Thirteen ways of looking at a French director.

Actually, just three. Jacques Audiard's "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," a French remake of James Toback's 1978 film "Fingers" (which has apparently gained "cult classic" status, perhaps only in comparison to the increasingly sleazy films Toback managed to follow it up with), opens in limited release tomorrow. "Beat" has gotten great festival buzz — it stars the pretty Romain Duris (of "L'Auberge Espagnole") as a petty thug (in real estate, nonetheless) following in his father's footsteps, though all he really wants to do is be a classical pianist.

In the LA Times, Robert Abele interviews Audiard on what what "Fingers" meant to him, and things he kept and the things he changed for "Beat." In the LA Weekly, Toback himself sort-of interviews Audiard — it might be more correct to call it "a conversation," scroll down the article to see what we mean.

And at our very own IFC News, Andrea Meyer poses questions to Audiard and his star Duris together, and get this choice moment:

Why was Romain your man?

Audiard: I've seen him act in quite a few films, and he had something I liked. It could be his talent as an actor or how photogenic he is. This is a character who changes, who moves from adolescence to adulthood, and Romain has that capacity in him. Romain is very virile and at the same time there's something feminine about him. I'd have a hard time defining it, but it's palpable.

Duris: Now, this interests me.

+ Oui, an American accent (LA Times)
+ Jacques Et Jim (LA Weekly)
+ Be Still My Skipping Heart: Jacques Audiard & Romain Duris (IFC News)

Well, we did ask.

Yesterday we grumbled about what Spielberg was getting at with all his "War of the Worlds" 9/11 references. Today, there are two attempts to slog through what it all means.

Kevin Maher at the London Times calls the film "the first true post-9/11 disaster movie." According to him, we are all afficted by the Nero Complex:

It was diagnosed in the 1950s by the French film theorist André Bazin, and it describes the vicarious pleasures experienced by popular cinemagoers who, like the bloodthirsty emperor, delight in the spectacular destruction of cities, towns and various conspicuous landmarks.

Maher argues that the modern blockbuster had become a spectable of mass destruction (see 1996's "Independence Day" and "Twister," 1998's "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact") and was then blamed for 9/11 ("The movies set the pattern, and these people (terrorists) copied the movies," announced Robert Altman). And so, nearly four years after, we're still trying to reconcile our desire to see cities burn and buildings crumble for entertainment with the inescapable images of those things actually happening still very much in the public consciousness.

For Maher, then, the nods to 9/11 are a sign of Spielberg's concession to the fact that the age of cheering at wanton destruction is over:

Here, repeatedly, the Nero Complex money-shots occur off-camera. A 747 crash; the big climactic confrontation between the US military and the aliens; the very demise of the aliens themselves are all alluded to, rather than revealed.

And it’s not because Spielberg doesn’t want to show it, or doesn’t have the technical means to do so. No, the real lesson of "War of the Worlds" is that Spielberg doesn’t show it simply because he can’t.

In his review for the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas has a different, and particularly weird (if interesting) interpretation:

From the moment of the film’s first alien attack..."War of the Worlds" announces itself as a reverse inventory of 20th- and 21st-century atrocities, beginning with 9/11 (blinding clouds of debris filling the streets of New York and airplanes falling from the sky) and winding its way back through the L.A. riots (a truly terrifying scene in which Cruise is pulled from his car and beaten by an enraged mob), the corpse-strewn rivers of Rwanda, the battlefields and deportation trains of WWII, and even (in a perilous drawbridge scene) the sinking of the Titanic, with its eternal reminder of man’s hubristic folly.

We haven't seen the film (and still dunno if we want to, frankly) but reading these is infinitely more intruiging than any of the ads Paramount has churned out.

+ When the killing had to stop (Times of London)
+ Starfire and Brimstone (LA Weekly)

"She feels that they have stolen her life from her."

"Domino," the Tony Scott-directed Keira Knightley vehicle about a model-turned-bounty hunter, will stick to its scheduled August release despite the film's real-life inspiration, Domino Harvey, being found dead in her home under suspicious circumstances Monday.

Aida Edemariam in the Guardian outlines the fascinating and odd life of Harvey, who was the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey and model Paulene Stone. An unhappy, troubled girl who was constantly being expelled from schools, she drifted into modeling, drifted out of it, and eventually found her calling working for the Celes King Bail Bonds agency in south central L.A.

Harvey was also vocally unhappy about how "Domino" was turning out — New Line bought the rights to her life story and immediately began "improving" on it, inventing another partner for movie Harvey, and ignoring the fact that she dated women.

+ Biopic release goes ahead despite subject's death (Guardian)
+ She loved bringing in sleazebags (Guardian)

The rest of it: Wednesday.

Via the BBC, Deepa Mehta's "Water" (which will complete the trilogy she started with 1996's controversial "Fire" and 1998's controversial "Earth") will open this year's Toronto International Film Festival. It may not surprise you to hear that "Water" already generated its own share of controversy. The film follows the lives of Hindu widows, and filming was abandoned in India five years ago after the set was attacked and burned by protesters who felt it distorted Indian culture (there's a first-hand account from one of the camera assistants over at Bright Lights). More TIFF titles announcements are here.

At indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman informs us that it's been a tough year for foreign films at the box office too.

Jessica Winters of the Village Voice plays compare and contrast with "War of the Worlds" and Scientology tome "Dianetics," while Chuck Stephens interviews director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose "Tropical Malady" opens in New York today.

The LA Times' Rachel Abramowitz and John Horn round up the growing number of films dealing, either directly or indirectly, with 9/11.

And two older stories we didn't post about before but which are certainly worth a look — Caryn James in the New York Times on sorting through the bric-a-brac of Marlon Brando's life:

In a long typewritten letter, Kerouac asks Brando to "buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it." He adds, "you play Dean and I'll play Sal." Too bad that potentially hilarious buddy movie was never made.

And Christina Patterson at the Independent chats with Michael Winterbottom at a screening of his newest film, "A Cock and Bull Story," based on Laurence Sterne's pretty much unfilmable (and, some would argue, unreadable) novel "Tristram Shandy."

+ Hindu widows film opens festival (BBC)
+ The Downfall: Foreign Language Hits Are Few and Far Between in 2005 (indieWIRE)
+ Mystery Scientology Theater (Village Voice)
+ The Rupture (Village Voice)
+ Post-9/11 anxieties influence spate of films (LA Times)
+ The Outtakes of Brando's Large Life (NY Times)
+ A taste of Shandy (Independent)

Two legs good, three legs bad.

"War of the Worlds" is rated PG-13. Much of the earth's population is wiped out, leaving very little time for sex or bad language.
—A. O. Scott, New York Times

In many ways, the movie reaches its peak with its chilling portraiture of mass panic, from the astonishing road hog exposition sequence (Cruise's terrified dad trying not to explain to his kids what's going on as he weaves in and out of stalled traffic and to and from the camera) to the image of a crowd tearing into an SUV's shattered windows with bloodied hands.
—Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

True, it has a ham-fisted script, a bewildering objective for its hero (it involves getting from New Jersey to Boston), and an ending that—given the level of tension—isn't cathartic enough. But this is a blockbuster that transcends summer blockbusters. In all the ways that matter, it's pure.
—David Edelstein, Slate

The thing is, we never believe the tripods and their invasion are practical.
—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" is the ugliest little movie of the summer.
—Stephanie Zacharek, Salon

What's driving us (and, it seems, several of the above critics) nuts, besides Roger Ebert's odd recent insistence on discussing practicalities (see his "Land of the Dead" review — has the man forgotten what summer films are like?), is that no one can explain the reasoning behind Spielberg's apparently very heavy-handed and frequent references to 9/11. It all seems to hover on the verge of being a statement — after all, as several reviews point out, this film is better read as a brutal counterpoint to Spielberg's 1977 "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," with its aliens as figures of magic, mystery and music, than in relation to the 1953 "WotW."  Nearly thirty years after Spielberg told us "We are not alone," we're given tripods emerging from beneath the pavement where they've been lying dormant, a fight and flee narrative, and near silence as a backdrop.

