• Robert Downey Jr has signed on to star as Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, and The Avengers. This, plus his starring role in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, will put the Less Than Zero survivor in at least one summer tentpole per year through 2012. Say it with me: poor, poor Andrew McCarthy.
• Mike Nichols will direct a David Mamet-scripted remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. Martic Scorsese comissioned the script from Mamet; he’ll now executive produce.
• In an unusual deal, Janus and sister company Criterion Collection have acquired theatrical and DVD rights to Revanche, the Austrian Foreign Language Oscar contender which premiered in Berlin and went on to Telluride. Janus, known for its library of classic art films, hasn’t handled a first-run theatrical release in 30 years.

• Studios are refusing to greenlight pictures that can’t be completed by June 30, the deadline for the Screen Actors Guild to settle on a new contract. But Michael Bay, for one, is not afraid of a silly little actor’s strike. Says the Transformers 2 director, who claims he currently has three screenwriters “in Michael Bay jail” hammering out a script: “If there is a strike, we shut down, but shutting down isn’t that big a deal.” Expect the AMPTP to use this as a bargaining tool––after all, why would they care about meeting the demands of human actors, when they can make a billion dollars off a self-professed captor of screenwriters and his imaginary robots?
• Peter Debruge goes out of his way to defend The Last Emperor on the occasion of its Criterion release, but still longs for the Criterion treatment of “better” Bertolucci: “Witnessing the care and respect they pay The Last Emperor (going so far as to indulge Storaro’s controversial reframing of the film’s aspect ratio from 2.35:1 to 2:1), it’s a shame Criterion didn’t handle restorations of either The Conformist or 1900 two of the director’s earlier epics that Paramount released from their vaults with minimal attention just over a year ago.”
• Disney is launching its own version of Rock Band, called Ultimate Band. We’re told it’ll feature “more family friendly gameplay and song selection,” but the examples offered of songs sure to be involved are by The White Stripes and The Who. So by “family friendly”, they mean it’s a game for Jason Bateman-in-Juno style reluctant hipster parents, and embittered ex-hipie grandparents? That actually sounds really great.

The gorgeous Criterion version of Jean Luc-Godard’s Pierrot le Fou hits stores today. Because I’m date dyslexic, I accidentally posted my review of the film and the set a week early, but you can read it here. To get in the mood, watch the film’s original trailer above.

I watched the new Criterion edition of Pierrot le Fou, a film I’ve seen many times but not once in at least five years, with Glenn Kenny and Nathan Rabin’s wildly divergent reads swirling in my head. I am not in a place in my life where I’m particularly open to romance as either a nostalgic concept or present-day reality, but this recent viewing of a film that I loved long ago left me wondering how it could be received with anything but a swoon. Pierrot le Fou can be distant and opaque, for sure, but necessarily so––it’s about a couple’s inability to overcome the opaque distance that lies between them. More than that, its blend of cinematic Cubism and stylized hyper-realism is deeply evocative of a love that’s literally out to sea. There’s no question that it works as a romance about the death of a romance. In fact, what may be up for debate, is whether it works as anything else at all.

I was nudged down this path of questioning by two elements of Criterion’s special edition package, both of which illuminate Pierrot’s relevance as an extremely thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the disintegration of Jean-Luc Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina. The first is Richard Brody’s liner notes essay, “Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens,” which meticulously breaks down how a film ostensibly based on an American crime novel called Obsession, infused with two Balzac works which Godard conflated into one, became, through a necessity of casting, an accident of timing and a desperate need for catharsis, “an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work.”

Godard, l’amour, la poesie, a documentary on the package’s second disc, doesn’t fully explicate that”destruction”, but it does offer some clues as to the mindset that transposed it into film. Filmmaker Luc Lagier introduces Anna Karina as “a woman to be filmed and loved,” which is our first indication that said accusations towards Karina’s almost mystical-sounding ability to drive Godard to ruin with her love will be taken at face value.

…Read more

Criterion is about to release a beautiful new edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou. I’ll have my own review of the two-disc set (which includes a new interview with Anna Karina, as well as a documentary about the actress’ relationship and work with Godard) next week, but others have already begun to weigh in.

Glenn Kenny sets to work dissecting the film’s literary references, both direct and indirect. At the A.V. Club, the less-enamored Nathan Rabin blames those references in part for making the film feel “at worst…like the product of a man rapidly losing interest in anything beyond politics and ideology.” Rabin cites the famous scene embedded above, in which Samuel Fuller reduces cinema to “one word, emotion!” as “bitterly ironic” because “it would be hard to imagine a film with less visceral emotion than Pierrot Le Fou.”

I have not watched my screener copy yet, but in art school I wore out a VHS copy of Pierrot Le Fou by watching it over and over again, falling obsessively in love with a film for maybe the first time, so I’m eager to watch it again and with Rabin’s assessment in mind. Still, after reading Rabin’s piece, I went back and took a second look at Kenny’s, and noticed that Kenny has very little to say in terms of an assessment of the film’s actual quality, or how it makes him feel––which is fine, neither is necessarily the goal of this particular piece––but it seems safe to assume that one doesn’t undertake such trainspotting in regards to a film that they could take or leave. Maybe the passion Pierrot inspires is more of the obsessive reference-catching and decoding variety; maybe that’s just not Nathan Rabin’s thing. In any case, I’m anxious to unwrap the DVD to see if it’s still mine.

• Erik Skillman, the Criterion designer who recently regaled us with tales of his process putting together the box image for Berlin Alexanderplatz, has applied some of the same techniques to a portrait of Barack Obama. “I’m not sure I quite captured him (there’s a little hint of Reinhold in there that’s kind of strange), but for a 20-minute sketch it’s not half bad…” [via Cinetrix]
• Mike Jones has already started blogging Berlin. We’ll be keeping an eye on Filmbrain, Twitch and of course Berlin-based David Hudson for updates over the next week or so.
• Jette Kernion on the magic trick of Quiet City: “You can’t watch a man and woman who become fast friends like this without wondering whether they’ll hook up, which provides a small amount of suspense. But you get so caught up watching these people and their friends that the romantic potential hardly seems to matter most of the time.”
• Kevin Kelly balks at Christina Ricci’s suggestion that there’s a “sad guy” thing in Speed Racer that will make the boys cry: “What’s a sad guy thing that’s not a sad girl thing? Does Speed lose his penis during one of the races and get told that he can’t have any Speed Juniors?”

In a two part series beginning at the Criterion blog and continuing on his own site, Eric Skillman breaks down part of the process of designing Criterion’s recently-released edition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (which was purchased for me as a Christmas gift, but which has still not arrived via Amazon, much to my frustration). Skillman begins with the image above, and breaks down each step along the way to the final cover image, which you can find here.