• Ben Affleck will probably star in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy follow-up, Extract. The film “centers on a flower extract factory owner (Jason Bateman) who’s dealing with workplace problems and a streak of bad luck, including his wife’s affair with a gigolo.” Affleck play not the gigolo, but “an ambulance chasing lawyer.”
• Orphaned by the demise of Warner Independent, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire will now be distributed jointly by Warner Brothers and Fox Searchlight.
• Screenvision, a company previously noted for screening baseball games and opera performances in movie theaters, is bringing a BBC adaptation of the classic girls novel Ballet Shoes (one of my favorites at age 7) to US multiplexes. The film stars three veterans of the Harry Potter franchise: Emma Watson, Gemma Jones and Richard Griffith.
• Heaven’s Gate superfans, take note: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is going to help MGM preserve the MGM/United Artists archive.

• Mike Everleth passes on a philosophical Jonas Mekas quote on the purpose of critics/criticism: “If the critic has any function at all, it is to look for something good and beautiful around him, something that can help man to grow from inside; to try to bring it to the attention of others, explain it, interpret it — and not to clutch at some little pieces of dirt, or mistakes, or imperfections.”
• David Edelstein jumps into the Remembering Manny Farber fray, with a personal anecdote. “Once I made the mistake of saying I thought a film was ‘about’ something. ‘About…’ he said, softly, and glanced at Patricia. ‘How can we say what a film is ‘about’? There are so many things…’”
• Critic Robin Wood does the impossible: he narrows the entire Criterion Collection down to ten favorites.

California may have spent the last five years under the rule of a Republican movie star, but news that major industry players are anything but super-lefty liberals still seems to strike many as a surprise. Responding to a story in which it’s casually mentioned that Dennis Hopper is expected to attend the Republican National Convention, Defamer’s Kyle Buchanan writes, “Did we miss the memo that said the countercultural director of freaking Easy Rider was a Republican? We’d assumed his appearance in the right-wing Zucker film An American Carol was a strict paycheck gig…”

I’m not sure when the “memo” first went out, but Hopper has been a registered Republican for over 25 years. …Read more

Queen of Bad Sex Catherine Breillat could learn a thing or two from Woody Allen. Not only is his latest celluloid psychotherapy session Vicky Cristina Barcelona a phenomenal work of intellectual porn, but it also happens to contain one of the sexiest, most hysterical and poignant portrayals of polyamory to come along in a long, long time. Allen actually gets that those of us who choose to live outside of hetero monogamy are not voracious sex addicts lacking in morality – on the contrary, we simply abide by a different set of desires and ethics than that of the mainstream.

Watching the sexual roundelay involving Diane Keaton/Mia Farrow substitute muse Scarlett Johansson and Allen stand-in Rebecca Hall as the American tourists Cristina and Vicky, who become sucked into the fiery passionate and oftentimes downright dangerous world of Barcelona artists Juan Antonio and his ex-wife Maria Elena, played by Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz (for my money the two sexiest European stars to grace the screen since Mastroianni and Sophia Loren), I realized it was the first time I’d ever wanted to jerk off to a Woody Allen film. This is the master of neuroses on Viagra. Spain seems to have reinvigorated Allen, and it’s a joyous thrill to behold. Simply put, the director’s upped the endorphin factor, leaving me hot and bothered and hysterically laughing all at the same time.
…Read more

On the same weekend that The Dark Knight surpassed the original Star Wars as the second highest grossing film in United States box office history, the most recent Star Wars film, the animated Star Wars: Clone Wars, opened in third place to a disappointing $14.6 million. How is it possible that a film produced under the banner of the most recognizable brand in the cinema history––and with all the money in the world behind its promotion––barely outgross a throwaway Korean horror remake which opened on 800 fewer screens? It’s because Russia’s at war with Georgia, silly!

Well, sort of. The Guardian’s David Cox outlines a complex theory, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s appropriation of both the title of George Lucas’ franchise and the phrase “evil empire” in his 80s-era rhetoric against the Russians. Cox says that even though we’ve got another president with a “plan to plant anti-missile missiles in the very eye of the Russian Death Star,” a mix of public apathy for Bush’s Wars and Clone Wars overall suckiness has resulted in both the movie and public excitement over the political conflict generally falling flat. Excerpts after the jump; your own counterarguments are expected in the comments.