So we're at a different place, culturally, than we were back then, and what Spielberg thinks we want is darkness and massive destruction. Fine. But, as Stephanie Zacharek puts it:

At one point the camera scans a wall covered with fliers of missing loved ones (presumably humans who have been abducted or just plain disintegrated by the marauding aliens), as direct a reference to post-9/11 New York City as you could make. I can't possibly divine what Spielberg intends by that shot. Are we meant to nod solemnly, jolted by the recognition that this alleged bit of summer fun has a real-life parallel?

And Michael Atkinson asks:

Is it exploitation of our experience, or is Spielberg forming a statement? At the very least, the presumption, pace Roland Emmerich, seems to be that we have, after a four-year rest cure, regained our consumer's appetite for destruction. You may have.

Spielberg's a smart cookie, and he know that just dropping references does not make for any greater meaning. So what is this to be read as except laziness? Or pretension?

We're feeling a bit put off by the whole thing at the moment.

Incoming: Remaking the world (or at least making a sequel/prequel).

Trailers: The "King Kong" (remake, of course) trailer is here, and we'd like to point out that Adrien Brody should really only be allowed to act in period pieces like this — not a modern-looking man, that one. The "Fun with Dick and Jane" (remake) trailer is here. And the "Elizabethtown" (not a remake, but, ugh, looking eerily similar to this) trailer is here, and...eh. Orlando Bloom, while lovely, is not the young John Cusack into which Cameron Crowe is clearly attempting to mold him.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Andrea Berloff is writing the screenplay for a remake of "Don't Look Now." Via Empire, Jennifer Garner is set to star in a remake of Japanese supernaturalish romance "Be With You." Also from Empire, Brian De Palma has apparently signed on to replace Antoine Fuqua as director of "The Untouchables: Capone Rising," a prequel to "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (we kid). And via the Sydney Morning Herald, Cate Blanchett will reprise her role as the Virgin Queen in a sequel to 1998's "Elizabeth," with Clive Owen on board as Sir Walter Raleigh.

+ Trailer: King Kong (Official Site)
+ Trailer: Fun With Dick and Jane (Official Site)
+ Trailer: Elizabethtown (Official Site)
+ Gordon spies 'Look' remake (HR)
+ Jennifer Garner is With You (Empire)
+ Brian De Palma To Direct Untouchables Prequel (Empire)
+ Blanchett returns to the throne (Sydney Morning Herald)

NYAFF: Hana & Alice.

Shunji Iwai's last film, the excellent "All About Lily Chou-Chou," was the bleakest, most emotionally devastating view of high school life we've ever witnessed. His latest endeavor, "Hana & Alice," is a fitting counterpoint to the earlier film — taking place at the same stage of life (the end of middle school and first year of high school) with many of the same actors (notably Yu Aoi, who played a girl bullied into prostitution in "Lily," here enchanting as Alice, one of the two leads), "Hana & Alice" is a sweet and weightless as spun sugar.

Hana (Anne Suzuki) and Alice are best friends who go to school and take ballet together. The quirky, wide-eyed Hana develops a crush on a boy she's seen (and in a cute, if slightly bunny-boiling way, secretly photographing) on the train in the morning. The boy, Masashi Miyamoto (Tomohiro Kaku), turns out to be an upperclassman at the girls' high school, a dreamy, slightly dazed member of the rakugo club who's constantly reading. This habit proves to be his downfall: one day, on his way home, he smacks his head against a low overhang and is knocked out. Hana, who's been following him, seizes this opportunity to inveigle herself into his life by informing him that they're dating, and that he must have amnesia from the blow to the head if he doesn't remember this. A muddled Masashi at first accepts this, but eventually asks increasingly difficult questions that force Hana to enlist Alice as her co-conspirator. Alice, against her will, begins to have feelings for Masashi herself.

No, come back! It's actually a great film. Iwai, despite his immense popularity in Japan, has inexplicably never made much headway here. His films, unlike those of his more internationally known countrymen Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, are unabashedly populist, dealing with themes of love, friendship and youth. This is not to say they're simplistic — "Lily" was a dead-on portrait of the failure of technology to assuage modern isolation, and 1995's "Love Letter" was an epic, bittersweet alternative to the "eternal love" dramas so popular in Japan at the moment. The sitcomish hi-jinks of "Hana & Alice" unfold against a backdrop of less idyllic realities that only become clear as the film progresses. We learn that the ebullient Alice lives with her petulant, immature mother in a magnificently messy house, essentially being the parent in the relationship as her mother pursues sleazy men and lies about not having any children, and that Hana, before meeting Alice, had essentially dropped out of school, spending her days at home and refusing to interact with people. Alice gets scouted by a talent agent and begins going to auditions, and we glimpse a dispiriting, seedy world of low-budget photo shoots and script readings, and though she remains unjaded (and, in a joyous scene, impresses a cynical photographer and his crew by taping paper cups to her feet and dancing en pointe across the studio floor), it's clear that the hazards of the industry will lurk in her future.

Iwai has a great ear for dialog, scripting funny, realistic, meandering conversations that nevertheless carry a great emotional weight. And the free-form pacing leads to lovely digressions — a friend arranges to photograph the ballet class, and shoots the girls outside at night. Dressed in "Swan Lake"-style white tutus, they glow under the flash, luminous, blurry, a Degas brought to life.

Previously:

+ NYAFF: Three...Extremes
+ NYAFF: Princess Raccoon

Mags.

This year's Asian American International Film Festival has an entire program devoted to the cinematic divinity that is Maggie Cheung, kicking off with her appearing in a one-on-one with Film Comment's Editor-at-Large Kent Jones at the Walter Reade Theater. The AAIFF is opening with "Clean," her second film with now ex-husband, French director Olivier Assayas. "Clean" is opening in the UK this Friday (it won't open here until September), and both the Guardian and the Independent have interviews with Cheung.

"Somehow, it's difficult to imagine that Maggie Cheung is a real person," Steve Rose starts off in the Guardian. After outlining all of her untouchable screen goddess roles, he points out that "Clean" may be the first film Cheung has appeared in in which she actually resembles a real person, albeit an extra-glamorous rock star-ish person undertaking the harrowing journey from heroin addiction back to normal life. Assayas essentially wrote the film for Cheung (she won the best actress prize at Cannes last year for her role in the film, though otherwise word on it has been that it's disappointing compared to Assayas' previous, more narratively innovative (or bizarre) work), and Rose goes into the details of the pair's strange pan-global relationship (whatever they say, Wong Kar-Wai was so responsible for their separation, though we're not complaining — it resulted in "In the Mood for Love"), which started around the time they made 1996's "Irma Vep" together, and ended with them signing divorce papers on the set of "Clean."

Jonathan Romney in the Independent focuses more on her career path, from her South London childhood to her return to Hong Kong as a model and eventual actress, to her big break playing Jackie Chan's girlfriend May in 1985's "Police Story," to her work with Wong and with Assayas. She talks about wanting to give singing a try after a few scenes in the studio in "Clean," though Romney says "To be honest, judging by her dour, Nico-ish moan when singing as Emily in the film, she might be advised to hold on to the day job for a while yet; in any case, it seems to be holding up just fine."

+ The final cut (Guardian)
+ Maggie Cheung: The Lady Is A Vamp (Independent)

The sky, she falls.

