Shorts, 9/3.

In a cover story for Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner tells the story behind two filing cabinets Marilyn Monroe left behind when she overdosed in 1962. "One had a built-in safe hidden behind a faux drawer. That's where her personal life was, in those files: the letters, invoices, financial records, favorite snapshots, and mementos that meant the most to her." Photographer Mark Anderson spent more than two years documenting the collection and VF's posted over 500 of his images. Related online viewing: Kashner and Anderson discuss the stash.

John McElwee continues his exploration of "Warners and the James Dean Cult."

FilmInFocus is running an excerpt from Paul Cronin's Herzog on Herzog.

Michael J Anderson and Lisa K Broad at Tativille:

Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira's Doomed Love (Amor de Perdição, 1978), an adaptation by the director of Camilo Castelo Branco's 19th century novel, has very recently emerged as the knowledgeable cinephile's choice for the greatest of Oliveira's films - a position, it should be added, that has found a convenient alibi in the film's virtual invisibility (it remains unreleased anywhere on VHS or DVD). Following a recent 16mm screening of the 265-minute picture at Washington's National Gallery, this piece's two authors can do nothing but agree with the above position, however unlikely it might seem that one of the director's least seen should rate as his very best. That this position is in no small measure a product of the narrative's real emotive strength only reinforces the unlikelihood of its obscurity (in the clandestine context of Oliveira's high art corpus, of course).

Earlier: Jonathan Rosenbaum in Film Comment.

"I received word from filmmaker James Longley this morning that our friend and colleague Andrew Berends has been detained in Nigeria while working on a film." Toronto docs programmer Thom Powers has details on the detainment of the maker of Blood of My Brother and When Adnan Comes Home. More from Will Conners in the New York Times: "Chris Alagoa of the Niger Delta Peace and Security Secretariat, a community organization, said: 'The government probably knows the fellow's real mission and that it has nothing to do with espionage, but they want to do it to discourage others from coming to report on the situation on the ground.'"

New blog on the block: Catherine Grant launches Film Studies for Free. Also via Girish, Adrian Martin on "Tributes to unknown cinephiles."

Karsten Meinich has a good long talk with Julie Taymor. Related online viewing: Taymor on staging a musical version of Spider-Man.

For the Scotsman, Paul Whitelaw talks with screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce God On Trial, "a powerful feature-length television play co-produced by BBC Scotland and based upon the (possibly apocryphal) tale of Auschwitz prisoners setting up court and charging God with having broken his covenant with the Jewish people. Intelligent, thought-provoking, and unashamedly weighty, it's welcomingly reminiscent of the sort of compelling, dialogue-heavy plays that seemingly faded from our screens years ago." Via Movie City News. Related: Frank Cottrell Boyce in the Guardian; Andrew Pettie talks with Antony Sher for the Telegraph.

"Alex Cox has just published his filmmaking memoirs X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Film-Maker, and as well as offering much detailed insight into the apparently-thankless task of being an independent film director, it also motivated me to have another look at what now emerges as his rather impressive central American trilogy." Andrew Pulver on Walker, El Patrullero (Highway Patrolman) and Death and the Compass.

Also in the Guardian:

• Xan Brooks has some grumbling to do regarding that Los Angeles Times list of the 25 best LA movies of the past 25 years. Dennis Cozzalio has much, much more to say on the matter and gets a good conversation going.

• "The Polish film poster has a unique place in the world." Paul Rennie explains how that happened.

• Geoffrey Macnab talks with Nanni Moretti: "In Italy, vis-à-vis Berlusconi, there is a passivity. There are no more antibodies. It's as if the immune system has been sent to sleep. Five times - in 1994, 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2008 - a guy who has a monopoly over the TV channels has run for prime minister, something which is not acceptable in a democracy.... I refuse to make the ritual statement that there is hope among our youth, because there is not."

• Matthew Taylor plucks some choice bits from a recent GQ interview with Helen Mirren. In the Independent, Jerome Taylor focuses on her comments on date rape. Zoe Williams comments.

• "You may not know the name, but you'll have heard the voice hundreds, if not thousands of times," writes Ben Child. "Don LaFontaine, king of the movie voiceover, has died at the age of 68." Related online viewing (and of course, listening): The Voice; and Jeffrey Overstreet is collecting trailers he voiced.

"Barney Rosset, the subject of new documentary Obscene, should be canonized by First Amendment fans as the patron saint of key mid-20th-century obscenity cases," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Ian Parker has a longish profile of Alec Baldwin in the New Yorker.

"Unfortunately, burdened by both studio interference and the weighty promise of its title, The True Story of Jesse James never coalescences into a completely satisfying film." Thomas Scalzo; and the latest entry in Not Coming to a Theater Near You's Nicholas Ray series is Evan Kindley's on Party Girl.

His first night in Paris, and Filmbrain watches Douglas Sirk's The Tarnished Angels: "The experience was almost ruined by my neighbor, a 50-ish professorial type who was continually pointing out Sirk's nuances to his companion, a young-enough-to-be-his-daughter 'student' (who just happened to be nestling in his arms.) Fortunately he stopped after being shushed by about a dozen people, all of whom were no doubt jealous of their budding May-December romance. Aah, Paris. I mean... ick."

AJ Schnack: "The filming we have done in Branson through the summer and the film that we have just wrapped in Denver have taught me much - about collaboration, about working with new technologies, about plunging ahead on leaps of faith."

"[A]s a portrait of the couple and their extended family - including two dogs, a cat and various relatives and neighbors - Trouble the Water is wonderful," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum for In These Times. "And what it says about whom you can trust in a crisis if you’re poor and black couldn’t be more lucid and direct."

"Discovering that Mike White was also the man behind SuperHappyFun was like discovering that Deep Throat lived down the street," writes DK Holm.

Mike Everleth on Marta's Sex Tape: "I can safely say that it is very sexy. No, scratch that. It is an extremely sexy, vivacious and arousing movie."

Aaron Hillis on The House of Adam: "Jorge Ameer's laughably unskilled drama... is so poorly written and directed that it could be a fake movie within a John Waters camp classic. How else to explain such a waste of time escaping the LBGT-festival circuit?"

Also in the Voice, Ella Taylor on Everybody Wants to Be Italian: "Less a movie than a charm offensive beamed at those who thought My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a masterpiece, writer-director Jason Todd Ipson's all-too-autobiographical romantic comedy stars Jay Jablonski as Jake, an addled Boston fishmonger with little to distinguish him beyond a fine set of washboard abs and a thing for stacked but unavailable Mediterranean women."

"Singer-turned-actor Jerry Reed, known as 'The Guitar Man' of country music, has died aged 71." The BBC reports. Phil Nugent reflects at Screengrab.

New Triple Canopy: "NOLA."

Online viewing tip. Ted Zee has one for movie poster lovers from Funny or Die.

Posted by dwhudson at September 3, 2008 8:06 AM