…Read more

A special round-up this afternoon, featuring bloggy memories of Manny Farber:

• “What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle,” writes Glenn Kenny. “I doubt that Farber was particularly surprised by Godard’s Breathless, because his criticism actively anticipated that film.”
• “To prove my size, and yours, here’s some of his enormity.” Ryland Walker Knight offers images of two of Farber’s paintings.
• “He remains our best,” says Ray Pride. “A curmudgeon, but a painstaking one who concedes that his effects are like the layering and smearing and reworking of layers of paint, that he is ‘unable to write anything at all without extraordinary amounts of rewriting.’”

A couple of months ago, Kevin Lee asked me to watch Peter Greenaway’sThe Draughtsman’s Contract, #922 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? list of the 1,000 Greatest Films of all time, so that I could contribute to his series of video essays devoted to the films on the list.

I’ve actually been known in the past as something of a Greenaway apologist, but for whatever reason, I found Draughtsman’s ridiculously difficult to get through. I kept returning to a note that I jotted down within the first couple of minutes of the film: “What was Derek Jarman doing the year this film was made? What was Duran Duran doing?” It’s that axis of British culture of the early 1980s that Kevin and I ended up exploring in the above video. But if it was my idea idea to travel down this road, the brilliance of applying the video effects from Rio to footage of Margaret Thatcher on the eve of the Falklands War was all Kevin. Watch and discuss.

Chris posted this a couple of weeks ago but, since the Bog Saget Comedy Central roast thing finally aired last night and the whole internet is going batshit crazy for Cloris Leachman, I thought I’d post this video again. Also, I just kind of get a kick out of imagining what Peter Bogdanovich thinks of all this. I know he was distracted on the set of The Last Picture Show, what with all that leaving his wife for his 18 year-old ingenue business, but even so, you have to assume he never imagined that his direction of Leachman would lead, almost 40 years later, to a nationally televised anal sex joke. I bet he’s really loosening his ascot over this one.

For more on the Bob Saget roast, check out Chris’ original post.

I’m heading out a bit early for the weekend (yes, the Week in Review is on its way), but before I go I want to give a shout out to some of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming coming up this weekend. Across Saturday and Sunday, they’re saluting the two greatest male musical stars of all time, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I’m a sucker for certain of the Astaire/Rogers films (primarily Swing Time, and probably mostly because I think there’s something interesting about the fact that Fred is essentially a gambling cad who spends the entire movie flirting with Ginger but won’t seal the deal because he has a frumpy fiancee at home), but I’m really more into Gene Kelly.

Among the films screening on Sunday that I’d recommend: the Best Picture winning An American in Paris, directed by Vincente Minnelli and scored to Gershwin; It’s Always Fair Weather, which is essentially the Mad Men of mid-century musicals; and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the last film Busby Berkeley directed without choreographing. Ball Game is more of a curiosity than anything else; rumor has it, Berkeley was too far in the bottle at that point in his career to really take control, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s credits for choreography.

The numbers aren’t “good”, exactly, but intriguingly off. Like the one above, where Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing a song where they tell a number of increasingly unlikely brags about making out with girls on the road and then never calling them. The chorus: thanks to Sinatra leading leading her on and leaving the next day, they sing triumphantly, “the sweetest gal at Vassar’s in the cold, cold ground.” Later, Kelly sings about how he “had to go” when he learned that one paramour was “just 11.” Of course, the cads eventually get their comeupance when they meet Esther Williams and Betty Garrett, but the movie’s a little more interesting in these WTF? moments.

I took these photos off my TV the other night, with my iPhone, whilst watching Mad Love on Turner Classic Movies (the 1935 horror film about the brilliant but creepy doctor who tries to steal the wife of one of his patients, not the Drew Barrymore movie about manic depressive teenage runaways. It was Peter Lorre night.) This post partially exists to see if I can successfully blog from the iPhone WordPress App. It’s also an excuse to repeat two of my favorite lines from Mad Love.

1. Frances Drake tells Lorre’s Gogol that even if she didn’t love her husband, the doctor would still be too scary for her to consider dating him. “You are cruel!” he cries. Then he reconsiders.”But only to be kind.”

