Shorts, fests, etc, 8/28.

"[T]here are more than enough names to be going on with: Balanchine, Stravinsky, Koussevitsky, Toscanini, Stokowski, Kurt Weill and Rouben Mamoulian are only the most prominent," writes Clive James, reviewing Joseph Horowitz's Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts for the TLS. "Horowitz provides biographical sketches for them all, each sketch studded with quotable illustrations. (Otto Preminger, hearing a group of his fellow émigrés speaking Hungarian, said, 'Don't you people know you're in Hollywood? Speak German.') The result is a rich assembly, an unmasked ball teeming with famous names, but you always have to remember - and our author, to his credit, never forgets - that in too many cases their attendance was compulsory, a fact which can lend a sad note to the glamour."

Earlier reviews: Joscelyn Jurich (Bookforum), Phillip Lopate (New York Times) and the Economist.

Jean Renoir in 1952, in a piece that ran in Films in Review: "I didn't want to stay put. But my compass was out of order. I couldn't find my direction. I am very proud of this. It means that I haven't lost contact with the actual world, with this strange, unstable world of the mid-twentieth century.

Yesterday was Hollis Frampton day at DC's.

"According to Nicholas Rombes, editor of the book New Punk Cinema, the main feature that associates New Punk Cinema with punk music is these films' do-it-yourself ethos, which suggests to the audience that anybody can make a film," writes Halim Cillov in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Rombes states that beginning in the 1990s a series of films from around the world began to emerge and became highly popular among mainstream audiences, films that challenged and radically revised many of the narrative and aesthetic codes that governed Hollywood fare."

The Guardian's Ben Childs notes that Variety's Tatiana Siegel reports on the next film from Todd Solondz, "a companion piece, a 'quasi-sequel' as it were, to Happiness... The cast includes Demi Moore, Emma Thompson and Paul Reubens."

"Alongside compulsive dives into the deep end of the nostalgia pool, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of television series on DVD presents a rare opportunity to indulge in sociohistorical hindsight (to say nothing of scrutinizing and justifying personal obsessions)," writes Marc Holcomb at Moving Image Source. "From such a vantage point, the private-eye/police detective shows that flourished from the mid-1960s through the late 70s offer telling insights into an era of intense cultural flux. Chief among these is the jarring isolationism of the TV dick milieu, best exemplified by Mannix, Ironside and Hawaii Five-0. Combined with their blinkered portrayal of the fractious social and political movements of the time, this reclusiveness positions these shows as monuments to alienated white male power."

Fests and events:

• The Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival opens on Wednesday and runs through the following weekend. "[D]espite the festival's fundraising difficulties, the lineup of aGLIFF's 96 films is vibrant, idiosyncratic, and also a lot of fun." Clay Smith tells the story of a festival struggling - and surviving - for 21 years now. The Austin Chronicle's package is also chock full of previews and reviews.

• "Set to begin on Sept 4, the 33rd Toronto film festival has devoted some prime spots to movies that are not so much jockeying for position in the forthcoming Oscar race as fighting to be seen at all," writes Michael Cieply in the New York Times. "Even with strong credentials, several featured pictures have been sideswiped by corporate consolidation, a weak market for independent films and producers' wariness of an audience that has often shunned the difficult."

• In the LA Weekly, Courtney Fitzgerald rounds up local goings on.

• Online listening tip. Charlton Heston's daughter, Holly, and his producing partner, Walter Seltzer, discuss Cinematic Atlas: The Triumphs of Charlton Heston on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"Just in case you're not already freaked out enough about climate change, oil prices and that general, exhausted sort of end-of-the-world vibe that's been in the air for the past couple years, Irena Salina's outraged, deeply unsettling documentary Flow investigates another underreported impending disaster: the world water crisis." Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

In the New York Times, April Dembosky reports on the umpteen docs screening all but secretly in Manhattan to qualify for Oscar consideration.

"Even more than Calcutta, Singapore (Universal, John Brahm) carves out its own mini-genre of the orientalist noir," writes Chris Cagle. "It's an amalgam of Maltese Falcon (Curt Conway plays a Peter Lorre-like gay underworld figure, Thomas Gomez a low-rent Sydney Greenstreet), Casablanca (the romance flashback and voiceover narration), the Graham Greene novels (oblivious American tourists), and the RKO noirs (combination of expressionists visuals and low budget setups)."

Vulture's Dan Kois receives confirmation - from producer Scott Rudin, no less - that Aaron Sorkin's Facebook page is real and that, yes, Sorkin really is writing a "Facebook Movie." Related: At the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell lists "10 Other Websites That Need Their Own Movie."

From the wires: Barbie and Ken - voiced by Michael Keaton - join the crew in Toy Story 3, slated for a June 2010 release.

In Slate, Nathan Heller argues that in Trafic, "it's the automobile lust of the 50s [Jacques Tati] was reaching for amid the grim traffic of the disco era - the idea that seeing cars as objects of excitement, romance, and adventure would let us live more humanly among them."

In the Voice:

• "Year of the Fish is the kind of really bad movie it takes a lot of misplaced conviction to make," writes Vadim Rizov. More from Tasha Robinson (AV Club). For the New York Times, Jennifer 8 Lee talks with director David Kaplan about what Vadim calls the "uneven, mostly pointless rotoscoping." And for IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Ken Leung, who plays "Johnny, an accordion player who may also be the Prince Charming to disillusioned immigrant Ye Xian (An Nguyen). Notoriously shy, Leung graciously offered up a phone interview from Hawaii while preparing to shoot his next puzzling episode of Lost."

• "My Mexican Shivah kvetches its way through an insipid vision of cross-cultural conflict," writes Ed Gonzalez. "Armed with broad humor and scant insight, Alejandro Springall settles for shooting gefilte fish in a barrel, directing the persistent oy-ing and ay-ing of his characters with only half the charm of one of his country's telenovelas." More from Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

• Ruth McCann on the "moving, occasionally charming, and universally well-acted" The Sensation of Sight.

• Aaron Hillis on two docs screening at New York's Pioneer Theater, Maria Bethânia: Music is Perfume (more from Noller in Slant) and Youssou N'Dour: Return to Gorée.

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Lars von Trier's The Kingdom.

"Rebel Without a Cause transcends easy categorization and continues to resonate several decades later," writes Beth Gilligan at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Jonathan Rosenbaum once aptly described [Nicholas] Ray as 'a creature of both the 30s and 60s [who] was ahead of his time during both decades'; the enduring nature of the director's body of work suggests that he remains so."

Rob Nilsson interviews Rob Nilsson at SF360.

Dennis Cozzalio presents "Dr Zachary Smith's Lost in Space at the End of Summer Movie Quiz."

Lists: Sean Axmaker (MSN) with road movies and Christopher Campbell (SpoutBlog) with college movies.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Get Hit, an IFC series on "how to achieve viral video success or nearly die trying." The Hollywood Reporter's Andrew Wallenstein is pleasantly surprised by the show.

Online viewing tip. The "Top Coolest Commercials by Movie Directors," at Shiznit, via Ted Zee.

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2008 3:32 PM