Shorts, 8/21.

"At the famous Cinecittà studios in Rome, shooting gets underway this week on 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (36 Views from the Pic Saint-Loup), the new feature by seasoned director Jacques Rivette," reports Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa. Jane Birkin and Sergio Castellitto headline the cast. Meantime, there's been a summertime update at Order of the Exile: Concerning the Films of Jacques Rivette; scroll down a tad for a guide to the five new additions.

"This has got to be one of the strangest press releases to hit my inbox in many a long day." Anne Thompson passes along the announcement that Lars von Trier is ready to start shooting Antichrist in Germany with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

From Jeff Sneider's link roundup for Variety: "Apparently, Kevin Smith has seen Zack Snyder's Watchmen and he thought it was 'fucking astounding.' I have a friend at Paramount who also saw the film about a month ago and he called the 3-hour cut 'fucking amazing.' At this rate, every two-word review of the 2009 tentpole will be 'fucking (insert ultra-positive adjective here).' I for one, can't fucking wait." Related: Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay watches the "Watchmen Studio Grudge Match."

The Canary Islands are eagerly anticipating the arrival of the cast and crew - and cash - for the remake of Papillon, reports Graham Keeley: "Robert Downey Jr has been tipped to take [Steve] McQueen's part as Papillon, while Philip Seymour Hoffman has been fancied to take Dustin Hoffman's role of Louis Dega, who plots with Papillon to escape."

Also in the Guardian: Peter Jackson will be co-writing the screenplay for The Hobbit with Guillermo del Toro, reports Ben Child.

"Skeptics unite: You only have to lose your inhibitions," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "That, in sum, is the underlying message of Bill Maher and Larry Charles's brilliant, incendiary Religulous, in which comedian/talkshow host Maher inquires of the religious faithful and finds them severely wanting.... [I]ts arrival shortly after the death of George Carlin - a profound influence on Maher's standup act and politics - suggests the kind of film Carlin might have made in his prime."

"There may be academic couples luckier than NC State University film professors Marsha and Devin Orgeron, but there probably aren't many." Gerry Canavan counts the ways and then turns to their new books: "Marsha's book, Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age, is a journey through the Hollywood of the early 20th century, exploring what it was that attracted such diverse celebrities as Wyatt Earp, Jack London and Gertrude Stein to seek additional fame and audiences on the silver screen. Devin's Road Movies: From Muybridge and Méliès to Lynch and Kiarostami is a book about exactly that: a look at cinema's attachment to the myth of the road from Jean-Luc Godard to David Lynch."

Also in the Independent Weekly, Grayson Currin talks with Brett Ingram about his company's new DVD release of Bruce Bickford's Prometheus' Garden and Neil Morris reviews Baghead, "well-made and genuine, yet also simplistic and unremarkable. That is just what its makers intended it to be."

"When Frederick Wiseman is asked about the inspirations of his panoramic body of work, he doesn't tend to talk about other documentaries, but often mentions literature and drama." Nicolas Rapold talks with him for Moving Image Source.

New from Film International:

• After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation and Intertextuality is "a readable and informative anthology that dares to present a different take on Hitchcock," writes Helle Kannik Haastrup; also in Film International, Deirdre Devers recommends The Savvy Screenwriter: How to Sell Your Screenplay (and Yourself) Without Selling Out!.

• Daria Kabanova reviews Yana Hashamova's "short, but engaging volume," Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film: "Hashamova follows Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein, suggesting that 'when the distance between the subject and fantasy disappears, fantasy breaks down,' and therefore the fantasy of the West needed to be resurrected in some way to provide a renewed basis for identity formation. The stages of this resurrection are the subject of the volume's five chapters."

• Scott Jordan Harris on Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, "a classic of British wartime cinema and a perpetually re-watchable pleasure," Marlon Wallace on Michael Haneke's Funny Games US and Daniel O'Brien: "There are more frightening forces than ghosts at work in the Yeogo Goedam universe."

Tom Stempel, author of Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So-Good and Bad Screenplays, has a terrific second column up at the House Next Door, where the conversation is already rolling. Also: Godfrey Cheshire's coda to the lively back-and-forth with director James Marsh and others regarding Man on Wire and film music.

