GreenCine Daily: Shorts, fests, etc, 8/18.

August 18, 2008

Shorts, fests, etc, 8/18.

"[Kim] Novak was the top box office star three years running in the 50s," notes Stanley Fish. "Still, she is not usually mentioned in the same breath with the other major actresses of the period - [Elizabeth] Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner. She was not earthy like Gardner or icy like Kelly or Rubensesque like Monroe or raunchy like Jane Russell or perky like Doris Day. She was something that has gone out of fashion and even become suspect in an era of feminist strictures: she was the object of a voyeuristic male gaze." Earlier: Jonathan Rosenbaum.

"[A]udiences' ironic appropriation of [Douglas] Sirk - apart from being, like, so 1990s - thwarts the nonironic acceptance on which basis alone the films can work (as I believe they work ideally) as emotional melodramas that remain detached from the assumptions of the society they depict," argues Chris Fujiwara at Moving Image Source. "Ignoring the detachment makes Sirk an idiot. Denying the emotion makes him a cynical mass-culture satirist."

"For a couple of years now, I have resisted seeing Andrzej Zulawski's The Important Thing is to Love (L'important c'est l'aimer, 1975) a second time, because I was afraid that it wouldn't - couldn't possibly - live up to my recollection of it," writes Tim Lucas. But it's held up: "I like Zulawski's work more often than not, but this film I find the most spellbinding of them all, due in no small part to the central performance of Romy Schneider, without whose beauty at its core I suspect the entire zany, enraptured film might collapse like a house of cards."

John Cage: Variations VII "No maudlin Behind the Music - but tinged with drama of a different kind - a new series of films is chronicling the seminal multimedia series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, which took place in October 1966 at New York's 69th Regiment Armory," writes Michelle Kuo for Artforum. "Led by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver of Bell Laboratories, a group of artists and engineers banded together to collaborate on ten experimental performance pieces. They brainstormed, argued, and pulled all-nighters, producing an event that détourned existing technologies and aesthetic conventions. Critic Brian O'Doherty called it 'the major scandal, triumph, vision or nightmare of the season.'" Screens tonight and Wednesday as part of MoMA's Looking at Music series.

Variety's Anne Thompson points to Entertainment Weekly's "20 Fall Movies We Can't Wait to See," passes along an early word or two on David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and notes: "Now is the time that the various Oscar campaigners are lining up behind certain studios and movies." Related online listening: Matt Singer and Alison Willmore.

"Ricky Gervais has just finished writing the script for The Men at the Pru - a major feature film he describes as a cross between The Office and Mad Men." Arifa Akbar reports for the Independent.

"The popularity of the AMC series Mad Men, about Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, is renewing interest in previous efforts on television and in movies to portray the advertising business," notes ad industry columnist Stuart Elliott, introducing a list in the New York Times: "What follows is a look back at 10 of those shows and films - some serious, some silly, all worth watching again."

Paul Rennie traces the historical forces that led to a poster for Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA. Also in the Guardian: Charlotte Higgins blogs from the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams.

At Twitch, The Visitor has a quick talk with Woo Ming Jin about The Elephant and the Sea.

"Relaxed and genteel with a disarming smile and quick wit that strike you immediately upon meeting him, James Ponsoldt, the Athens, GA native who made a big impression at Sundance 06 with his tragically underseen Nick Nolte high school baseball umpire drama Off The Black, is a well-rounded guy." Brandon Harris talks with him about his "Media Diet" at the SpoutBlog.

Bit of good news (praise for his cameo in Tropic Thunder, mostly) and lots of bad news has rained down on Tom Cruise lately. The Los Angeles Times' Rachel Abramowitz surveys the wreckage.

"There were lessons to be learned this summer in terms of filmmaking, marketing, ticket sales, and film criticism." In the New York Sun, S James Snyder lists five he's "taking away from the summer of 2008."

Mike Everleth has the lineup for the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival: Friday at Midnight.

Nick Bradshaw's been blogging from Locarno for the Guardian. Roundups in the German-language papers: Peter Claus (Berliner Morgenpost), Daniel Kothenschulte (Frankfurter Rundschau), Isabella Reicher (taz), Christiane Tilmann (Tagesspiegel) and Martin Walder (Neue Zürcher Zeitung).