• “There’s been a bit of talk lately about Manic Pixie Dream Girls,” writes Matt Prigge. “It got me thinking about a more interesting and reflexive variation on this character: the kook.” Examples include Annie Hall, “most Eric Rohmer women,” and Marcia Rudd’s character from Little Murders, which screens tonight at BAM in Brooklyn with a Q & A with Elliott Gould to follow.
• Laure Parsons has launched Infinicine, a new site with news coverage, discussion boards and other resourced dedicated to “information and dialog about the brave new world of digital distribution.”
• At the FILMMAKER Blog, Scott Macaulay points to Roger Ebert’s three-and-a-half star review of Frownland, which opens in Chicago today. Ebert acknowledges that the film is a tricky sell––”Now why would you want to see this film? Most readers of this review probably wouldn’t. I’m writing for the rest of us”––but ultimately calls the film a “rebirth of the need for expression that inspired the American independent movement in the first place.”

Noticing a fair amount of thematic overlap amongst the films selected for this year’s New York Film Festival, Filmbrain has created a visual aid, awarding 15 of the Festival’s official selections unhappy faces for their representations of things like divorce, adultery, and daddy issues. The exercise reveals that, amongst the 30-something films on this year’s schedule, not only was there a marked lack of “traditional” romance on display, but the Festival as a whole trafficked in “an almost universally negative (and even cynical) view towards marriage, and a preponderance of infidelity.”

Which causes Filmbrain to wonder:

Is cinematic love, like, so last century? Has that infernal machine on the left coast that continues to pump out one cloying RomCom after another sullied the waters forever? Or are these films a genuine reflection of a post-whatever malaise that has succeeded in driving us apart from one another?

To Filmbrain’s disclaimer that he missed Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astree and Celadon, which “sounds like it could have been a genuine love story”––yes, I guess it is. It just comes at through the Shakespeare back door of communication breakdowns ameliorated via cross-dressing.

Day 3 of NYFF 2007 brought surprisingly strong late-career efforts from two esteemed filmmakers previously thought to be several decades past their prime. To my mind, Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon is a greater creative success than Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, although I suppose there’s no doubt as to which film will manage the greater commercial success (it’s not even a contest, really–the Rohmer has no U.S. distributor). Lumet’s film is a proper comeback, the work of a filmmaker returning to familiar themes and, if not exactly reinventing them, then certainly doing his most solid and engaging work in some time. But the Rohmer picture feels like a true farewell, and as final films go, I can’t imagine a more poignant send off.

Céladon won quite a few hearts in Toronto, but it didn’t seem to go over so well here in New York. I know more than a few members of the press corps didn’t make it to the final frame, and after the screening, I heard a lot of “awful”s and “interminable”s. I’ll admit that it may not be Rohmer’s finest hour in terms of filmmaking craft; when Alison Willmore compares the film to a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s not entirely wrong. But I would argue that the plotting needs to be as deliberate as it is, and the overall technique as rudimentary, in order for the film to work as a romantic fable.

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