We are now in our 18th week of Box Office Slump, which has heralded another round of "Where are we going? Where have we been?" from all corners. Ty Burr at the Boston Globe suggests the system is broken — movies aren't worse, but we would rather stay in our increasingly well-appointed homes than pay to schlep our way out to a possibly unpleasant theater with the rest of the rabble. Burr also points out that no one makes movies for grown-ups anymore:

[T]he film industry has by and large written them off. This may be a smart business move — most of my peers are too exhausted to do much beyond popping in a Netflix movie and falling asleep 30 minutes later — but it leaves filmmakers and audiences with depressingly few options...It's worth noting that the major studios no longer bother with straight-up dramas and awards bait, leaving such films to boutique wings that know how to turn a movie out cheaply. Even then, profits are rare.

Well, according to that study, the average G-rated film was eleven times more profitable than its R-rated counterpart, and while one could certainly quibble with those numbers (sans Pixar, which is certainly not the norm, they'd be far less impressive, and we can't find David Poland's analysis on that to link to or we would), it does seem that any movie shiny enough to hold a kid's attention for ninety minutes does decently.

Geoff Pevere at the Toronto Star makes similar points, bemoaning the death of the drama and detailing the fact that the only "grownup movie" around this season is "Cinderella Man," and that despite decent reviews and all, it's barely made back half of its production costs.

At the Guardian, Mark Lawson talks about the new, anti-word-of-mouth marketing ("zipped lip") being adopted by the "War of the Worlds" crew, seeming out of bewilderment that none of the old, trusty ways of building interest in a film seem to be working anymore. Lawson credits the internet with wresting control of advance buzz from the studios, and claims that for "WotW," some publications were kept out of advanced screenings (including the NYT?!). At said paper, Sharon Waxman has her on take on how this summer, watching the celebrities' off-camera antics became more interesting to people than watching the films themselves. And at the LA Times, Rachel Abramowitz and R. Kinsey Low inform us that not only are Americans neglecting to go to the movies this summer, so is the rest of the world: "According to figures from Nielsen EDI, which tracks box-office performance, grosses in Germany are down 14%. In Spain, they're down 9%, and in Australia they're down 11%."

+ Are the movies dying? (Boston Globe)
+ Study shows G-rated fare more profitable (Reuters)
+ Where have the grownup movies gone? (Toronto Star)
+ Hollywood crisis as summer hits dry up (Guardian)
+ You've Read the Gossip; Still Want to See the Movie? (NY Times)
+ Moviegoing's overseas slump (LA Times)

NYAFF: Three...Extremes.

The ostensible sequel to earlier multi-director Asian horror anthology "Three," "Three...Extremes" is another trinity of shorts from three different directors: Fruit Chan of Hong Kong's "Dumplings," Park Chan-wook of Korea's "Cut," and Takashi Miike of Japan's "The Box." Presumably more edgy than the original "Three," "Three...Extremes" has garnered considerably more international attention than the first film due to the fact that this set of directors are particularly hot shit right now.

Sharing nothing thematically to string them together, the films are a mixed bag best taken in pieces. "Dumplings," from the least well known director of the bunch, is also by far the best, a gleefully disturbing and occasionally poignant combination of the macabre and the mundane. Miriam Yeung stars as a former actress whose inability to accept the fact that she's aging leads her to track down a woman (Bai Ling) known for making dumplings with remarkable rejuvenating qualities. The growing dread as we figure out, along with Yeung's character, what exactly goes into the dumplings is truly Cronenberg-worthy. Ling is particularly good as a cheerful, rough-mannered mainlander who approaches her gruesome craft with the unaffected callousness of someone raised slaughtering animals on a farm.

"Dumplings" is beautifully photographed by Christopher Doyle, and, except for one memorable shot at the end, eschews shocks in favor of pacing and the occasional gross-out moment. The sound design is also notable — eating noises have never been quite so horrific. There's a feature-length version of "Dumplings" floating around without US distribution that we're planning to look up after this.

Park Chan-wook, whose Cannes Jury-prizewinner "Oldboy" earned him the adoration of hip audiences everywhere, directed the second story, "Cut," a campy, sometimes funny attempt at Grand Guignol. "A Bittersweet Life" star Lee Byung-hun plays a director who comes home after a long day on set, only to be kidnapped, along with his wife, by a disgruntled extra, who, angry at various broad injustices in life, strings the director's wife up with piano wire and threatens to chop her fingers off, one at a time, until the director strangles the random young girl the extra grabbed off the street.

Park is fond of flashy, David Fincheresque camerawork that suited "Oldboy" but here is just distracting. His meta-ish jokes aren't particularly clever, and the tonal shifts from drama to black comedy to whatever else are jarring enough that we never get a sense of the characters or understand them on any level deeper than sharing their desire for the event to end (Kang Hye-jeong, who played Mi-do in "Oldboy," is particularly shrill as the wife). The setting is fabulous, however, a set that looks like it was designed by a gothy twelve-year-old girl, with a black and white tiled floor, velvet furniture, and Kang strung up like a human-sized Victorian marionette at the grand piano.

Like many of Takashi Miike's films, the final story, "The Box," appears to have been conceived on the basis of one or two striking images, and the rest of it thrown in as filler to get us there. Kyoko Hasegawa plays Kyoko, a novelist haunted (literally) by her past in the form of her dead twin sister. As young girls, they were contortionists/dancers as part of their father's act, which appears to be some ghastly combination of Cirque du Soleil and "Carnivàle." Dark, richly colored flashbacks alternate with snowy, sparse shots of the present day, as Kyoko flutters around in the snow acting fragile, and finally reveals the secrets of her past.

Though rather lovely, "The Box" is structured around a dream/not dream structure that renders the storyline utterly incomprehensible. There's a standard droopy-haired girl ghost, a frighteningly realistic doll, a character standing out in precipitation wearing mime make-up a la "Abre Los Ojos," reoccurring imagery of being buried alive, and some incest thrown in for what's ultimately an empty exercise in style.

Previously:

+ NYAFF: Princess Raccoon

The week's critic wrangle: Bewitching the Dead, Yes!

+ Yes: Despite our fears that many critics would think it was just hilarious to review Sally Potter's film in the rhyming iambic pentameter in which its written, only one ventures that far. And it's Anthony Lane, of course:

You may get off on this enthralling stuff,

But after half an hour I’d had enough.

He actually does quite a good job of it, and seems to thoroughly enjoy pretending he's the love child of Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde (now there's a grand romantic pairing for you). Anyway, he doesn't buy the verse gimmick, finds the film padded, and while he admires Joan Allen and the ambition behind the film, he ultimately finds it lacking. So does A. O. Scott: ""Yes" is not just a movie...it's a poem. A bad poem."

Snap.

He has many issues with the film, particularly with Potter's high-minded attempts at commentary on the state of the post-9/11 world: "'Yes' offers a case study in the moral complacency of the creative class, and its verbal cleverness cannot disguise the vacuous self-affirmation summed up in the title."

We suspect our personal preferences are seeping through here, so for the record, we do not care for the films of Ms. Potter. Perhaps we go so far as to loathe them and find them insufferably dull, humorless and agonizingly self-important. That being said, many did care for "Yes." Andrew O'Hehir at Salon finds that the film works despite itself, and is particularly impressed by Joan Allen's apparently smokingly hot performance, though he finds the film falls apart at the end. Holly Willis at the LA Weekly is impressed by Potter's use of verse to represent the social structures that prevent her characters from connecting:

He and She may quarrel, but their inchoate rage must find expression in verse. The result is at once frustrating and striking. We desperately want them to connect, but they can’t step outside the codes that at once enable and debilitate them.

