Shorts, fests, etc, 9/22.

"It would be quite easy to go so far as to conclude that even though [Koji] Wakamatsu's filmography now includes several dozen accomplished works, United Red Army is without doubt his most complete, ambitious and overwhelming work to date," writes Rea Amit. "It was achieved only after a few years of flooding Tokyo with pamphlets requesting pledges of substantial sums of money to finance the project (signatories of these pamphlets included musician Jim O'Rourke, who composed the film's musical score, and film critic Inuhiko Yomota). In other words, we could say that the movie is a zenith in Wakamatsu's oeuvre, towards which he had been heading for a long time, far earlier even than the actual production process."

More new reviews at Midnight Eye:

• Keith Fancher: "Satoshi Miki's Adrift in Tokyo is a difficult film to categorize. Is it a road movie? A city film? A buddy movie? A comedy? A drama? The short answer is: yes."

• Bryan Hartzheim on Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones, "a wrecking ball to what can be considered the indulgencies of the seishun eiga genre, an exhibition of the horrors of uninhibited youth taken to its carnal extremes and matched by a visual accompaniment akin to the abstract and improvised style of a Miles Davis score."

• Again, Rea Amit: "Mandala is the mid part of [Akio] Jissoji's Buddhist trilogy which opened with This Transient Life (Mujo, 1970) and sealed with Poem (Uta, 1972). While each part shows a strong thematic commitment with several Buddhist ideas, each one is also cinematically and narratively unique in itself."

"Stephen Parr licenses film and video footage, and currently presents some of the best film screenings in town with his Oddball Films series.... Parr's work is currently being appreciated in the Bay Area Now 5 series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in a screening of Euphoria this coming Thursday." Sean Uyehara talks with him for SF360.

More fests and events:

• Mike Everleth has the lineup for this weekend's Coney Island Film Festival.

• For the New York Sun, S James Snyder talks with Thom Powers, documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival and organizer of Stranger Than Fiction, the series kicking off at the IFC Center tomorrow and running through November 25: "Having cultivated a loyal following of attendees and offered some filmmakers their entrée into the New York movie scene, Stranger Than Fiction is more than just a weekly film series; it's often a celebration of those unsung documentary films that Mr Powers wants to share with his friends and colleagues."

• "[T]here still exist a number of severely depressed and abandoned towns scattered just outside the county lines of California's largest metropolitan areas," notes Catherine Taft in Artforum. "These sites - former boomtowns established around specific industries and occupied by laborers - are the subject of Lee Anne Schmitt's haunting new film, California Company Town." Premieres tonight at REDCAT in Los Angeles.

• At the Evening Class, Michael Hawley previews the Mill Valley Film Festival, running October 2 through 12.

Acquarello: "Like Boris Lehman's autobiographical essay Looking for my Birthplace, Albert Solé's Bucharest, Memory Lost is a search for identity - the reconstruction of a past that has been lost in the shadows of turbulent history, exile, and parental silence."

"There is much to admire in José Luis Torres Leiva's The Sky, the Earth, and the Rain / El Cielo, la tierra, y la lluvia: the film's haptic Chilean landscapes, its textured aural compliments, a precise feeling for the region's unceasing winter precipitation and its metaphoric relation of class with the aforesaid deluge." Michael J Anderson finds fault but also "real filmmaking promise."

"With his fourth narrative feature Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique (The Sea Wall) boasting its world premiere at the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, Rithy Panh adapts the eponymously-entitled 1950 novel by Marguerite Duras - a classic work of French literature - to make a compelling, sumptuous, yet politically astute film about his native country." And Michael Guillén interviews him.

"Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping is virtually defined by its slow, swirling rhythms, but one of the first things that is apparent about Bill Forsyth's passionate, faithful film adapatation is that, as story telling, it starts out with a hop, skip, and jump; and although an idea of leisurely pacing is sustained throughout, the movie never dawdles, stalls, or grinds to a halt." Jonathan Rosenbaum posts his 1988 review.

In the Guardian, Paul Rennie offers historical context for the poster for Blow Up.

Vulture's got the complete list of Emmy winners. Nathaniel R live-blogged the evening. Commentary: Heather Havrilesky (Salon) and Alessandra Stanley (New York Times).

At the SpoutBlog, Brandon Harris asks Ry Russo-Young about her media diet.

Online listening tip. Vinyl Is Podcast #2: "Future calendar highlights, with Brian Darr."

Posted by dwhudson at September 22, 2008 3:04 PM