this.
Tom Shone talks about On the Waterfront and HUAC with Budd Schulberg, while Nick Bradshaw interviews Larry Charles (Borat, Curb Your Enthusiasm).
Also in the Guardian: "Those who consider The Dark Knight the best film ever made... are entitled to their view," offers David Cox. "But not, surely, to the claim that this woefully disappointing hodgepodge says something useful about the central predicament of our age." Related: Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on one good shot: "For a movie that wants to explain every damned thing on its mind, from the vigilante morality of Batman to the urban terror 'anarchy' of the Joker, here thank God, is an honest-to-goodness snippet of cinema: brutal, moving, feeling, expressing images." And in the Voice, RC Baker comments on the politics: "Will you sacrifice your privacy, accept surveillance of your every phone call, as if you were a villain, in order to snare terrorists?"
"Angelina would own the part." Says Julie Newmar, responding to rumors that Angelina Jolie is interested tackling Catwoman. The Age reports.
"After Burnt Money (2000), Marcelo Pineyro's conventionally entertaining true crime tale of gay bank robbers, queer blooms began to grow within the wilder garden of new Argentine cinema." Johny Ray Huston presents a guide, a sort of sidebar to Lynn Rapoport's review of Lucía Puenzo's XXY.
Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey: "Kenny is one of those films that sneaks up on you, at first seeming 'not so bad,' then 'pretty cute, actually.' Then before you know it, you're grinning ear-to-ear, pants duly charmed off." And local cinephiles coming across the Bay Guardian's "Best of the Bay 2008" special issue will likely head straight to the Nightlife & Entertainment section, where they'll find plenty to celebrate.
"There is a certain class of British film - for which John Boorman's Hope and Glory is perhaps the prototype - which follows an adolescent boy's coming of age during a notable or sentimentality-laced period of 20th-century English history," writes Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE. The film at hand is Sixty Six, also reviewed by Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "Condescendingly, the story spells out the parallel between Bernie's [Gregg Sulkin] 'underdog' status and England's during the World Cup, but what really stings is the onslaught of quirk, which isn't surprising given that Paul Weiland's name appears on the credits." In the Voice, Ella Taylor finds the film "brightened by a terrific cast, including Eddie Marsan as Bernie's timid dad, the hilarious Catherine Tate as his culinarily challenged aunt, and (given that she's about as Jewish as the queen) a surprisingly terrific Helena Bonham Carter in full floral folly as Bernie's loving mum."
"Is it just me, or is 'the inevitable, tragic interconnectedness of all humankind' currently in danger of replacing 'wise-cracking hitmen' as the most overworked arthouse cliche of our time?" Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly on The Edge of Heaven
"In a summer that will have Tom Cruise applying his considerable cackle to a Sumner Redstone surrogate in Tropic Thunder and a manscaping-derelict Bruce Willis doing his meanest Alec Baldwin impression in the adaptation of producer Art Linson's Hollywood tell-all, What Just Happened?, we thought it was high time to look at a few ways filmmakers have exacted revenge, both personal and professional, through their movies in recent times." A list from Stephen Saito at IFC: "The 10 Most Slanderous Cinematic Slights."
More on What Just Happened? (with a clip, too) from the Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein: "Not a knockout, but a victory nonetheless."
"In the course of recent events, various people have asked me what it feels like to have completed the project of a lifetime," writes Tim Lucas. "The answer I've settled on, the most truthful one, is quick and to the point: 'I feel bereaved.'" But that's not stopping him.
In Stream, Eric Kohn watches the studios ooze online - and notes that there's still plenty of room for independents.
"The scattershot America the Beautiful recapitulates vintage Beauty Myth trumpery," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice: "Beauty standards make us average frumps miserable and are the conspiratorial invention of a cabal of Madison Avenue execs working in concert with Patriarchal Hegemony."
How are docs doing in theaters? Agnes Varnum presents a mixed report card at indieWIRE.
Ray Pride has a DVD roundup.
"The nominees for the Israeli Academy Awards, The Ophir Awards, were announced yesterday." Yair Raveh's got 'em.
"Hacker Ethic is a provocative feature documentary that explores the politics and culture of the latest generation of hackers." And its makers are raising funds.
Online browsing tip. Via JR Jones, programmer and radio host Scott Marks's Emulsion Compulsion, "which includes over 10,000 images from his gigantic memorabilia collection. Enter at your own risk; the next time you look at your watch, it'll be two hours later and you'll be late for something or other. This I know."
Online listening tip #1. If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger... has Hitchcock and Truffaut discussing Psycho.
Online listening tip #2. At the House Next Door, John Lichman and Vadim Rizov talk with Adam Nayman and Andrew Tracy.
Online listening tips. Talking DVDs with Glenn Kenny and Douglas Pratt, Aaron Aradillas launches a new radio program, Back By Midnight. Also: A talk with John Badham about WarGames.
Online viewing tip #1. Terence Davies discusses Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons at a recent retrospective of his own work in Poland (that's Michal Oleszczyk translating in the background). Related: "Recently, I watched one of Welles's supposedly 'minor' works, The Lady From Shanghai (1947)," writes Ted Pigeon. "I was not surprised to find out that it was yet another intriguing exercise in Welles' career-long inquiry into the potential of the moving image."
Online viewing tip #2. Lena Gieseke's 3D exploration of Picasso's Guernica. Via Fimoculous.
Online viewing tip #3. Ed Halter has The House That Kent Built, "a profile of a local librarian who built up his library's 16mm collection, and remembers the format's popular heyday in the 60s to 80s. Great stuff with many cinephilistic shout-outs!"
Online viewing tip #4. For those in the US, Hoop Dreams, on Hulu, for free.
Posted by dwhudson at July 30, 2008 3:20 PM
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