The Latest from GreenCine Daily

Shorts, 10/7.

2008-10-07T15:26:53-08:00

John Howard Lawson has, from a certain standpoint, always been a Cold War blacklisters' favorite," notes Paul Buhle, reviewing Gerald Horne's The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten for Film International. "The brilliant avant-gardist playwright of the 1920s who became a leading Hollywood Communist in the 1930s wielded the polemical pen if not whip in the 1940s, following Central Committee commands to constrain dissent and artistic freedom. The 'Maltz Incident' in which a leading screenwriter, Albert Maltz, was made to repent his supposed sins, became the perfect excuse for cold warriors (notably historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, a 'communist expert' for the slick magazines) to call the Hollywood Communists dangerous, even when nobody could say in what ways exactly. The FBI penetration, the hearings, the Blacklist and the mood of fear that shut down Hollywood's social themes went in all directions, but never got entirely away from Lawson."

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Fests and events, 10/7.

2008-10-07T15:02:21-08:00

John Waters is 'the Pope of Trash' (according to the gospel of William S Burroughs) then freelance curator and film fanatic Jack Stevenson is a shoe-in for Cardinal," writes Matt Sussman, introducing his interview. "The last time Stevenson rolled into town in 2006, he arrived with a stack of film canisters that were a veritable Pandora's box filled with drug scare propaganda, witchcraft and Scandinavian skin flicks. This time he comes bearing amateur blue movies, a gritty portrait of a bisexual hustler, and grainy reels documenting live, nude girls - all shot in San Francisco - for the series The Superstars Next Door at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts." Thursday and Saturday.

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Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/7.

2008-10-07T14:50:47-08:00

Twitch, Swarez marvels at Jeff Kleinsmith's poster for The Shining, commissioned by the Alamo Drafthouse.

A couple of recommendations from Richard Harland Smith: "Every day is Halloween for the minds behind Kindertrauma, where you can find confessions of childhood nightmares spawned by mindless entertainment, a sausage surprise recipe you won't soon forget and some traum-mercials that will scar your soul (no, I really mean that) and what has to be the scariest album cover ever." And "Frankensteinia is always a good time and host Pierre Fournier is a gracious and affable host in possession of an encyclopedia-like brain (which is to say it's very heavy and dry) about all things related to Mary Shelley's undying Creature."

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DVDs, 10/7.

2008-10-07T14:35:03-08:00

Jean-Pierre Melville makes meaty films, a cinema of heft." Ryland Walker Knight begins his review of Le Doulos by lining it up against Army of Shadows: "Both films adhere to a delimited set (often trios, sometimes quartets) of masculine characters with little narrative space for women...; both films are 'about' the world's tests for fraternal bonds; both are about failure; both are marked by a curious attention to giveaway interstitials of clocks, of a look up, of walls empty and plentiful, so many things) and inward trajectories where the end game is less fatal than illuminative, however brutal and deliberate the swath carved across desolate earth winds."

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Universal's Touch of Evil.

2008-10-07T14:01:05-08:00

James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum on Criterion's The Complete Mr Arkadin as being one of the most pleasurable and informative DVD commentaries of recent years, and their new tag team recording on Universal's 50th anniversary edition of Touch of Evil (released today) is a worthy followup," writes Doug Cummings. "Watching the film again this year, it's a stunning example of socially relevant dramaturgy that centers not only on immigration issues that still dominate the headlines, but also highlights issues such as the ethics of tyrannical power and torture versus criminal rights and legal procedures that have been (or should have been) equally front and center in the mainstream conscience the past five years."

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Jamie Stuart's NYFF46, part 3.

2008-10-07T12:20:36-08:00

episode's got plenty of stars, terrifically photographed, too, but mostly you may find yourself wondering what that Jamie Stuart character is really up to, where he comes from and why he's here.

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NYFF. Nathaniel Dorsky.

2008-10-07T09:48:34-08:00

Devotional Cinema (2003), Nathaniel Dorsky aspires to discover in film a way of 'approaching and manifesting the ineffable,'" writes Darren Hughes, introducing his interview with the filmmaker for the Auteurs' Notebook. "In recent years that has meant fixing his camera on the world around him, usually his adopted home town of San Francisco, and finding in its mundane details images of extraordinary wonder. His work counters what Peter Hutton, another practitioner of devotional cinema, calls the 'emotional velocity and visual velocity' of our times. Dorsky's films manage to shift our perception, making us more alive to the strange beauty of the physical world we inhabit."

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(Arbogast on Oct 7, 2008 10:52 AM) I'll bet that surname got him slapped around a bit in the schoolyard.

Ken Ogata, 1937 - 2008.

2008-10-07T06:18:24-08:00

Japanese actor Ken Ogata, who starred in a number of films for the great director Shohei Imamura, died of liver cancer on Sunday. He was 71. Ogata is perhaps best known to an international audience for his role in Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, in which he played a man who, by village tradition, has to leave his elderly mother up a nearby mountain to die; the film won the Palme d'Or and Ogata won the Japanese equivalent of the best actor Oscar in 1984. In total he was nominated 11 times for the gong, winning three times. Other collaborations with Imamura include Vengeance Is Mine (1979), Eijanaika (1981) and Zegen (1987).

Ben Child, the Guardian.