Laura Sinagra at the Village Voice finds "Yes" cautiously refreshing, and the week's indieWIRE/Reverse Shot crew like it/love it, Jeannette Catsoulis with the lead review in particular finding Potter's wide-ranging embedded political commentary impressive.

+ "Land of the Dead": All hail the return of the zombie king. George A. Romero's newest addition to the undead canon to which all aspire is getting praise all 'round (at least from the critics we care about).

Perhaps Sally Potter should take a leaf from Romero's book (of the dead! bwahaha!). His film seems to offer more complex politically commentary than her overtly messagey one. La Manohla points out that:

With "Revenge of the Sith" and "Batman Begins," "Land of the Dead" makes the third studio release of the summer season to present an allegory, either naked or not, of our contemporary political landscape... One of the enormous pleasures of genre filmmaking is watching great directors push against form and predictability, as Mr. Romero does brilliantly in "Land of the Dead."

She notes that as Romero's films have progressed, the dead seems to become more human, while the living seem less and less in touch with their humanity.

David Edelstein finds "Land" "more formulaic than its predecessors"; nevertheless, "The zombie with the flip-top noggin is an instant classic. And the sociopolitical subtext is good, too." Edelstein heralds each of Romero's previous "Dead" films as classics in their own way, though the greatest remains, of course, 1968's "Night of the Living Dead": "I saw it at age 12, and it didn't just scare the living crap out of me, it turned my world inside out."

Roger Ebert attempts to understand the mechanisms of Romero's world:

The most intriguing single shot...is a commercial for Fiddler's Green, showing tanned and smiling residents, dressed in elegant leisurewear, living the good life. The shot is intriguing for two reasons: (1) Why does Fiddler's Green need to advertise, when it is full and people are literally dying to get in? and (2) What is going through the minds of its residents, as they relax in luxury, sip drinks, shop in designer stores and live the good life? Don't they know the world outside is one of unremitting conflict and misery?

Of course, that's Romero's point.

+ "Bewitched": Roger Ebert's the only one unfamiliar with Nora Ephron's source material, which is perhaps why he liked it the best ("tolerably entertaining", two and a half stars). We've seen maybe two or three episodes of the original show ourselves, so we were mildly surprised to see it declared and defended from various sides as a subversive somethingerother, though perhaps it looks better in comparison to this "reimagining." Anthony Lane, on the earlier televised incarnation, claims "You could read Samantha’s gifts as subversion in deep disguise or as a smiling gesture to the radical—just enough to leave the status quo refreshed," while Armond White sites the "legitimate antecedents" of the "witch longing for a normal life" genre.

Stephanie Zacharek declares that Nicole Kidman has proven she can rise about the most dismal of material, while her performance works for Manohla Dargis for a different reason:

Because the ethereally beautiful Ms. Kidman no longer resembles a real person, having been buffed to almost supernatural perfection in the way of most modern stars, casting her as a witch was inspired.

For David Edelstein, though, "she's playing Meg Ryan—and even Meg Ryan has moved beyond playing Meg Ryan." He says the movie is at least not as bad as Ephron's last few, while reminding us that he's "grading on a curve that dips, at its lowest point, into the abyss." He is particularly put out by the use of R.E.M.'s anti-suicide song "Everybody Hurts" over a montage of Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, um, hurting, but it's Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice who should get final say on the musical montages here:

As always a fool for wealth porn, Ephron also jams her scenes with swatches and memorabilia from the old show—postmod!—and virtually every sequence change is an occasion for a song interlude. "Witchy Woman," "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead," Sinatra on "Witchcraft," the Police's "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic." I'm dying!

We'd twitch our nose and make it better if we could, darling.

The rest of it: Thursday.

Via Page Six (it's that kind of day), Renée Zellweger is apparently pining to play Edie Bouvier Beale in a fictional adaptation of Albert and David Maysles' "Grey Gardens" after seeing "The Ghost of Grey Gardens," a doc, um, based on a doc, we suppose. Zellweger has apparently "gotten her hands on 100 reels of unseen footage that was shot in the making of the 1975 'Grey Gardens'" and paid a visit to the (now refurbished) East Hampton estate. A Broadway musical based on the doc is already in the works.

The New York Press' Matt Zoller Seitz interviews writer/director/generator of tabloid fodder James Toback, and points out an event that we hadn't heard of and are kicking ourselves for not being able to go to: the Museum of the Moving Image will be showing a double feature of Toback's 1978 film "Fingers" and the upcoming French remake, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped." After the screening of "Fingers," Toback will participate in a Pinewood Dialogue, whatever that means.

Sharon Waxman in the New York Times tackles "The Aristocrats" and the difficulties of marketing a film based entirely on a dirty joke that's unmentionable on billboards, in ads, in TV spots and in trailers.

Gregg Kilday in the Hollywood Reporter breaks down the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' decisions on producer credits (they'll be scrutinized) and awards for stuntmen (there won't be any).

And the Onion taunts us with a glimpse of award-winning cinema in the year 2056.

+ Zellweger's Wish (NY Post)
+ The Outsider (NY Press)
+ Dares to Tell It, Repeatedly (NY Times)
+ Academy gets strict on credits (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Final Installment of Frogger Trilogy Poised to Sweep Oscars (The Onion)

Sneaking in the social commentary.

Two interviews with George A. Romero, whose "Land of the Dead" opens tomorrow, both emphasizing that his movies have earned their place in the pantheon because of the societal criticism innate to each "of the Dead" installment. And also because of all the cool zombie gore. Robert Abele in the LA Times:

"Night" evoked Vietnam-era bloodshed and, with its black male lead trapped in a farmhouse, echoed civil rights hysteria. "Dawn" poked fun at soul-deadening consumerism. And "Day" addressed ethics in science. With "Land," Romero tackles issues of safety and boundaries, showing a community fortifying itself against a murderous horde while its wealthiest keep alive class divisions separating them from the powerless.

"It's the folly of saying, 'Everything's OK, don't worry about it,'" says Romero, who wrote "Land" before the events of Sept. 11. Its focus then was about "ignoring social ills, setting up a synthetic sense of comfort."

He says he didn't have to tweak it much to reflect new fears of terrorism. When told that it's hard not to think of Iraq watching an armored car of trigger-happy humans roll through a zombiefied suburb shooting anything they see, Romero smiles. "That's one of the things I put in there afterward."

He also discusses how "28 Days Later" and the recent "Dawn of the Dead" remake, for all their relative success, are wrong, wrong, wrong about one thing: zombies really shouldn't be able to run.

Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly is clearly a Romero fan, and his gushy intro is nearly the same length as the interview itself. He has the director talk about the evolving nature of the zombies in the latest installment.

The Chicago Tribune's Michael Kilian covers a far more unlikely vessel for subversive messaging: the rom-com. "The Girl in the Café," an HBO/BBC co-production, features Bill Nighy and Kelly Macdonald falling in love (ew!) at the G-8 conference in Iceland — nothing spells grand romance like a vampire lord, a Scandinavian island and a meeting of representatives from the industrialized nations. Apparently, over the course of the film Nighy's awkward British bureaucrat is put into an increasingly uncomfortable position, as Macdonald's character is outspoken about her political beliefs.

"I approached the film as a kind of Trojan horse," said director David Yates. "You've reached the audience [with the message] if you've made the audience feel it had a substantial interest in these people."

It's an interesting attempt at sugarcoating ideology to make the message go down smoothly, but we doubt the film will reach or appeal to anyone whose beliefs aren't already in line with the ones being presented.

+ Knight of the living dead (LA Times)
+ Dead Director Rises Again (LA Weekly)
+ Movie makes poverty, debt crises real (Chicago Tribune)

How to spot the culprit.

In honor of the NFT's Crime Scene 2005 Festival, the London Times has a section of delightful oddities on crime films, which isn't really a genre we have here (it seems to lie somewhere between noir and mysteries).

