October 18, 2008

Shorts, 10/18.

Tsai Ming-liang Darren Hughes points to a "great post at Unspoken Cinema about Tsai Ming-liang's latest project, a film commissioned by the Louvre that will star Lee Kang-sheng, Laetitia Casta and Jean-Pierre Leaud!" Tsai blogs, by the way.

The Vulture, the other day: "Not long after we ran a post this morning on The Road's probable delay, John Wilson, one of our intrepid New York interns, helpfully e-mailed to inform us that not only was the movie screened for the first time in New York last night, but also that he'd been there. Cinematic Happenings Under Development has already run one scathing report from the screening, evidently from a hater who never read the book..., but according to Wilson, it's very good and doesn't look too far from completion."

Milk Gus Van Sant's Milk has been "drawing attention as an early contender in the coming Oscar race," reports Michael Cieply. "Hollywood insiders and others have been startled by [Sean] Penn's picture-perfect rendering of [Harvey] Milk, a politician who was at once gawky, ambitious and unforgettable to those whose lives he touched. 'Sean's portrayal of Harvey is so beautifully right,' Cleve Jones, a Milk friend who is played in the film by Emile Hirsch, said in a phone interview." Even so, "studio marketers are wrestling with an inherently political film at a time when audiences have been wary of them."

Also in the New York Times:

  • Mark Harris profiles Angelina Jolie: "At 33 she occupies a rare place within Hollywood's uppermost tier of female stars. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she cannot escape her several identities. The serious actress who won an Oscar for 1999's Girl, Interrupted and much acclaim for playing Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, in last year's Mighty Heart is also the dominatrix-ish action dynamo who can open slam-bang guy movies, like this summer's Wanted. There's also the humanitarian activist who has served as a United Nations good-will ambassador and is now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And there's her role as half of Brangelina, an unincorporated business that remains the celebrity magazine industry's best bet for surviving the economic crisis." Related: A sequence from Goldenfiddle.

    Shawna Malcolm talks with Mark Oliver Everett about Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, the Eels' frontman's portrait of his father, Hugh Everett III, pioneer of the many worlds theory: "[T]he hourlong film paints a striking portrait of an inordinately gifted man so devastated by the scientists' dismissal and scorn of his work, and his subsequent reputation as a crackpot, that he withdrew almost entirely into his own mind. Yet it also celebrates the same man as a folk hero to science fiction writers and aficionados, as an iconoclast who made what Max Tegmark, a physicist and an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, characterizes in the film as 'one of the most important discoveries of all time in science.' He adds, 'I would put it right up there with Einstein's relativity theory and Newton's theory of gravity.'" Geoff Boucher talks with Everett, too - for the Los Angeles Times. Airs on PBS on Tuesday.

  • Thomas Vinciguerra: "Seen at a 40-year distance The Prisoner seems intelligent enough to be forgiven most of its excesses, especially if you treat the whole thing as an allegorical time capsule."

  • Melena Ryzik talks with Jeremy Piven about his Broadway debut, a revival of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow.

  • "Like its subjects, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie has a modest, down-home feel: it's not flashy or even visually pleasing, its pace is leisurely and its intent unfocused." Laura Kern: "While plenty of time is spent traveling with [Dallas] Gilbert and [Wayne] Burton on research trips and to the Chattahoochee Bigfoot Conference in Tennessee, the film's main emphasis is on depicting the everyday lives of regular, financially struggling folk who just happen to have an unusual hobby." More from James Van Maanen.

Max Payne

"The legendary star actress Liv Ullmann is back on Norwegian screens today with Through the Glass, Darkly (I et speil i en gate), the screen adaptation of Jostein Gaarder's best-selling novel, directed by the Danish Jesper W Nielsen." Annika Pham has the story at Cineuropa.

It was Krzysztof Penderecki day yesterday at DC's.

"Just when you thought there was never enough Samurai animations in the world Ghost in the Shell's lord and master Mamoru Oshii is developing a animated samurai film for Japanese animation powerhouse Production IG." Mack has details at Twitch.

"After turning Homer's epic poem The Iliad into the 2004 film Troy, Warner Bros and Brad Pitt are teaming with George Miller to adapt the Greek poet's other masterwork, The Odyssey," reports Variety's Michael Fleming.

The House on 56th Street "[W]hat better period to be looking at right now than the 1930s? and what better actress than our own dear Kay Francis? The Siren has been planning to recap the Kay movies she caught during TCM's September Star of the Month festival. In order of preference..."

"At the time of its release in 1949, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Small Back Room was praised as a welcome return to the postwar realism that audiences had come to expect of 'The Archers' after their Technicolorful, fantasmagorical The Red Shoes. The respectful but compact reputation enjoyed by this intimate wartime drama overlooks one of its most startling achievements," a scene Tim Lucas breaks down, analyzes and illustrates with terrific screencaps.

At Moving Image Source, Michael Atkinson looks back on the work of Mike Leigh, beginning with the "Thatcher ice age": "These were not films that could've happened anywhere but England, and took pulse-checking matters like prole struggle, immigration, and class permafrost as their main text. In a steady run of films since, some major, some minor variations on Leigh's topography, the filmmaker has essentially crafted a national cyclorama - a one-man people's-history panorama of the British moment, Balzacian in breadth but in tone oozing with dry bloke comedy." Related: Marilyn Ferdinand and Gabe Klinger on Happy-Go-Lucky. And related online viewing: FilmCatcher interviews Leigh.

