Category: movies

A friend just told me she is going to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming for a screening of Close Encouters of The Third Kind. It’s part of a 21-day tour called the Rolling Roadshow that screens films where they were shot.
Films we’ve already missed: The Last Picture Show [Archer City, TX]; Once Upon A Time In The West [Monument Valley, AZ]; Planet of The Apes [the first one, Lake Powell, AZ]; and Repo Man [in LA somewhere, just yesterday].
There’s still time to see The Goonies, though, and the movie tourist-weary locals only delayed the Sideways screening not cancelled it. Gives you more time to kick your tacky merlot habit.
Rolling Roadshow 2005 [presented by Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema]

Given its subject–loss and longing that spans and haunts the characters’ entire lives–wouldn’t it be perfect if the two+ year delay in bringing of Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 to theaters was somehow intentional, planned, not just a part of the marketing, but of the movie’s experience itself?
It was a gorgeously made film, with incredible cinematography [pace Christopher Doyle], sound, music, acting, production design. But it’s so sad, relentlessly sad. Maybe not the best movie to see alone and away from home.

The Zone 2 DVD of 2046 has been out since May [or mai, comme ils disent]

Doom: The Movie seems about as stupid as Mortal Kombat: The Movie. At least they didn’t blow $1mm on a script by Alex Garland.

See the Doom trailer [apple.com, via fimoculous]

How else to explain this totally out-of-nowhere reference to one of the worst “short films on a theme by different directors” compilations EVER? Kuczyinski is fast becoming the Times’ new crazy auntie, Joyce Wadler.
“I wandered from one rack to the next, dragging my mitts over the textures and beading, feeling like Buck Henry in the 1987 movie Aria, when he spends an ecstasy-fueled evening stroking the iconographic statuary at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Calif.”
Let Clothes Be Your Guide to Adventure [nyt]
Look–but don’t touch, rent, or buy–Aria at imdb.com
Hey Alex, I have a Netflix recommendation for you–switch to greencine.

How else to explain this totally out-of-nowhere reference to one of the worst “short films on a theme by different directors” compilations EVER? Kuczyinski is fast becoming the Times’ new crazy auntie, Joyce Wadler.
“I wandered from one rack to the next, dragging my mitts over the textures and beading, feeling like Buck Henry in the 1987 movie Aria, when he spends an ecstasy-fueled evening stroking the iconographic statuary at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Calif.”
Let Clothes Be Your Guide to Adventure [nyt]
Look–but don’t touch, rent, or buy–Aria at imdb.com
Hey Alex, I have a Netflix recommendation for you–switch to greencine.

Director Alberta Chu’s 2003 documentary, Seeing The Landscape: Richard Serra: Tuhirangi Contour follows the artist’s production of a massive, 843-foot steel wall piece in New Zealand. Here’s a line from the synopsis: “A dramatic five years in the making, the Tuhirangi Contour finds Serra’s artistic vision at odds with his patron, his materials, his environment, and the harsh realities of physics.”
While I’m sure there’ll be a lot of conflict, I don’t think there’s much suspense about who prevails here. Serra’s whole artistic practice is built around pushing and expanding his understanding of his materials and the “harsh realities of physics,” and from what I understand of his commission agreements, a patron who stays at odds with the artist can very quickly find himself without an artist to be at odds with.
Still, this sounds like a great way to spend an evening: The film screens Wed. 5/18 at 7pm at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. Chu will be present to discuss the work.
Buy Te Tuhirangi Contour, a book of photos documenting the finished work by Serra and Dirk Reinartz

Dale Peck thoughtfully turns is hatcheting attentions from things that people should care about but don’t (books) to things they shouldn’t care about but do (movies).
And what he finds is, the current star-based movie rating system is inadequately and overly generous; it needs “a negative unit of measurement to warn viewers away,” a Dark Side, if you will.
Naturally, his proposal is based on things people shouldn’t care about and don’t (the ‘new’ Star Wars movies).
Go to his NY Observer article and see how, exactly, his new unit of evil film measure, The Lucas, works.
[But go soon. Here, I thought that the NYO had just bunged up their search function, gone even cheaper and crappier with their site by adding free/slow-to-update Google search, and given up on ever publishing persistent links to their stories, when in fact, they’ve done all that and started charging money for the stories you can’t find in the first place.]

Nebraska In Single Frames is a beautiful, evanescent short film from Robots on Strike, the home for the Oregon-based design house Impactist‘s off-the-clock projects. [via Coudal’s Jewelboxing]

Is at the end of David Edelstein’s all-too-kind Slate review of Miss Congeniality 2.
Sandra Bullock rocked on The Daily Show, but not so hard that she can trick me into seeing a movie Manohla compares to a lagoon at a hog farm.

The awesome Haitian director Raoul Peck’s new HBO film about the Rwandan genocide, Sometimes in April, was the first film shot in Rwanda, and so he promised to debut it there as well.
Writer Melanie Thernstrom writes about attending the packed, tense screening, which was held in a giant stadium in Kigali.

A View To A Killing Field [nytimes.com]
Sometime in April premiers on HBO Mar. 19 [hbo.com]
Related: Thernstrom’s book, Halfway Heaven, about the violent deaths of two immigrant students at Harvard, and an article about Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s 2003 epic novel-like reporting in Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx [nymag]

The BFI’s National Film Theatre is running a complete Tarkovsky retrospective through March 30. It includes new prints of both Solaris and Stalker. And who can pass up seeing Andrei Rublev on the big screen? [I know everyone in NYC passed up seeing it on video; I bought an utterly unused copy, fresh from the newly dead Kozmo.com, on ebay a few years back.]
NFT: Andrei Tarkovsky [bfi.org.uk, via kultureflash]

it’s already too late, they’re not. If only the movie were as well done as Mahnola Dargis’s review.
added bonus: NYTimes.com, HTML hand-coded, just for you: “,em>This film is rated PG-13”
Manohla Dargis’s review of Be Cool [nyt]

So we finally caught Sideways, twice, on the plane back from Amsterdam. The fat white trash sex scene was edited out, of course, and the PG dubbing was awkward [how can they not say “get you laid”? It’s the characters’ whole point.] with one exception: they replaced “a**hole” with “Ashcroft” which, at least in the first occurrence, just sounded like Oscar-worthy writing.
Meanwhile, on the other channel, Alfie was so full of humping, naked birds and profanity, it would’ve been outrageously offensive–if anyone could’ve been bothered to watch it.
[update: Slate linked to this Thursday WashPost report of the Ashcroft thing. Airline movies run for a month, but presumably, it didn’t raise any eyebrows until now.]

Holy smokes, the IFP awards were a total dogpile on Sideways. I can’t remember all my votes, but even though I’m a Payne/Taylor fan, I spread the love around a little bit more.
Yeah, and on that Oscar, too. We just flew back from Amsterdam, and not just our arms are tired. I was banished from the (TV-equipped) bedroom, so I “watched” the Academy Awards on Gothamist and Defamer [who got the NYT to sponsor their 10-month anniversary party, complete with a gift, um, sac from Fred Durst, you know, the one on Rodeo?]

20th IFP Independent Spirit Awards Winners [ifp.org]

No, these are just strange commercials, discussed on Design Observer by Momus.
Previously: The Suntory Commercials of Akira Kurosawa
‘Lost’ Swedish Soap Commercial Director Ingmar Bergman Finally Gets Recognition