As an introductory piece, Phoebe Greenwood talks to various real cops and robbers about their favorite criminal film moments. She ties everything up with there useful pointers for spotting a criminal (on camera):

+ It’s the fourth or fifth person billed in the credits.
+ A major character actor in a minor role will declare his guilt at the end.
+ A love of fine wines/high art/biblical quotations is the sign of a master villain.
+ If suspects are blind or wheelchair-bound, they are probably faking it.
+ Never trust anyone with a cast-iron alibi.

Maxim Jakubowski presents the A to Z of crime movies, from "Angels With Dirty Faces" to Cornell Woolrich (he kind of flakes at the end there). Then he offers the following list of the worst crime clichés (we love kitschy lists, can you tell?):

+ Cases burst open in a shower of banknotes
+ Answer machines always have one message vital to an investigation
+ Serial killers plaster their bedroom walls with newspaper cuttings and psychotic scribblings.
+ Assassins always wait too long for a better shot
+ It’s always the first day on the job for the bank teller being robbed

James Christopher interviews Donald E. Westlake, who's written scads of crime novels under several aliases, each with their own literary style. Many have been made into films, among the better ones "The Grifters" (which is, hey!, playing on IFC next week) and "Point Blank."

He gracefully acknowledges that the industry occasionally makes a total hash of his work. He refuses to give specifics: "There's a wonderful line from James M. Cain. He was once asked, 'What do you think the movies did to your books?' He answered, 'They didn’t do anything to my books. There they are on the shelf.'"

Reporter Wendy Ide gets feedback on the realistic (or not) use of forensics in film from her father, a forensic scientist. Joanne Hines points out that women in crimes films tend to be arm candy, screaming victims, or feisty: "In Hollywood terms, this usually means a woman too stupid to respond plausibly in the kind of situation which would have any sane person passing out with fear." Author Ian Rankin lists his top ten crime films, and finally, as we always have to come back to celebrity antics these days, Kevin Maher details the ten crimes celebs tend to commit (there's no "Overacting," or "Telling unfunny anecdotes on talk shows," which would be too easy, we suppose).

+ Real life True Crime (Times of London)
+ It's a fair cop and robbers (Times of London)
+ Mystery man of many faces (Times of London)
+ Why I so love killing time with Dad (Times of London)
+ What's a vice girl like you doing in flicks like these? (Times of London)
+ Molls, murder and mayhem (Times of London)
+ Lights, camera, infraction! (Times of London)

100 quotes of solitude.

The American Film Institute unveils the latest of its "100 Years... 100 Whateverwhatevers," which would be the top 100 Movie Quotes. What's interesting is the films that are fading from popular memory, even as certain quotes from them linger. We'd guess that most people couldn't name the stars or plots of "Sons of the Desert," "Little Caesar," "Knute Rockne All American," or "Yankee Doodle Dandy,"  for all that they may well have referenced each film's iconic line: "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!" (#60), "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?" (#73), "Tell 'em to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper." (#89), and "My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you." (#97).

Paul Hamilos, at the Guardian's Culture Vulture blog, has a few more pugnacious things to say, though, being British, he clearly is incapable of understanding the great social and political import of "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."

+ 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes (AFI)
+ Top film quotes (Guardian)

Yes. Yes! Yes?

Three interviews with Sally Potter, whose racy interracial romance in verse, "Yes," opens in New York this Friday. Laura Sinagra at the Village Voice gets a few quick quotes from her in one of those blurby things the Voice does on occasion. On her tendency to work with actresses that are generally thought of as aloof or chilly (Joan Allen is the nameless female lead of "Yes"):

I don't really find them cool. What I find them is intelligent. You may find a certain detachment. But I find that very moving. It's the opposite of sentimentality.

In the New York Times, Annette Grant has a longer interview with the director, in which she speaks about her film as a response to 9/11 and her writing process.

And we linked to Scott Foundas' LA Weekly re-interview with Potter a few days ago, but it's worth a second look. We've never read an interview quite like it, with a director chastising a critic for his review, and it raises some interesting questions about the nature of criticism when it comes to small films. Foundas reviewed the film for Variety at its Telluride debut at last year, and wrote what he saw as a negative review, and what others saw as a savaging. A few notable quotes from Potter:

It’s so difficult financing independent films today, and from a filmmaker’s point of view, when it takes a very long time and great difficulty to fund a film that’s risky for political, aesthetic or formal reasons — in this case, for all three — it’s a blow when the industry paper gives it a thumbs-down, because that only adds to that risk-averse climate.

She seems to be suggesting a variation on Dave Eggers' The Believer magazine, with its manifesto about never giving bad reviews to books, because books have a hard enough time getting read these days anyway. Of course, The Believer manages this by only publishing reviews of books its writers like, while Foundas was hardly in a place to tell Variety he wasn't going to review "Yes" because he didn't care for it.

For us, at least, this comes down to the problem of festival coverage. If we assume Potter's film (she hardly being one of those known to rake it in at the box office) debuted without a distributor, the idea of several publications descending on it with harsh reviews seems unfair — they would mush the film before it ever had a chance to reach theaters. Foundas' review may have been unfairly weighted, it being one of the few and first from a major publication, but Variety is, as Potter herself points out, also a trade, read by industry types who, we'd hope, would know better than to make major decisions on a film based on one critic's say.

It would have been different if everyone in Telluride had thought the film was no good. Then, however well-intentioned it had been, however hard the people had struggled, however long it took and that nobody got paid and everything — in a way it all would have been irrelevant, because in the end the film didn't work. But in this case, 99 percent of the people not only thought it worked, but thought it worked brilliantly. The other 1 percent happened to have its voice in print.

That we're less sympathetic with. Foundas was clearly just doing his job as a critic, which was to give his opinion of the film — after all, it was a review, not an attempt at gauging the crowd's reaction, a tricky thing in itself.

We have no real point here, it's just part of the overall "how to cover festivals" problem we muse over from time to time.

+ Yes Woman (Village Voice)
+ Verse Film Pits Love Against the Clash of Cultures (NY Times)
+ Just Say Yes (LA Weekly)

Score.

Alex Ross in the New Yorker has an overview of the fine art of scoring films, by way of Lincoln Center's Great Performers presentation of "Koyaanisqatsi" with an accompanying live performance of the score composed by Philip Glass. "Koyaanisqatsi" and its sequels "Powwaqatsi" and "Naqoyqatsi" are dialog- and plot-free, visually lush collages of nature/urban shots that have always struck smug us as the kind of pseudo-profound thing you pretend to enjoy in college because you have a crush on an activisty boy. So we felt particularly schooled when we read this:

When I saw “Koyaanisqatsi” in college, I dismissed it as a trippy, slick, MTV-ish thing, to which some well-meaning soul had attached hippie messages about the mechanization of existence and the spoliation of the planet. At Lincoln Center, I understood it as something else altogether—an awesomely dispassionate vision of the human world, beautiful and awful in equal measure.

We're still not going to rewatch it, though.

More our style are his thoughts on the use of tonally inappropriate music, either for irony, or, better, for some more complex sense of compassion:

Stanley Kubrick's decision to play "We'll Meet Again" over a montage of nuclear annihilation at the end of "Dr. Strangelove" is one famous example; another is Oliver Stone's use of Barber's velvety "Adagio for Strings" over scenes of carnage in "Platoon." Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie, in their score for the new Gregg Araki film "Mysterious Skin," do something wholly unexpected: as a horrendous story of child abuse in a Kansas town unfolds, the music sways toward a state of irrational bliss, as if to numb the pain. Music, in these cases, doesn't show the image as a lie; instead, it is itself the lie we tell ourselves in order to survive.

