Shorts, fests, etc, 11/21.

"The Good, The Bad, The Weird won a total of four prizes at the 29th Blue Dragon Film Awards ceremony which was held Thursday evening in Seoul, Korea." Han Sunhee reports for Variety Asia.

"Watching [The Curious Case of Benjamin Button], occasionally I actively loathed it, but mostly I just felt genuinely disappointed that it seemed so lacking in genuine feeling," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "I'm a realist - I understand that the masses will probably go the other way on this one, and I won't begrudge them that. But as a critic, it is my job to clearly state, for the record, what ignited that loathing and disappointment."

Twitch's Todd Brown notes that Johnnie To is a very, very busy man and points to Grady Hendrix's question of the day: "So what's up with Johnnie To's obsession with old French actors?"

Volkswagen is one of the Berlinale's major sponsors, but as the car company reviews its expenditures in light of the current financial crisis, it may pull back - or out altogether. Peter Zander reports in the Berliner Morgenpost.

Timecrimes' "plentiful complications aren't necessarily unique (at least for anyone familiar with Philip K. Dick), but they're given corkscrew verve by taut plotting and correspondingly fleet, no-nonsense direction that – even when unable to keep the film's domino-ing developments wholly surprising – place a premium on compact, clever, vigorous genre thrills," writes Nick Schager.

"Break out the laudanum: It's time for some totally 1880's retro, courtesy of period melodrama Henry May Long." Nicolas Rapold in the Voice.

"My first film, Get Carter, was a hit in 1971," writes Mike Hodges. "In 1972, my second feature disappeared." Following the story behind Pulp, "It was to be another 16 years before I managed to rustle up my next 'lost' film. This was Black Rainbow, an original script, written on spec... Big in Japan? It was news to me. Trouble is, I don't live in Japan."

Also in the Guardian, Kirsty Scott interviews Robert Carlyle and Anne Billson finds "the most tasteless DVD cover ever" and Cath Clarke reviews 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris and Manoel de Oliveira's Belles Toujours.

And Demetrios Matheou looks back on the Amazonas Film Festival: "Here we are, 150 filmmakers and journalists from all over the world, congregated in a luxurious hotel, fed succulent fruits with impossibly beautiful names - the cupuacu, caju, abacaxi, the pupunha and the jambo - and connected to intravenous drips of caipirinha, looking across the inky-black waters of the aptly named Rio Negro, the river that will take us into the Amazon. Here we are, ostensibly, to discuss the end of the world. That is to say, the environment."

"István Szabó is currently working on his European co-production, The Door, which will start shooting next summer," reports Fabien Lemercier for Cineuropa.

"When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt negotiated with People and other celebrity magazines this summer for photos of their newborn twins and an interview, the stars were seeking more than the estimated $14 million they received from the deal," reports Brooks Barnes. "They also wanted a hefty slice of journalistic input - a promise that the winning magazine's coverage would be positive, not merely in that instance but into the future." (New York's Logan Hill has a little fun with this story.) Also: "DVDs propel profits these days, and there is a creeping dread in [Hollywood] that buyer interest is plummeting as the global economic crisis worsens."

And also in the New York Times:

• "It is foolish to expect an actor to work miracles, but for longtime moviegoers the name Sissy Spacek over a movie title promises that the film will have a core of integrity, at least in the scenes in which she appears," writes Stephen Holden. "And when Ms Spacek speaks her clichéd lines in the mediocre screenplay of Lake City, a movie that has delusions of high seriousness, her plain-spoken delivery lends them a resonance that is not in the written words." More from David Fear (Time Out New York), Ed Gonzalez (Slant), Noel Murray (AV Club), Michelle Orange (Voice), Mark Peikert (New York Press) and Andrew Sarris (New York Observer).

