Shorts, fests, etc, 12/22.

For Kino!, Neil Young reviews James Benning, "a measured, copiously-illustrated text that combines the scholarly and analytical with the anecdotal and playful as it navigates the reader through Benning's dauntingly large work... Overall it's an unmistakeably enthusiastic paean to Benning and his films. And, as I've more than once described in print Benning as probably the greatest of all living filmmakers, I'm not exactly outraged or dismayed by such a reverent approach - although the writers' enthusiasm does take on a somewhat hagiographic tone after a while."

Also: Christoph Huber talks with Jean-Claude Van Damme about JCVD.

Order of the Exile: Concerning the Films of Jacques Rivette announces a wintertime update: "Just as the holiday season is kicking into full gear, a compact update of vintage Cahiers essays and a suitably wintery addendum to Andreas Volkert's expanding photo essay on Le pont du nord, La rose dans le caniveau: Magic in the streets of Paris. While one could disengenously chalk it up to dumb luck within our editorial pipeline, the pairing of 'The Essential,' 'The Genius of Howard Hawks' and 'Mizoguchi Viewed From Here' hits on a number of interesting threads running through Rivette's critical and filmic body of work."

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image's Focus on William Klein runs from January 22 through February 1. Adrian Martin: "William Klein is a remarkable figure in film history, a law unto himself, ultimately beyond (while overlapping with) many movements and trends." Via Girish.

"Four Oshima features pretend objectivity, each differently; three of them concern artists to undermine it." From a series by David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook:

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief is filmed in shaky 16mm as handheld newsreel flipping events every ten or fifteen minutes, but turns out to rhyme sequences in their ritualization: they're all staged. The Man Who Left His Will on Film, done mostly in smoother 16mm, hints at a Borgesian labyrinth in which everyone is being filmed all throughout, the subjects of a documentary we're watching, but demonstrates the censoring Christian's worries more overtly, that people find personal resonance and meaning wherever they look (as in Diary, if every shot is mediated by some invisible presence, the shots not only seem more objective, severed as they are from their subject, but seem more subjective, tied as they are to someone's vision). Dear Summer Sister, which doesn't follow artists beyond the usual Oshima folk singer or two, is breezy travelogue that nevertheless ends up in brisk, Seurat-like abstractions, with a few plastic red accoutrements of civilization (a couple chairs, a tent) planned neatly against a beach as, appropriately and as usual, artificial civilities crumble. And Shiro of Amakusa mounts its camera and militias, clogged in traffic of men, run to battle in congested jog, as the frame slowly yields thousands of men to a single one.

Also: Pleasures of the Flesh is Oshima's "rare 60s foray into simpler pleasures of plotting."

Heinrich Breloer's adaptation of Thomas Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, opens in Germany on Thursday. Reviews so far have been, for the most part, lukewarm at best; some, though - e.g., Ekkehard Knörer and Bert Rebhandl in Cargo and Richard Oehmann in Telepolis - are blasting away at Breloer with both barrels.

Lizzy Davies's piece on Buddenbrooks for the Observer is not about the film, but about the event: "Published in 1901, the book is a European classic that charts the rise and precipitate fall of a middle-class merchant family from Lübeck, whose younger generations squander the wealth amassed by their prudent forefathers. No one could have predicted the uncanny timeliness of its revival. The contemporary parallels of the book have undoubtedly struck a chord with a society in the grip of a recession and questioning the values of spendthrift capitalism."

Also: Miranda Sawyer profiles Yoko Ono and Philip French's latest "screen legend" is Gary Cooper.

"[L]ately, when I've sought escape from the daily flood of cultural novelty (and the daily grind of economic bad news) by slipping an old favorite into the DVD player, I've been confronted with a disconcerting jolt of reality." In the New York Times, AO Scott focuses particularly on It's a Wonderful Life, The Grapes of Wrath and Sullivan's Travels. "It was in the 1930s that the movies' hold on the popular imagination solidified and grew, and the marvelous monster known as the 'studio system' took shape. It's easy to forget just how new the cinema still was back then, and how uncertain its fate. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, sound film was younger than YouTube is now.... However much has changed since the 1930s, it still seems that in hard times people go to the movies. But why? To confront their troubles or to escape them? This may be the wrong question and the either/or phrasing too simple."

Also, Lynn Hirschberg profiles Philip Seymour Hoffman for the Magazine.

Stephen Metcalf on Tom Cruise: "I can't name another American icon who has been so popular, and for so long, and yet so hard to like, and for so long.... But note a curious fact about his career: It maps perfectly onto the 25-year bull market in stocks that, like Cruise, is starting to show its age. Nascent in the early 80s, emergent in 1983, dominant in the 90s, suspiciously resilient in the 00s, and, starting in 2005, increasingly prone to alarming meltdowns. For both Cruise and the Dow Jones, more and more leverage is required for less and less performance. Place Cruise next to Nicholson, Newman and Tracy, and he is a riddle. Place him next to Reagan, and he is not so confounding at all."

Also in Slate: Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagan looks back on the life of Jean Shepherd, who wrote and narrated A Christmas Story, focusing particularly on the radio days, spanning from the late 50s to 1977: "He was definitely a grown-up but he was talking to me—I mean straight to me, with my 12-year-old sensibility, as if some version of myself with 25 more years worth of life experience had magically crawled into the radio, sat down, and loosened his tie. I was hooked."

Kevin Lee on Mädchen in Uniform: "The film's once-controversial status as anti-authoritarian, proto-feminist and ultimately pro-lesbian is by now a non-starter; more troubling is the glaring subtext of pedophilia that remains largely unaddressed. All the same, this is a landmark work, blessed by a stylistic rigor that serves its subject matter perfectly."

"Who'd have thought James Bond would make his stateside debut in America's dustbowl?" John McElwee tells the story of the launch of a franchise. Related: Jason Sperb figures Thunderball is the series' all-time box office champ.

"Not only persuasive in its argument, that Victor Fleming was one of the unsung titans of his era, [Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master] also makes for a fascinating case study in how power was acquired, wielded and lost during the 1930s and 40s," writes S James Snyder for Time.

"Algerian director Lyes Salem's Masquerades and Korean/American director So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain took top nods at the Dubai International Film Festival, capping the event's fifth year," reports indieWIRE's Brian Brooks. Related: Fionnuala Halligan for Screen: "Undoubtedly, Masquerades marks Salem out as a talent we'll certainly be seeing more of; and if his next work is as genial as this, the pleasure will be all ours."

The Guardian runs a Reuters story on the quiet, all but under-the-radar return of cinema to Saudi Arabia following a three-decade ban.

Focusing on how Scientology recruits young unemployed actors in Hollywood, Ian Halperin offers a sneak peek at his book Hollywood Undercover in the Independent.

"Korean actor and theater director Park Kwang-jung, who starred in Driving with My Wife's Lover died of lung cancer Dec 15 in Seoul," reports Han Sunhee in Variety. "He was 46."

If you'll be in New York on January 6, you might consider spending 24 hours at the Guggenheim.

Online listening tip. Ambrose Heron talks with Alex Gibney about Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson.

Online viewing tip. David Poland talks with Matteo Garrone about Gomorrah.

Online viewing tips, round 1. A seasonal roundup from the Guardian's Kate Stables features... William S Burroughs?

Online viewing tips, round 2. Danny Boyle and Darren Aronofsky talk shop; and Cinematical points to other, scattered parts of the conversation as well.

Posted by dwhudson at December 22, 2008 7:53 AM