Though it blatantly rips off Terrence Malick's use of Carl Orff's "Vier Stucke Fur Xylophon: Gassengauer nach Hans Neusiedler" in "Badlands," Hans Zimmer's "You're So Cool" theme from "True Romance" has always been a favorite of ours this way. The opening sequence, with that lighthearted tropical motif twinkling over images of a post-apocalyptic looking Detroit dawn, has a weird resonance. It made the movie seem better than it was, as if Detroit, mid-winter, with its vagrant crowds warming their hands over trashcan fires, were reality, and the music represented Christian Slater's Clarence Worley's disconnect from it. Then the arrival of Rosanna Arquette's ridiculous character and all the silliness that follows could be read as an immature, violent, romanticized fantasy on his part, rather than the film itself being the immature, violent, romanticized fantasy we suspect it really is.

+ Sound and Vision (New Yorker)

Outside the system.

In the New York Times, Sharon Waxman pays a visit to Tom Laughlin, the creator (and actor) behind 70s cult action figure Billy Jack ("Just a person who protects children and other living things," as the tagline to the 1971 movie went).

Back then, it was bigotry against Native Americans, trouble with the nuclear power industry and big bad government that made this screen hero explode in karate-fueled rage. At the time, the unlikely combination of rugged-loner heroics - all in defense of society's downtrodden and forgotten - and rough-edged filmmaking sparked a pop culture and box-office phenomenon.

Laughlin and his wife, co-star and co-writer Delores Taylor, raised money for the original film from individual investors, and, unable to secure a distributor, rented the theater spaces and collected the box-office profits themselves (according to the article, Laughlin hired Mormons to work the ticket booths because he figured they could be trusted with the money). "Billy Jack" took in $32.5 million, and now Laughlin and Taylor are raising money for a new Billy Jack film that will take on drugs, the religious right, and the current war.

Over at the LA Times, Martin Miller profiles Scott Neeson, a former high-up in the international marketing arm of Sony Pictures Entertainment who left Hollywood to help Cambodian street children. The funny part (and by that we mean sad) is the industry's reaction:

News of Neeson's career move created something of a stir inside Hollywood. The single man with no children is having a midlife crisis, the rumor mill speculated. Or he was pushed out of his job at Fox and/or Sony. Or he's just playing some angle for a triumphant return. Or he's gone nuts.

And, back at the New York Times, Lewis Beale uses the IFC Center's plans for a Midnight Movie series as a launching point to dwell on what makes a "midnight movie" these days:

What was once culturally transgressive - sexually, thematically, aesthetically - has now been made mainstream, he said, by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, whose "Kill Bill" would have been a perfect midnight movie if it had been made in 1975.

The current biggest midnight movie is "The Goonies," a sad testament to how nostalgia has replaced the sheer offensiveness we'd prefer. And anyway, we'd take "Labyrinth" over "The Goonies" any night. Ah, David Bowie: The cheekbones! The contact juggling clearly being done by someone else! The eyeshadow! The odd undercurrents of sadism!

+ Billy Jack Is Ready to Fight the Good Fight Again (NY Times)
+ Film exec did well; now he does good (LA Times)
+ John Hughes Versus the Vampires: The Dilemma of the Midnight Movie (NY Times)

Incoming: Bergman's last, Johnny Depp in Bollywood?

Trailers: One for "Saraband," which director Ingmar Bergman has said will be his last film, here. Features his longtime favorites Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman (whose face seems to grow more fascinating and expressive each year) reprising their characters from "Scenes From a Marriage" thirty years later. It was shot on digital for Swedish television, with Sony Pictures Classics handing the theatrical release here, NY/LA on July 8.

Another trailer here, for "Dorian Blues," a little coming-out/coming-of-age comedy that's been making the LGBT festival rounds and that will get a limited theatrical release in September.

Elsewhere, Sarah Michelle Gellar will continue doing her fighting cutesy girl thing, starring in an adaptation of "American McGee's Alice," a dark, violent video game take on "Alice in Wonderland." Marcus Nispel, of the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake, will direct.

Via ComingSoon, oddly punctuated choreographer-turned-director Franc. Reyes will be writing and directing a remake of Fritz Lang's "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt." Reyes, who made his directorial debut with John Leguizamo vehicle "Empire," is apparently not afraid of the long shadows cast by the great directors, having previously announced he was working on a remake of Robert Wise's fantastic 1949 noir "The Set-Up," which has our vote for best boxing movie of all time.

At Twitch, Todd uncovers four stills from Guy Maddin's upcoming feature "The Brand Upon the Brain!"

Via CRI, "The World" director Jia Zhang-ke has announced that his next two films will be shot in Shanghai: the first will be a love story set during the Cultural Revolution, and the second about revolutionaries in the city during the 1920s, for which he hopes to recruit some foreign stars.

On that note, via Rediff, director Ashvin Kumar, whose "Little Terrorist" was nominated for Best Live Action Short at this year's Academy Awards, is reportedly wooing Johnny Depp in hopes of casting him as the lead in a romantic comedy set in Kerala. Kumar is currently working on "The Forest," a bilingual ecological thriller that's "purportedly the first made-in-India film to be backed by a Hollywood producer."

Finally, Ain't It Cool News rumor of the day: the "Untitled Mike Judge Comedy" we know many are drooling over has, according to "Albert E.," been pushed back to fall and given the title "Idiocracy."

+ Trailer: Saraband (Official Site)
+ Trailer: Dorian Blues (Official Site)
+ Gellar game for Alice in Wonderland movie (Reuters)
+ Reyes Helming Doubt for Regency (ComingSoon)
+ First Stills From Guy Maddin's Brand Upon The Brain! (Twitch)
+ Jia Zhangke to Shoot Two New Films (CRI)
+ Johnny Depp in Kerala? (Rediff)
+ Does The Untitled Mike Judge Film Have A Title And A Release Date Finally?! (AICN)

The rest of it: Monday.

The new issue of Reverse Shot is up and, as they say, spectacular. The theme (of sorts) is "East Meets West," and they have their writers matching a breakthrough Asian film with a Western counterpart. We haven't even begun to slog through, and already much goodness.

[W]e hoped not to come to any grand conclusions about the vast differences between two worlds of cinema but rather to foster a better understanding of the processes by which we, western audiences and filmmakers, come to terms with our counterparts who live and work a half a world away.

We're particularly looking forward to a comparison of Shunji Iwai's "All About Lily Chou-Chou" (which emotionally wrecked us) with "Movern Callar." Also up: enough interviews and reviews to last you through the season. Bliss.

There's also a new issue of Cinema Scope up, which we'll be completely lazy about and direct you to David Hudson at Greencine Daily, who breaks it down, as always, with infinitely wisdom.

Trailer: One for "The Constant Gardener," the new film from "City of God" director Fernando Meirelles, is here.

In the Guardian, Mark Lawson reflects on how and why the upcoming slate of "authorized biography" films will doubtless be bad.

In the New York Times, Sarah Lyall pays a visit to the set of graphic novel adaptation "V for Vendetta," where they closed down Whitehall, between Trafalgar and Parliament Squares, for three nights to film a climactic scene in front of the Parliament building, which, in the film, gets blown up. "Each relevant official had been given a copy of the book 'V for Vendetta,' [location supervisor Nick Daubeny] said, and was made aware en passant that Parliament would have to go."

And in the LA Times, Geoff Boucher writes about how rapper 50 Cent learned to cry for his upcoming film "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," and about director Jim Sheridan's unexpected fondness for KRS-One.

+ Summer 2005: East Meets West (Reverse Shot)
+ Issue 23 (Cinema Scope)
+ Trailer: The Constant Gardener (Yahoo!)
+ Is there a part for me? (Guardian)
+ From the Wachowski Brothers, an Ingénue Who Blows Up Parliament (NY Times)
+ A rapper learns how to cry (LA Times)

The Interview, The After Party, The Hotel.