La Zona "La Zona is a contemporary satirical thriller by director Rodrigo Plá, contrasting the poverty of modern Mexico with heavily fortified, gated communities for the wealthy overclass and their families," writes Peter Bradshaw. "It is an intriguing, dystopian drama with a coolly unsentimental attitude to villain and victim alike."

Also in the Guardian:

The Parallax View's running Richard T Jameson's 1982 piece on Jerzy Skolimowski's Barrier: "Just as Polanski's grotesque fables are realized with a classical precision, so is Skolimowski's stylization, however anarchic it may seem at isolated moments." And a 1983 piece on Deep end.

Films in Review And Films in Review's running Ronald L Bowers's 1971 piece on the career of Lucille Ball.

In the Voice:

Tru Loved

"I once compared [Joe] Swanberg's style in Hannah Takes the Stairs to Pialat's, and we see again in Nights and Weekends the same Pialat-like storytelling gaps and sense of entropy," writes Dan Sallitt. "But Swanberg/[Greta] Gerwig are much more centered on characterization than Pialat, and the structural gaps in their films are largely generated by their concern with the problem of the actor." For Noel Murray at the AV Club, "To some extent, if you've seen one Swanberg film, you've seen them all... But Swanberg and Gerwig also have a gift for constructing the kind of moments rarely seen in contemporary American independent film."

In the Independent, Gaynor Flynn talks with John Malkovich.

Tom Stempel opens his new "Understanding Screenwriting" column at the House Next Door with a note on his last one: "I was delighted to see that my comments on the Biden-Palin debate entertained some readers. I must say that the comments on all the debates by the HND writers have been well above what I have read elsewhere." Ambrose Heron, Joe Leydon and James Urbaniak all have related (and amusing) online viewing.

Saving Marriage Mike Roth, co-director of the doc Saving Marriage, is "terrified" of the Californian ballot initiative Proposition 8 and explains why at All these wonderful things. Related online viewing: Ellen DeGeneres's PSA.

"I spent a good chunk of the last year and a half working on a documentary series covering contemporary Latin American history for the National Geographic Channel," writes Alvaro Vargas Llosa in the New Republic. So what's he learned? "I think the most important lesson was that Latin Americans don't consider themselves Latin Americans. Despite the increased migration, trade and political connections among countries of the region, most citizens are unaware of the recent and not-so-recent histories of their neighboring countries."

James Van Maanen talks with Audrey Estrougo about Regarde-moi (Ain't Scared).

At SF360, Michael Guillén talks with Lance Hammer about Ballast.

"Michel Colucci, better known as 'Coluche,' a vulgar, tortured stand-up comedian, caused hilarity and consternation in France when he ran for president in 1981," writes John Lichfield in the Independent.... Antoine de Caunes, the former presenter of Eurotrash, is to direct a film about Coluche's brief political career. The result - Coluche, L'Histoire d'un Mec - has won admiring reviews in France but provoked angry complaints from the comedian's widow and sons."

It's Hard Being Loved by Jerks "The murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist in 2004, followed by the publishing of twelve satirical cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed that was commissioned for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, provides the incendiary framework for Daniel Leconte's provocative documentary, It's Hard Being Loved by Jerks." A review from Acquarello.

"Krabat, Marco Kreuzpaintner's film adaptation of Otfried Preußler's beloved bestselling novel Krabat (The Satanic Mill) - which sold over 2.1 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 30 languages - has come highly anticipated.... Kreuzpaintner's film is a soul-stirring adventure for all ages that seizes the viewer with its atmospheric power, emotional truthfulness, and discreet SFX rather than CGI overload and arcane storylines." Michael Guillén talks with Kreuzpaintner and his star, Daniel Brühl. Also, what's in the new issue of movieScope.

"Once, the indie film underdog that waltzed away with an Oscar for best original song in 2007, will become a musical with sights set on Broadway," notes David Ng.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

"Pause with me a moment to remember the work of Neal Hefti, who passed away last weekend at the age of 86." Raymond De Felitta: "Hefti was a jazz giant - a composer/arranger who wrote two of the most played jazz tunes of the past fifty years, 'Li'l Darlin'' and 'Cute' as well as two of the most beloved (and listened too) TV themes of the past fifty years. Both Batman and The Odd Couple are, as shows and cultural artifacts, inseperable from Hefti's irresistable themes."

"Armond White has been re-elected as the 2009 chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle." The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein has more. Via Movie City News.

Velvet Goldmine An invitation from Nathaniel R: "Velvet Goldmine 10th anniversary blog party on November 6th. The boys will be pretty. The girls will be fabulous. The music will be glam (rock). You're invited."

Andrew Bemis presents a Top 101, "the VIP list, the movies that have become such a part of me that I wonder how I ever went without having seen them."

A call for applications: "In its continuing effort to promote original filmmaking by individuals from around the world, the Global Film Initiative is pleased to announce the Winter 2009 cycle of its feature–film Production Grants program."

Online scrolling tip. "Movie posters with brand integration" from Antrepo, via Coudal Partners.

Online listening tip #1. At the House Next Door, Steven Boone, Keith Uhlich and Lauren Wissot discuss Ballast, Hunger and more.

Online listening tip #2. James Rocchi talks sci-fi with io9 editor Annalee Newitz.



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Posted by dwhudson at October 18, 2008 2:34 PM