Shorts, fests, etc, 8/3.

Michael Guillén points to TCM's elaborate site - seriously, spend a bit of time with this - for this year's Summer Under the Stars series, in which day in August is devoted to, yes, a different star. Tomorrow is Marie Dressler day, so Michael also talks with Matthew Kennedy about his biography.

Has an uncut print of A Night at the Opera been found? Scott Marks looks into it.

The thesis Michael Z Newman is exploring: "[T]he availability of films to own on videotape, disc, or computer file marks a transformation in the way audiences engage with the film text, and... this transformation makes the cult mode of film experience much more typical, more available to more viewers and to more movies."

Stephanie Zacharek's review of Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Life and Work of Jean-Luc Godard has been bugging Ed Howard for a couple of weeks; now he takes her on.

"Writing for my college paper, the Daily Texan, I gave 54 one of its only raves (its current Rotten Tomatoes score is a dismal 13%). My friends still tease me about it," admits Variety's Peter Debruge. "But I'd read about [Mark] Christopher's clash with Harvey Weinstein over which cut to release, had heard that Miramax was snipping a male-male kiss from the film, and I believed with my generous, closeted soul that a work of art was lurking somewhere on the editing room floor. Now I know... It may not be a masterpiece, but the film Christopher screened at Outfest, with 20-odd more minutes, couldn't have been more different from the neutered theatrical cut."

"[Frederick] Wiseman's films have been influential, and not just on other documentarians," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times. "Milos Forman screened Titicut Follies before shooting One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital adapts sequences from Hospital. Stanley Kubrick borrowed liberally from Basic Training in Full Metal Jacket. It's no surprise that Wiseman's great films stand as such imposing touchstones. For anyone looking to make sense of modern-day America - its human institutions and social constructs - no other body of work comes close."

At the House Next Door, Ted Pigeon considers recent comments by Salman Rushdie and notes that "his rendering of the novel in relation to film illustrates the discourse of dualisms that has shaped how we think about each of these forms."

"'A film is like a battleground,' says Samuel Fuller, playing himself, in Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Pierrot le Fou, one of 38 noirs in Film Forum's ambitious, entertaining, blood-and-doom-soaked series French Crime Wave, which begins Friday and runs through Sept 11," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "The line seems like a throwaway in that busy, demanding picture, but it resonates strongly in the context of this series because when the young French cineastes known as the New Wave went to war with their elders in the late 50s and early 60s, the crime film was, in many ways, the field on which the decisive battle was joined."

Also in the New York Times:

• "The Germs' sole album, 1979's GI, sold few copies but influenced much bigger Los Angeles bands, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction." Their story is told in What We Do Is Secret, as Marc Spitz reports. Nick Schager in Slant: "Infused with ragged unpredictability, What We Do Is Secret's wild concerts are its high points. Yet the script's desire to transform [Darby] Crash [Shane West] into some sort of tragic icon... is undercut by two-dimensional characterizations and an inability to convey the greatness of its protagonist's music, thereby making his story something of an appropriate secret."

• Joe Rhodes talks with Alan Ball about his new HBO series, True Blood: "I think after Six Feet Under, which was so much about people wrestling with their own mortality, I was just ready for something that was a little more fun."

• "Luther Davis, a playwright who won a Tony Award in 1954 for the book of the musical Kismet and a screenwriter whose films included The Hucksters, with Clark Gable, and Lady in a Cage with Olivia de Havilland, died on Tuesday in the Bronx," writes Bruce Weber. "A busy author for the screen and the stage, Mr Davis wrote 15 movies and dozens of scripts for television series, and he had a hand in five Broadway shows, including writing a 1945 play, Kiss Them for Me, about four sailors back from the war, and the book for Grand Hotel, the musical adaptation of Vicki Baum's novel, which was directed and choreographed by Tommy Tune and which ran for more than 1,000 performances from 1989 to 1992."

"With its tale (set to plaintive country guitars) about a man forced to take justice into his own hands, Red exudes a distinct 70s Southern-exploitation vibe," writes Nick Schager. "Faced with a choice between accepting powerlessness and asserting strength, Avery understandably chooses the latter, but the film's climax ultimately seems less an example of its protagonist's irrational fury than of cockeyed storytelling." Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Also in Slant:

• "After Sideways and now Bottle Shock, it's official: I love wine as much as I hate movies about people who love wine," writes Ed Gonzalez.

• Nick Schager: "The second wave of fawning Tarantino imitators commences with Hell Ride, a wannabe badass biker flick that plays like a Kill Bill-Death Proof hybrid minus the genre-deconstruction angle."

• And Beautiful Losers is a "compassionate but detached portrait [that] ultimately seeks to capture the spirit of a movement rather than fully examine the unique people and diverse work that comprised it."

• And Nick Schager again, this time on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2: "[W]hereas the first film presented the titular pants as a force that united its characters in shared female experience, such an impression is here routinely thwarted by a fantasyland-set script that jumps erratically between exotic locales, pressing dilemmas and tumultuous emotions, not to mention has a habit of wrapping up serious situations through flippantly easy shortcuts."

"At once melodrama and social problem picture, entertainment and exposé, The Snake Pit remains significant today for helping us grasp some sense of the attitudes and feelings about mental illness and state hospitalization prevalent in the United States in the late 1940s," writes Thom Ryan. "[Director Anatole] Litvak's method of contrasting what we see on the screen with the way the main character tells herself (and us) she perceives things has since become a familiar way to differentiate opposing perceptions of reality on film. I wonder, what other approaches have filmmakers tried over the ensuing years to convince the audience that a character is mentally ill?"

At Pixel Vision, Jesse Hawthorne Ficks talks with Jay and Mark Duplass about Baghead.

In the Guardian, Rosanna Greenstreet has a quick chat with Emily Watson.

Online browsing tip. Chris Wangler comments on several samples from Translating Hollywood: The World of Movie Posters for the Boston Phoenix. Via Jeffrey Wells.

Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks Comic-Con with First Showing's Alex Billington.

Online viewing tip. Mark Kermode talks with Woody Allen about Ingmar Bergman. Or rather, talked with... when Bergman was still alive. From Jerry Lentz, who also sends along a two haunting shorts - Overlook and SKA-63 - and a sort of amusing one, Call Sheet, that screened as part of More4's Kubrick season.

Posted by dwhudson at August 3, 2008 8:36 AM