Updated.

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W., round 1.

2008-10-07T05:16:58-08:00

Oliver Stone's unusual and inescapably interesting W. feels like a rough draft of a film it might behoove him to remake in 10 or 15 years," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "The director's third feature to hinge on a modern-era presidency, after JFK and Nixon, offers a clear and plausible take on the current chief executive's psychological makeup and, considering Stone's reputation and Bush's vast unpopularity, a relatively even-handed, restrained treatment of recent politics. For a film that could have been either a scorching satire or an outright tragedy, W. is, if anything, overly conventional, especially stylistically. The picture possesses dramatic and entertainment value, but beyond serious filmgoers curious about how Stone deals with all this president's men and women, it's questionable how wide a public will pony up to immerse itself in a story that still lacks an ending."

Updated.

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NYFF. I'm Gonna Explode.

2008-10-06T14:45:59-08:00

Voy a Explotar (I'm Gonna Explode) is the contemporary Mexican teenage Pierrot le Fou," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It knows this, and it wants you to know it, and it doesn't care if this makes you hate it on principle. The third feature by Gerardo Naranjo (director of Drama/Mex, co-writer and star of Azazel Jacobs's The GoodTimeskid), it's the rare love letter to influence that's infused with enough personal style and sentiment to transform the stolen into something thrilling and moving."

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(Marv on Oct 7, 2008 6:20 AM) I don't hate it on principle, I hate it because it's bad.

(Anhedoniac on Oct 7, 2008 6:02 PM) But. Aren't you ascribing a value judgment (ultimately, "bad") according to your principles, however innate and unarticulate and thus unknown to you they might be? For the record, I doubt I'll like it either but I second the sentiment that it's not so much because it follows the footsteps of Nouvelle Vague (after all, Stellet Licht has Ordert as its guiding star and that turned out remarkably well) as because it doesn't seem to go anywhere much other than tap-dancing around the subject. Mind you, I might change my tune once I actually, you know, see it.

NYFF. Hunger.

2008-10-06T14:28:46-08:00

Hunger is a stationary 20-minute single-take conversation between imprisoned IRA leader Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham) seated at a table in London's infamous Maze prison in 1981," writes Nick Schager. "A doomed man's final meeting with religious counsel is a scene seen countless times over, yet video-artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen turns his variation into a tour-de-force of controlled dramatics, his camera's rigid medium-shot gaze so intense that one can soon feel the propulsive movement of their back-and-forth verbal volleys, which bluntly lay out their differing views on Sands' plan to stage a suicidal hunger strike."

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NYFF. The Wrestler.

2008-10-06T14:02:29-08:00

The Wrestler (site) "may best be described as an existentialist tragicomedy about the nature of identity and performance, but the movie itself is as light as low-calorie mayonnaise - which is saying a lot when you consider that, in director Darren Aronofsky's previous film, The Fountain (2006), even a mere snowflake was hunkered down with several tons of symbolic importance," writes Scott Foundas in Cinema Scope. "The result is a movie far closer in look and feel to the New American Cinema of the 70s (which Aronofsky clearly idolizes) than any of its maker's more laboured sacrifices at that hallowed altar."

And profiling Mickey Rourke in a cover story for the Voice, Foundas notes that his is "a characterization of rare intensity and pathos that bristles with the lived-in authority of someone who knows what it means to live with his back against the ropes."

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NYFF. Lola MontÃ¨s.

2008-10-06T12:18:02-08:00

Stendhal novel, Lola MontÃ¨s is also, even more than La Ronde, [Max] OphÃ¼ls's definite commentary on movie-watching," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "The Earrings of Madame de... is a smoother and more precise valse romantique, but Lola MontÃ¨s is OphÃ¼ls's boldest vision of film as a medium that reveres beauty in order to both nurture and mock dreams. After their own sobering affair with the film, viewers are left to echo Liszt's compliment to Lola: 'Thank you for the illusion.'"

"Artificiality and performance, in other words, are major concerns of this film, both on the level of the narrative, with characters playing literal and metaphoric roles, and, more reflexively, on the level of the film itself." Malcolm Turvey for Artforum: "Lola MontÃ¨s is one of the most scrupulously honest films in the history of cinema, shining a light - long before political modernists of the 1960s such as Jean-Luc Godard and Nagisa Oshima - on the filmmaker's and viewers' willing complicity in the fabrications of the film's characters."

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Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/6.

2008-10-06T11:25:40-08:00

Row Three's a few days into its "31 Days of Horror" special. So far John Allison has survived My Little Eye, Road Games, Ã l'Interieur (Inside) and Identity.

Quint's horror movie of the day at AICN: SalÃ². And here's the full list for October.

Updated through 10/7.

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NYFF. Summer Hours.

2008-10-06T10:31:27-08:00

Olivier Assayas has said that his intention with Summer Hours [site] was to return home and make a âFrench filmâ in the wake of his globetrotting trilogy of demonlover, Clean and Boarding Gate," notes Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot. "[H]e doesn't seek to dampen the bustle of everyday life and contain it with his camera, rather, like Hou Hsiao-hsien he reacts to the rhythms of a gathering with deft sensitivity. This setup is all very universal in its generalities, but the particulars couldn't be more (stereo)typically 'French' - mission accomplished, Olivier."

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