Interviews worth checking out (we've been letting them slide again):

Christoffer Boe (the director of "Reconstruction") with Todd at Twitch: "'I think Dogme is a wonderful thing in the sense that it has put Denmark on the map for film making and has done a lot for the industry but, as such, the film making that it does to me is really not anything revolutionary. I think Godard went out with five people and made Dogme movies in the sixties and I think they are more vibrant, they are more intellectual, they are more interesting, they are more keen on film and so forth. So I wouldn’t give Dogme the benefit of reacting against it. I wouldn’t say "Reconstruction" is a reaction against Dogme.'"

Jesse Bradford (now appearing in "Heights," though he really won our heart as Kirsten Dunst's love interest in "Bring It On") with Janice Page in the Boston Globe: '''I don't want to say I'm trying to get away from the whole teen heartthrob thing, as if it's this bad thing that I want nothing to do with, but it's not the ultimate end to what I'm trying to do.'"

David Gordon Green on casting Jamie "Billy Elliot" Bell as a redneck teen in "Undertow" — with Sheila Johnson in the Telegraph: "'There was no question about it once we had got together. What appealed to me first off was that he was not someone trying to get a part, just a kid with a lot on his mind. No one else had that combination of energy and emotion.'"

Dan Harris (whose directorial debut, at age 24, was "Imaginary Heroes") with Mark Monahan in the Telegraph: "[Woody] Allen accidentally hit him in the chest with a ball that he was chucking against a wall between takes. 'He said, "We're going to pretend this never happened," and then he winked at me. And I thought it was the perfect Woody Allen moment: just small and weird and a little funny and not too much.'"

Andrew Horn, director of "The Nomi Song," with Amanda Reyes at Film Threat: "After a lot of thought I realized the simple reason the East Village became what it was, was because it was cheap and so it attracted all the lunatics and misfits who couldn't deal with life anywhere else. We were young and life was relatively simple and we had time on our hands, places to do things (rent was cheap and spaces were available) and everyone seemed if not actually ambitious to do things then at least available."

Spike Lee with Andrew Billen in the London Times: "When Lee recalls how often Christ appeared to die in Mel Gibson's 'The Last Temptation of Christ' [whoops, Billen, wrong controversial Jesus flick] ('Jesus got his ass kicked') he chuckles so hard that I have to tell him to calm down. His career, as opposed to Gibson’s, is, after all, a serious business.

Matthew MacFadyen (who'll be playing Darcy in the new "Pride and Prejudice," and who was rather spectacular, in a clenchy, British way, in ultraserious BBC spy drama "Spooks" ("MI-5" here)) with Wendy Ide in the London Times: "'I find it difficult to talk about acting because...I just can't. Unless you can dissect it like an acting teacher, you can't do it. I'm not clever enough to do it. I can't analyse it like that. As soon as you try and generalise something, you lose hold of it.'"

Anton Newcombe (of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, one of two bands profiled in "DiG!") with Sylvie Simmons in the Guardian: "Look at the box. It says 'written by Ondi'. How do you write a documentary? You don't. I'm not taking issue with any particular pixel or frame or sequence, but taken out of context, I can cut your words with this tape and make you say anything I want to say. It's just lies - lies that were written into the narration. Courtney [Taylor, of the Dandy Warhols] read a script. They were not his words. It's fascinating. Do you know what Courtney thinks? Shall I speak for Courtney? 'This is a life mistake.'"

Nick Nolte with James Mottram in the Independent: "As he shambles his 6ft 1in frame towards me, Nick Nolte looks like a cross between Grizzly Adams and Father Christmas."

Sally Potter with Scott Foundas (who apparently famously trashed "Yes" in Variety when it premiered at Telluride last year) in the LA Weekly: "'It would have been different if everyone in Telluride had thought the film was no good. Then, however well-intentioned it had been, however hard the people had struggled, however long it took and that nobody got paid and everything — in a way it all would have been irrelevant, because in the end the film didn't work. But in this case, 99 percent of the people not only thought it worked, but thought it worked brilliantly. The other 1 percent happened to have its voice in print.'"

+ Christoffer Boe interview (Twitch)
+ Jesse Bradford moves into a new role (Boston Globe)
+  The birth of Hillbilly Elliot (Telegraph)
+ The young prince of Hollywood (Telegraph)
+ Outer Space Angel (Film Threat)
+ Spike Lee (Times - London)
+ Matthew MacFadyen (Times)
+ 'I am not a movie' (Guardian)
+ Nick Nolte: The bad stage was good too (Independent)
+ Just Say Yes (LA Weekly)

Last week's critic wrangle: Delayed reaction.

It's been a while since we've done one of these (we keep meaning to and then the day slips away from us — and were intimidated by the very thought of trying to digest all of those "Batman Begins" reviews into a paragraph), but once again Armond White summons us to back.

+ "Me and You and Everyone We Know": We loved this film, and it got a warm to ecstatic critical reception this past weekend, opening in New York. That being said, we could easily see how someone wouldn't like it. It flirts with preciousness, and though, save for one moment (Christine, in her car, writing on the windshield, if you've seen it), the film held us totally in its grasp, we assumed it wouldn't be many others' cup of tea. There are several other reasonable complaints you could lodge against it, none of which the New York Press' Armond White makes in his snarling take-down.

If I had never seen a film by D.W. Griffith, Antonioni, Ozu, John Ford, Vincente Minnelli or Prince, I might have been impressed by performance artist Miranda July's Cannes award-winning directorial debut, "Me and You and Everyone We Know." It's contemporary high art, made as though no cinema about human experience had ever existed—as if being wimpy and sweet about this thing called life was justified by the "indie" filmmaking label.

Does an even mildly ambitious film have to be Antonioni to get a good review out of you, M. White? Or would you prefer that no one attempt "cinema about human experience" anymore, it being just done to death these days?

We don't want to dwell so much on White's reviews, which are clearly written to provoke and to differ from the crowd (is there anyone more conscious of what the other critics are saying about a film?). "Me and You" might well be the kind of film that's tailor-made to please critics (particularly the "hipster critics" White railed against in the 2004 Slate Movie Club) and a certain type of indie movie-goer likely to go see it. But what of it? It may not be Ozu, but we haven't heard anyone labeling as such, and simplicity in a film shouldn't automatically be a pejorative. Anyway, we're a little frustrated because White touches on these ideas that have such validity ("indie films" becoming a parade of particularly navel-gazing, sensitive, Sundance-y ensemble weepies) and then makes such inflammatory, erratic statement that we have no idea what kind of good film he's championing.

Over at indieWIRE, the Reverse Shot crew like the film quite a bit better than White. Lead reviewer Kristi Mitsuda is particularly enchanted, saying that it "achieves a rare distinction: It manages to make a cinematic exploration of love, that most done-to-death of all themes, effervescently fresh again." Nicolas Rapold and Elbert Ventura, responding, seem fond if not as rapturous. David Edelstein at Slate sums up how we felt about it, as something:

admirable and wondrously strange—as well as gorgeous, funny, dreamlike, mesmerizing, squirmy, and occasionally annoying, the way a borderline-precious solo performance can be. But if you get on the movie's wavelength, the annoying parts just melt into the ether.

A. O. Scott over at the New York Times admits as well that the film is calculated and won't work for everyone. Of Miranda July's main character Christine:

Her provocations may strike some people as overly cute, and her self-consciousness as a tiresome form of solipsism. But "Me and You and Everyone We Know" is brave enough to risk this rejection, and generous enough not to deserve it. I like it very much, and I hope you will, too.