Ed Howard follows up on his critique of Stephanie Zacharek's review of Richard Brody's Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard with a series of entries on late(r) Godard: British Sounds (1969), Numéro Deux (1975), Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991), Hélas pour moi (1993) and JLG/JLG (1995).

"I am sitting with [Alex] Holdridge and his two [In Search of a Midnight Kiss] leads, Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds, at Café Audrey in Hollywood, a strangely cheerless place that disappoints as both a coffee shop and an homage to Audrey Hepburn," writes Joe Donnelly. "The three have the easy manner of old friends about them, which they are, having worked together on Holdridge's Austin indies and having spent much of the past 18 months on the road, as their latest collaboration wound its way through festivals around the world, winning fans and distribution deals wherever it went. They also carry the newfound joie de vivre of having survived their Hollywood horror stories, which they can now relate with something like good humor."

Also in the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas on Falling: "Deliberately crude around the edges, with the grainy, hand-held images of an 80s-era grindhouse special, this open wound of a movie is at once [Richard] Dutcher's most accomplished and personal film to date - the one that feels like Dutcher made it for no one other than himself, because if he didn't get this off his chest, it might have eaten him alive."

Andrew Schenker: "For a film that spends so much time keeping its lovers apart, [The Romance of Astrée and Céladon] brims over with a joyousness at the prospect of an unspoiled romantic consummation, a concept that [Eric] Rohmer treats with dead seriousness and is unafraid to depict in lovingly sensuous terms."

"I've devoted a significant amount of my film watching lately to genre films of varying kinds, from action and horror to science fiction and anime, and I've become fascinated by genres and the ways in which they stagnate or evolve." MS Smith's also been reading Barry Langford's Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond and it informs his consideration of a batch of films by George Miller, John Carpenter, Neil Marshall and Danny Boyle.

Scott Marks on Vertigo: "Nothing will ever rival the day I received a call from a mole who, in whispers, informed me that the School of the Art Institute was screening a private collector's 35mm dye transfer print.... Nobody, not even Jerry Lewis, uses Technicolor quite like Hitchcock. You haven't lived until you've seen Kim Novak flare Technicolor red as she exits Ernie's." Related online viewing: Hitchcocked! (thanks, Jerry!) And related online scrolling: Films With Nobody in Them.

"Filmed during the transition from silent to sound, Vampyr also represents a creative transition for Carl Theodor Dreyer," writes Acquarello in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"Now I just noticed the DVD is out of print and selling for over $125." What's Erich Kuersten going on about at Bright Lights After Dark? Lady in Red, written by John Sayles, directed by Lewis Teague and starring Pamela Sue Martin, Robert Conrad and Louise Fletcher. "So, good lord, with so much talent and beauty and sexy camp flowing through this (great editing too), why isn't it recognized more widely as a cult classic?"

In the Austin Chronicle, Raoul Hernandez talks with Isabel Coixet about Elegy; Cindy Widner with Steven Sebring on Patti Smith: Dream of Life (more).

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Gremlins 2.

"In the 90s, Ice Cube and Limp Bizkit co-headlined the Family Values Tour as, respectively, a rap legend and the nadir of music up to that point," writes Vadim Rizov. "Cube and Bizkit frontman-cum-filmmaker Fred Durst reteam for The Longshots, canceling each other out into total mediocrity." More from Nick Schager in Slant. Also in the Voice, Ruth McCann on Bachna Ae Haseeno: "High points include a lavish wedding scene featuring beautiful Nehru jackets, plus some tongue-in-cheek rap in the sexed-up musical number 'Lucky Boy.'"

Via Bookforum, Giles Scott-Smith on Tony Shaw's Hollywood's Cold War.

SF360 editor Susan Gerhard explains the "transition of services" as what was once done via the Film Arts Foundation is now going to be done via the San Francisco Film Society.

Online browsing tip. 40 Years Ago: Prague Spring Crushed at Slate. November's election aside, it does look as if the biggest story of 2008 may well be 1968.

Online viewing tip #1. The trailer for Died Young Stayed Pretty, a doc about rock posters. Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tip #2. Vadim Rizov comments on Grey Gardens; see, too, Kevin Lee's extensive notes.

Online viewing tip #3. Kyle Patrick Alvarez vlogs the making of Easier With Practice.

Online viewing tip #4. A terrific montage from Matt Zoller Seitz, The Explanation.

Posted by dwhudson at August 21, 2008 6:58 AM