• "Plugging the same two actresses into different Sapphic scenarios may be a valid filmmaking strategy but it can be an extremely boring one," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "When we last saw Sheetal Sheth and Lisa Ray (in New York and Los Angeles, that was just two weeks ago) they were playing would-be lovers in The World Unseen. Now they're back to continue making eyes at each other in I Can't Think Straight yet another weightless confection from the writer and director Shamim Sarif." More from Jim Ridley (Voice), Nick Schager (Slant) and Chris Wisniewski (indieWIRE).

• "Pour Your Body Out (7534 Cubic Meters), a site-specific installation by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, is arguably the first project to humanize - and feminize - the [the Museum of Modern Art's second-floor lobby] atrium," writes Karen Rosenberg. "Incorporating high-definition video projections, music and specially designed furniture, it creates a womblike comfort zone in a building full of right angles. 'The concept was not to destroy or be provocative to the architecture, but to melt in - as if I would kiss[architect Yoshio] Taniguchi,' Ms Rist says in a behind-the-scenes video at moma.org." More from Andrew Goldstein in New York's Vulture.

• "Irving Gertz, a prolific though often uncredited B-movie composer whose melodies haunt a spate of pictures with words like 'Hell,' 'Thing' and 'Creature' in the titles, died on Nov 14 at his home in Los Angeles," reports Margalit Fox. "He was 93."

"Details of a revealing interview with Beatles guitarist George Harrison have come to light after 40 years," reports Georgie Rogers for the BBC, adding that Martin Scorsese, who's working on a doc about Harrison, has expressed interest.

In the third part of his series on Andre Bazin, Dan North revisits an old argument: "Bazin doesn't want to stem the flow of auteurist criticism - he just wants to divert its course."

"Jean-Daniel Pollet's oeuvre is weirdly divided into chilly, precise art films and lowbrow sentimental comedies," writes Dan Sallitt in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Hard to think offhand of another filmmaker with a similar split personality."

Frank Borzage's literary adaptations of the 30s are a varied bunch, often having to do with recent or current political events, and always showing Borzage's ability to transform his material into the kind of romantic and spiritual fables he preferred." David Cairns on A Farewell to Arms; and more.

"Days and Clouds, which was completed in 2007, contains a story that might have meant nothing to an American audience a year ago but means everything to us today," writes Charles Mudede in the Stranger. More from Robert Horton.

"[T]he juxtaposition of vampire lore and mundane reality is especially powerful in the Swedish import Let the Right One In," writes JR Jones in the Chicago Reader. "Set in a dank suburb of Stockholm, it proves once again that horror stories can be even more frightening when exposed to a little daylight."

Lesley O'Toole talks with Reese Witherspoon for the Independent.

Online browsing tip. The full Europeana will return soon (10 million hits an hour on opening day overwhelmed it yesterday), but for now, a taste.

Online listening tip. At the House Next Door: Holly Herrick, Eric Kohn, John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Michael Tully and Keith Uhlich.

Online viewing tip #1. "A much loved and acclaimed graphic novel by Czech collaborators Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99, Alois Nebel is getting the feature film treatment in its native land with first time director Tomáš Luňák at the helm," notes Todd Brown, introducing the teaser at Twitch.

Online viewing tip #2. For New York's Vulture, Bilge Ebiri introduces Michael Dudok de Wit's award-winning Father and Daughter: "This wordless, minimalist, beautifully animated eight-minute fable, about a girl who watches her father leave and continues to wait for him, is one of the most powerful things we've ever seen."

Online viewing tip #3. "Video essay for 932 (73). Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht / Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where it Rules (1965, Jean-Marie Straub) featuring commentary by Richard Brody." Also at Shooting Down Pictures, more from Kevin Lee: "Only 50 minutes long but requiring at least two or three viewings to grasp, the debut feature of cinema's most dynamic husband and wife directing duo is quite possibly the most daunting and demanding work of the 60s New Wave." Screens Sunday and Wednesday at the Walter Reade in New York.

Posted by dwhudson at November 21, 2008 12:59 PM