Fests and events, 9/3.

Lebowski Fest happens in San Francisco on Friday and Saturday. Sean McCourt has a preview in the Bay Guardian.

"Like his more critically celebrated simpatico contemporaries - Brian De Palma, Joe Dante and David Cronenberg - [John] Carpenter has kept alive the mid-century B-movie tradition of using impersonal work-for-hire projects to fulfill an auteur's vision," writes Benjamin Strong at Moving Image Source. "What's distinctive about Carpenter is how enthusiastically he embraces the hokiest conventions of the genres he works in. His films are cheeky, but not ironic. He has never, no matter the context, shied away from a gunfight or car chase. Indeed, Carpenter's approach to zombies, psychopaths, aliens, and vampires is to take them all dead seriously as subjects." BAM's Four-Pack of Carpenter rolls on through tomorrow. Earlier: Scott Foundas in the Voice.

Aaron Hillis opens his preview of goings on in New York throughout the fall season with a talk with Robert Downey Sr, who sees his restored underground comedies of the 60s revived at Anthology Film Archives from September 12 through 18.

Also in the Voice:

• J Hoberman: "An appropriate flourish with which to conclude Film Forum's season of French crime films, Shoot the Piano Player is the most purely enjoyable movie Truffaut ever made. It's also the quintessential nouvelle vague film, a blatantly cinephilic combination of vivacious vogueing and soulful sentimentality."

• Ed Gonzalez: "Latinbeat, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's yearly survey of new and classic Latin-American films, is now twice as long and twice as Chilean. Due to popular demand, this year's edition spans an extra nine days and, alongside a citywide centennial celebration of Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, it opens a window on a Chilean cinema that feels warmer and more expressive than the frosty sociocultural autopsies from Argentina that typically dominate the Latinbeat lineup." Friday through September 25.

• Scott Foundas previews The Films of Jerry Schatzberg, running at Anthology Film Archives from Friday through September 11: "What all those films have in common is a first-hand feel for wayward American lives and the lost idealism of the 60s. Or, as the Positif critic Michel Ciment has said of Schatzberg: 'He makes us feel, something that is too often missing in contemporary American cinema.'" Nicolas Rapold talks with Schatzberg for the L Magazine

"Puppets take centre stage at this year's London International Animation Festival (LIAF)." A preview from Charlotte Cripps in the Independent. Through Sunday.

Anticipating Toronto, opening tomorrow:

• An exchange between Robert Davis and J Robert Parks.

• "Our entertainment writers were in the theatres before you. Here's their advice on some of the film festival's selections." The Toronto Star's walloping preview, via Movie City News.

• "[F]ilmmakers and backers are thinking about new ways to deliver their labors-of-love to audiences as they head into this year's Toronto International Film Festival," reports Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE.

• "At least three pictures at this year's festival take an unusually deep look at the city as it roiled its way through the messy, magnificent, slightly mad 1970s." In the New York Times, Michael Cieply takes a brief peek at Every Little Step, American Swing and Lymelife.

For the Age, Jake Wilson talks with filmmaker and Sexy International Film Festival creator Jason Turley: "He's particularly keen to dispel the misconception that the festival is all about hardcore porn." Turley also programs shorts for the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, which runs October 9 through 19.

Venice notes:

• A mid-fest stock-taking from Jean-Michel Frodon in Cahiers du cinéma: "Even if we have not yet discovered a work that challenges head-on the contemporary state of imagery, as was the case last year with the film Redacted, there was no shortage of beautiful discoveries, thanks to Abbas Kiarostami (Shirin) and Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum) - which were for me the two most amazing feature length films presented thus far, and both were out of competition at this festival -, Takeshi Kitano (Achilles and the Tortoise) and thanks as well to Zhang Ke Jia's short film (Cry Me a River)."

• "Blame it on the Hollywood writers' strike, the weak economy, or just plain bad luck," write Mike Collett-White and Silvia Aloisi for Reuters. "Whatever the reason, the 2008 Venice film festival has been described as one of the weakest in recent years, and, as it reaches the halfway stage on Monday, needs more hits to light up the main competition."

• Neil Smith is keeping a diary for the BBC, where jury member John Landis jokes around.

For the Guardian, Ben Walters looks back on Drag Show Video Vérité, "a compilation of archive drag performance material that screened earlier this summer at Lincoln Center, an arts complex more usually associated with ballet and legitimate theatre than gender-busting finery."

Online viewing tip. From Mark Sweney in the Guardian: "This year's Raindance independent film festival will be promoted with a 4 Creative cinema ad campaign that is a tongue-in-cheek take on films such as the Blair Witch Project and Shaun of the Dead." October 1 through 12.

Posted by dwhudson at September 3, 2008 6:44 AM