2. Later in the same scene, our heroine figures out that the doctor has used his medical genius to try and break up her and her husband. Gogol denies it. Then he sort of admits it: “I, a poor peasant, have conquered science! Why can I not conquer love? You MUST be mine!”

Then he puts on this getup in order to convince the husband that he’s a decapitated criminal come to life.

Not to make a career out of Woody Allen apologia, but I thought it was interesting to see critics slam Vicky Cristina Barcelona for what they perceive as Woody Allen’s misogyny when, for the first time as far as I can tell, he’s cast a woman in the typical Woody Allen role, which you’d think would be a step-up from the typical Woody Allen woman-as-love-interest paradigm.

Not that there was anything wrong with that. …Read more

In the liner notes to the Criterion edition of writer/director Whit Stillman’s debut film, Metropolitan, cultural critic/historian Luc Sante notes that the picture, “which looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990, today seems like an artifact from an earlier century.” Sante is likely referring to the debutante culture in which the film is set, but the story of how the movie itself not only found an audience but rose to classic teen movie status among a certain class seems equally antiquated in this age of indie film Chicken Littles.

Made for a reported $250,000, starring a full cast of young unknowns, and consisting primarily of one long scene after another of rich kids sitting in a palatial Upper East Side apartment discussing Jane Austen, Charles Fourier, their mostly unfashionable morals and fears of failure, all the while dressed in evening clothes, Metropolitan played in theaters for seven months, eventually grossing $3 million and earning Stilman an Oscar nomination (he lost to the screenwriter of Ghost).

But if Metropolitan traveled a commercial road that seems nearly unnavigable today, the film itself has perhaps never been as in tune with popular culture. From Best Week Ever pundits to big-traffic bloggers, it’s become the standard mode of digesting the world around us to stand outside of it, employing caustic, self-deprecating humor as a defensive mechanism. It’s like we’re all Chris Eigeman characters from a Whit Stillman film––except, in some cases, stripped of the anxieties of old-money entitlement.

With Metropolitan premiering tonight on Hulu, I chatted with Whit about his films, the state of the indie film industry, his alleged political agenda, the state of the Last Days of Disco DVD, the project he’s getting ready to shoot, and why it’s taken ten years for him to make a fourth film.

——

Karina: I want to get the inevitable elephant out of the room, which is of course the “What have you been doing for 10 years?” question. The most recent stories that I can find about projects that you have in the works were the Jamaica project, and then Little Green Men [based on the novel by Christopher Buckley]. Are either of those still happening?

…Read more

• Amy Winehouse swears the producers of Quantum of Solace will be sorry that they hired Jack White and Alicia Keys to record a Bond theme instead of choosing her, still-unrecorded tune. Without giving Amy too much credit, Vulture points out that the wrong bond songs have been left behind before. If Amy’s in a club with Scott Walker and Pulp over one with Madonna and Sheryl Crow, she should probably keep her mouth shut.
• From Mental Floss’s list of “4 Alfred Hitchcock Secrets”: why Hitch’s initial plan for the end of North by Northwest was foiled, and how Hitchcock came to be okay with it.
• The TakePart Blog points to the above Star Trek spoof, in which Kirk deports illegal alien Spock, and then, when he can’t figure out how to do anything for himself, lives to regret it.

The Independent published some choice excerpts a couple of days ago from Notes on a Life, the recently published collected journals of Eleanor Coppola––wife of Francis Ford, mother or Roman and Sofia, and co-director of the making-of-Apocalypse Now doc, Hearts of Darkness. The book was already on my shopping list, but it’s moved up a bit in urgency now that I’ve read the excerpt about how Eleanor struggled to define herself in the mid-70s, while her husband was out winning Oscars and she was pretty much just expected to stay home with the kids.

Eleanor met artist Lynn Hershman (now Hershman-Leeson, she directed the excellent post-9/11 paranoia doc Strange Culture) through Roman’s nursery-school car pool, and the two moms became partners in conceptual art crime. Francis went out of town one weekend, and the girls threw a party where Eleanor moved her husband’s five real Oscars from a display case, and replaced them with her own five, keychain sized consolation prizes, apparently given to the wife of every Oscar winner. Then they had guests peel potatoes and, inspired by a Joseph Beuys quote, made everyoe decide whether or not their potato was art. It sounds like typical, 70s California stuff, but apparently Francis was not amused. From the book:

…Read more