GreenCine Daily: Shorts, 8/26.

August 26, 2008

Shorts, 8/26.

At Midnight Eye, Tom Mes talks with co-editor Jasper Sharp about his new book, Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, while Sharp interviews Yoshihiko Matsui, "one of the towering figures of the 80s jishu eiga underground scene, alongside other familiar names including his early collaborator Sogo Ishii."

Via Matt Dentler, Rolling Stone's chat with producer James Schamus about the film he and Ang Lee are working on: "'We've had some very intense movies,' said Schamus, who adapted the screenplay for Taking Woodstock from a book by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte. 'This is about play and fun and has hopeful spirit.'"

"The BBC's just-screened, rave-reviewed drama House of Saddam was billed as an ensemble piece but it was obviously going to triumph or be trashed on the strength of one role: the dictator himself," writes Rachel Schabi. "And the reviews for this character were effusive: critics described the performance as 'transfixing,' 'bombastic' and 'unnervingly charismatic.'... 'The minute I heard about it, I knew that I and no one else would play him,' says the Israeli actor Igal Naor."

Not Coming to a Theater Near You's Nicholas Ray series picks up again, with Leo Goldsmith on The Lusty Men and Jenny Jediny on Johnny Guitar.

FilmInFocus: "In this abridged extract from Burton On Burton, the definitive study of the director in his own words, editor/interviewer Mark Salisbury describes the inception of the Big Fish project and draws from [Tim] Burton an account of the personal circumstances that led him to want to direct the movie."

Cullen Gallagher in Reverse Shot:

La France inhabits a world of magical realism: songs are codes to pass by sentries, and bodies have an ethereal weightlessness that seemingly allows them to float (as when the whole band of soldiers take to the trees to hide from a passing stranger) or disappear (as when Camille, momentarily suspected as a spy, is able to slip through the circle of soldiers undetected while clouds obscure the moonlight). More than just blurring the line between realistic and fantastic, [Serge] Bozon uses these seemingly contradictory binaries as formal strategies throughout the film: the cinematic and the theatrical (tableau-style shots reminiscent equally of early cinema as the stage); the naturalistic and the artificial (by daylight the forest radiates unadorned beauty, while at night the deliberate lighting reveals the artistry of cinematographer Céline Bozon, the director's sister); and even the narrative seems to be divided into alternating daytime and nighttime scenes - the only distinction in what appears to be a never-ending journey. The most significant distinction (or lack thereof), of course, is one of gender: Camille passes as a boy, while the male soldiers sing of being a blind girl.

"Watching Brideshead Revisited after Barry Lyndon is not terribly fair to the former," concedes J Robert Parks at Daily Plastic. Even so, he finds comparisons worth exploring.

"During the late second-wave feminist movement in the United States and its slightly lagging reverberations in Europe, two films of female revenge premiered: I Spit on Your Grave (whose innocuous original title was Day of the Woman), a primal, graphically violent film that was lumped into the popular exploitation genre, and the Dutch film A Question of Silence (literally translated as The Silence of Christine M), an avowed feminist film with a very civilized veneer in which the murder at its center is never explicitly shown." Marilyn Ferdinand describes "the basic male/female dynamics at work in the narratives of these two films, ways the films have been understood, and ways to reframe narratives to accommodate more advanced ideas about gender roles."

"Having gleaned how to use the tools of the effects craft while working for Dreamworks in the late 90s, where [Mark] Russell worked on such effects laden Steven Spielberg pictures as Amistad, Minority Report and A.I., he has quickly made a name for himself as someone who can deliver high powered special effects work for films outside of the studio system's auspices. This year he's had two fairly high profile successes, Alex Rivera's cyberpunk goes south of the border techno thriller Sleep Dealer, which was a favorite at Sundance this year, and Charlie Kaufman's forthcoming Synecdoche, New York, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a theater director undergoing one mindbending mid-life crisis." Brandon Harris talks with him about his "Media Diet" for the SpoutBlog.

Adam Hartzell at Hell on Frisco Bay on No Regret: "I excuse the melodrama because South Korean cinema has a long melodramatic history, and such allows this Queer film to nestle up nicely with the history of genre in South Korean film. And as Guy Maddin asked us at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival this year, give melodrama a chance, since it enables us to live within our dreams, often something we must suppress during the realities of our everyday."

Adam Balm launches AICN's new column on sci-fi books.

List: "Six Novels I Would Love to See Adapted into Films," from Kurt Halfyard on Row Three, and Flickipedia's got a back-to-school list.

Online fiction tip. Steven Kaplan notes that painter and critic Peter Plagens's novel The Art Critic is being serialized on Artnet.