Fests and events, 11/20.

Holly Willis in the LA Weekly on Coleen Fitzgibbon: Internal Systems: "The history of smart, feminist, experimental films has been sadly neglected; this program represents the brilliance waiting to be revisited." Sunday at 7 pm.

"Everyone knows the [John] Boorman hits," writes Steve Vineberg in the Boston Phoenix: "Deliverance, Excalibur and Hope and Glory - but fine pictures like his neo-Shakespearean comedy Where the Heart Is (1990) and the political adventure Beyond Rangoon (1995) opened and closed without leaving a trace. Boorman has a distinctive visual style - he loves wide, wondrous, prismatic landscapes - and he's drawn to material that interrogates institutions; in his early career he also loved mythology and pop philosophy. But his instinct for subversive visions has made him risky and usually kept him far from the mainstream." John Boorman's Primeval Screen runs through Monday.

"To understand Jerry Lewis the performer, simply rewatch a handful of his sixty-odd films," writes Ed Halter for Artforum. "But to understand Lewis the thinker - the theorist, even - it's useful to dig up a copy of his 1971 book, The Total Film-Maker, a primer in Lewis's own concept of auteurism, containing a cogent study of film comedy. Here, Hollywood's spastic, saccharine goofball reveals himself to be a Siegfried Kracauer of the wisecrack, a Georges Bataille of the banana peel." And again, Peter Bogdanovich will be talking with Lewis on Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

The San Francisco Korean American Film Festival happens this weekend and Brian Darr and Adam Hartzell both recommend Secret Sunshine.

Basil Tsiokos, who stepped down from his position as artistic director of Newfest: The New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Film Festival, offers "some thoughts about the state of LGBT film festivals and about non-profit film organizations in general in this difficult economy." Also at indieWIRE: Rania Richardson's dispatch from the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and lya Tovbis's from the Starz Denver Film Festival.

For the Austin Chronicle, Josh Rosenblatt previews More Than Buenos Aires: Film Renaissance in Argentina, running Tuesdays through December 23.

Rooftop Films is accepting submissions for its 2009 Summer Series.

Posted by dwhudson at November 20, 2008 2:07 PM