Shorts, fests, etc, 7/31.

Twitch's Todd Brown hears big good news from Jason Gray: Tran Anh Hung (Cyclo, The Scent of Green Papaya and A Vertical Ray of the Sun) is set to direct a Japanese-language adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. I agree with Todd: This is a match-up that sounds right.

But back to the dreadful present: "August has arrived, bringing with it the shitty August Movie." Vulture offers "A Theory of Awfulness" and a history of the August Movie.

"I mean no disrespect to the fine folks at Lionsgate, because they spend a lot more money on horror movies than I do (and I spend a lot), but Dance of the Dead is a whole lot better than just another 'DVD drop' flick - and it sure as hell doesn't deserve to be released buried next to seven other titles." At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg argues that this'll will be garnering a cult following soon regardless, talks with director Gregg Bishop and quotes from many a rave.

Ray Privett unveils Amos Gitaï: Exile and Atonement.

"Ten Novels and Short Stories That Would Make Good Movies" from none other than Maud Newton at IFC.

"[I]n considering the best Hamlets I've seen in 50 years of theatre- (and cinema-) going, I am struck by several facts. One is that the romantic tradition of Hamlet as a figure of introspective melancholy - 'the gloomy Dane' - has long been supplanted by an emphasis on a host of other qualities: his wit, irony, intellectual agility, sexual confusion and frequent brutality. This, after all, is a man capable of murdering any number of people except the one who really matters: his uncle Claudius." The Guardian's Michael Billington lists his top ten performances.

"Scene Stealers: Five black-and-white films that cast design in a starring role." A list from Phil Nugent at Nerve.

Latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Showgirls.

"Best years in cinema history (in chronological order...)" from listmaster Richard Kelly.

Fests:

• Michael Guillén talks with curator Steve Seid about Hecho por México: The Films of Gabriel Figueroa, running through August 9 at the Pacific Film Archive. Also, a spotlight on Enamorada - and: "Whereas Steve Seid's curatorial involvement with the Gabriel Figueroa series might have been more administrative than creative, there's no question that the PFA program Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis is Seid's bawling baby." Tomorrow through August 23.

• Joe Leydon's got a cool Telluride widget. August 29 through September 1.

• Simon Abrams previews Japanese Screen Classics: In Honor of Madame Kawakita for the New York Press. Through August 14.

Novelist Jon Barnes sums up Batman's history in the Times Literary Supplement before turning to The Dark Knight: "Never can a movie of such size and ambition, released by a major Hollywood studio and intended for a mainstream audience of global proportions, have deliberately inculcated so minatory and oppressive an atmosphere of pessimism and despair. That the film is also so recklessly exhilarating, with its giddily kinetic narrative, overwhelming martial soundtrack and ceaseless barrage of gunplay, pursuits and explosions, makes it one of the most interesting (yet troubling) interpretations of the myth to date."

"PRs - that mysterious and dark breed of fixers, stuntsters and arch media manipulators - have, for more than a century now, been as fundamental to the Tinseltown fantasy as the Hollywood sign itself," writes Kevin Maher in the London Times. "They are, according to [Mark] Borkowski, in his new book The Fame Formula, the hidden gatekeepers of the Hollywood dream machine 'who guard its formula, often to the death.'" Via Ambrose Heron.

"Dance With the One is the first movie made by the University of Texas Film Institute, a nonprofit in the College of Communication, and the crew is made up almost entirely of UT students." Clay Smith visits the set. Also in the Austin Chronicle, a DVD roundup.

Revisiting Gilda: Billy Stevenson and the Intense Guys.

Michael Koresky in indieWIRE on America the Beautiful: "Director Darryl Roberts's mode of address is so hackneyed and juvenile, and the editing strategies and muddy non-aesthetic so predictable, that one has to try and look beyond the surface of things to find any value here; after all, that's what Roberts himself has attempted to do in making it."

Online listening tip. Noah Forrest talks with Beautiful Losers director Aaron Rose.

Online viewing tip. Ted Zee has the trailer for Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Redux.

Posted by dwhudson at July 31, 2008 8:46 AM