And Anthony Lane at the New Yorker weighs in today with criticism of the film, though more balanced than White's. Basically, it's too calculated for him, and he's not charmed (Christine also strikes him as a "bunny-boiler").

+ Don't Know Much. (NY Press)
+ American Beauty: Miranda July's "Me and You and Everyone We Know" (indieWIRE)
+ Christmas in July (Slate)
+ An Artistic Eye Wide Open, Observing Odd, Lost Souls (NY Times)
+ Bewildered (New Yorker)

NYAFF: Tanuki Goten wa...paradaisu!

This is the first of our promised dispatches from the New York Asian Film Festival, and it's a doozy (Good lord, when did such words creep into our vocabulary?). Securing "Operetta Tanuki Goten (Princess Raccoon)" was a real triumph for NYAFF — Seijun Suzuki pioneered the sort of visually brilliant, wondrously bizarre films the festival was created to showcase. He's now 82, and apparently sometimes requires the use of an oxygen tank, but age has hardly tempered his vision — "Princess Raccoon" is joyously strange, goofy, stylized, and very much a Seijun Suzuki film.

Zhang Ziyi plays the princess in question, ruling over the tanuki in the tanuki castle in the tanuki forest. The fact that she speaks Mandarin for most of the film is explained away fairly effortlessly — she came to Japan from China. Why? Oh, humans can never understand why tanukis do what they do. The language barrier doesn't really put a crimp in her eventual romance with the human prince Amechiyo (Odagiri Jo, rivaling Zhang in prettiness), because love transcends all languages. They do have plenty of other problems to deal with, like Amechiyo's father, who, in true (if gender-reversed) fairy-tale fashion, is trying to kill Amechiyo because his blossoming good looks threaten to make him, rather than his father, the fairest of them all. Then there's the Tanuki-hime's obligations to her people, who live in jolly, musical bliss away from the humans who try to trick them and/or make them into soup. This is before we get into the bizarre Catholicism, the random Italian courtiers hanging about, the Frog of Paradise, a rock, paper, scissors battle, and a digital appearance from an enka singer.

Strangest of all, as always, is Suzuki's distinct visual style. His love of color seeps richly into every shot, many of which play out against a green screened-in backdrop of a traditional painting or foil paper. Others are set on what is clearly a stage, or an artificial forest with a painted background, and in the closing scene, a minor character walks out of one of the few realistic(ish) locations directly onto a stage, where she deliver a final monologue. It is, after all, an operetta. Suzuki further departs from any sense of visual continuity with what we'd hesitate to call jump cuts (leap cuts? non sequitur cuts?) which pull characters wildly from one location to another (though really, we don't know how else they get from the obviously outdoor field of flower that supposedly borders on the clearly indoor set of the tanuki forest).

Delirious, enjoyable fun, though certainly not for everyone. Festival head Grady Hendrix even pointed the doors out in the back as he introduced the film, should anyone feel the need to walk out.

Update: One more note — Hendrix also said that Chris Doyle might be making an appearance at the screening of "Three...Extremes" this Friday.

The rest of it: Friday.

Quickly, as it's been a long week and we're sorely in need of some TV and beer.

At the London Times, Sean Macaulay weighs in on a figure who's been in the media a lot of late, and who's been plagued by gay rumors for most of his public career. Yes, we're talking about Batman.

At the Guardian, Margaret Atwood, in anticipation of "War of the Worlds," explains the cultural importance of science fiction (managing to work in "taking us boldly where no man has gone before").

Over at Slate, David Edelstein gets stood up by Joe Morgenstern at the intended "Did George Lucas and Steven Spielberg Ruin the Movies?" discussion. You were too good for him, anyway, David.

And at low culture...well, we won't spoil it. But — inspired. Seriously.

+ Camp Crusader (Times)
+ 'Aliens have taken the place of angels' (Guardian)
+ Did George Lucas and Steven Spielberg Ruin the Movies? (Slate)
+ low culture Exclusive: Tom Cruise's Actual Proposal to Katie Holmes (lowculture)

To do, today: NYAFF, IFC Center.

The New York Asian Film Festival kicks off today. We'll be going to "Princess Raccoon," "Three...Extremes," "Hana to Alice," "Green Chair" and "Crying Fist," and writing them up here. We'll try to remember to bring the big IFC bowling bag-style purse we got at a meeting once (yeah, the men pretty much had to suck it up with that giveaway), so if you're going to any of those screenings, look for us, and we can have an awkward, stilted non-internet moment.

Also, the IFC Center opens today with Miranda July's outstanding "Me and You and Everyone We Know." We're not obliged to shill for it, but we will anyway: it's a damn nice theater. We haven't seen the smaller screens upstairs, so we can't speak for them (and watching a film on a small screen can be the plague of the indie cinema-going experience), but the main theater is rather gorgeous. John Vanco, who's headed the remaking of the former Waverly Theater, loves films, and has gotten right all the little details you'd care about if you were given the fantastic-sounding job of running an arthouse cinema: the seats are sturdy and extremely comfy, a short will preface each film rather than ads, and the popcorn is organic. Oh, shut up. If we still found grittiness romantic, we'd be living in back in our old apartment with the rats and our Finnish dominatrix/bellydancer roommate.

At Pullquote, the cinetrix got to go to Wednesday's "Me and You" premiere (grumble we actually work here grumble and can't get a damn invite grumble) and falls in love with the film. Aaron at Out of Focus also caught an early glimpse of the theater, and has an interview with John Vanco over at Gothamist.

+ Back and Forth Forever (Pullquote)
+ The Gothamist Interview: June Day 1 - John Vanco (Out of Focus)
+ John Vanco, IFC Center (Gothamist)

Hell, works for us.

Kevin Maher in the London Times:

There is a spectre haunting Hollywood. It’s a terrifying vision of well-dressed fortysomething urbanites drifting aimlessly around city streets, staring at total strangers and ruminating on the nature of human intimacy, then returning home to sham marriages and alienated children, eating their dinner in silence and spending most of the night staring into the bathroom mirror, wondering in quasi-poetic internal monologue about the fact that we are all, on some unspeakably profound level, like, totally connected to everyone else.

This angsty archly reflective world view, once the preserve of the occasional Hollywood ensemble piece like "Magnolia," is becoming common currency at the multiplex. "We Don’t Live Here Anymore" and "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing"...are typical examples, according to The New York Times, of "a genre that has been flourishing in recent years, but still lacks a name."

La Manohla, reviewing "Heights" in today's New York Times:

In its aspirations, design and worldview, "Heights" resembles a number of other films about cozily connected souls. These films, like "Love Actually," constitute a soap-operatic subgenre that might be called We Are the World. Sincere to a fault, they are built on the bedrock of decency or, more accurately, a set of shared assumptions. In these films, married characters occasionally stray, but no one ever smacks the kid, kicks the dog or burns with true, blood-boiling hate. (Todd Solondz makes We Are the World movies, too, but no one hates as passionately in his movies as he does.)

Nice catch, Manohla. Wouldn't want The Paper of Record caught short on the coining of a phrase.

+ If you're unhappy and you know it... (Times)
+ A Long Day for Brooding and Yearning in the City (NY Times)

Wong Kar Wai at Lincoln Center.

At around 8pm, Wong Kar Wai arrived, hand in hand with a woman in a red dress, strolling past two lines of huddled crowds shivering unhappily in summer clothing on an unexpectedly frigid evening, and stopping in front of the small contingent of photographers and news cameras. We'd like to say that, having waited a year longer than the rest of the world to see "2046," three more hours was nothing, but goddamn, it was miserable. "Film Comment"'s screening started at 9pm, to a packed house, with the magazine's editor Gavin Smith introducing WKW, who in turn introduced his film, and thanked "Film Comment"