Jeff Goldblum is at Telluride to promote his new film, Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader. The film follows the story of a Holocaust survivor who also happens to be a clown. Committed to an asylum after the war, he becomes a ring leader of sorts. On the opening day of the festival Goldblum was graciously hugging young fans and striking odd poses for snap-shots. We got a chance to ask him about his media intake, which includes a substantial amount homework from Schrader.

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• Elliott Gould Takes Brooklyn
• Tropic Thunder: Hollywood Will Gently Nibble Itself
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona: In Defense of Late Woody Allen
• Anti-Populism and Indie Antiquity: Interview with Whit Stillman
• Michael Moore Dares Obama to Denounce Him
• Eleanor Coppola’s Conceptual Art Rebellion
• 10 Best Animated Series Spun Off from Movies
• Woody Allen by Jean-Luc Godard
• Bigfoot Found?
• Did Harvey Weinstein Get What He (Maybe) Paid Anthony Lane For?
• Elizabeth Taylor Murdered?!?
• Downloading = The End of American Imperialism?
• Star Wars Wedding Album
• Miss Mae West and Me
• Porno, Synecdoche Added to Toronto Lineup
• Exclusive Clip: A GIRL CUT IN TWO
• Dames & Cakes: Tilda Swinton’s Film Festival
• Toilet Humor in ‘The Spirit’
• CHE, CHANGELING, WRESTLER Make NYFF Lineup
• Benh Zeitlin of GLORY AT SEA: The Media Diet
• iArthouse Born as Vongo & ClickStar Die
• Kim Novak Drags Judy Holliday Under the Stars
• Strippers + Explosions = Patriotism
• Azazel Jacobs at BAM
• Films Within Films I Want to See
• Slavoj Zizek is in a Terrible Mood
• Astaire, Kelly and the Sinatra Kiss of Death
• Isaac Hayes, Bernie Mac and the Unfortunate Publicity Photo
• Mad Love for My IPhone
• Rebecca Hall: The First Female Woody?
• Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes in ‘Soul Men’. Clip of the Day
• Nastia’s Liukin’s Height of Fame? Stick It!
• FilmCouch #83: Tropic Thunder protest, The Clone Wars
• 10 Movies Sold on a Sex Scene
• Rohmer on the Lower East Side
• The Dark Knight: Where’s the Video Game?

• Are today’s bloggy cultural critics a thorn in Whit Stillman’s side, either because or in spite of the fact that “we’re all just stealing Nick’s lines from Metropolitan“? Maybe the next time Stillman emerges in search of his shadow, we’ll find out. In the meantime, Matt Dentler says Cinetic is working on distributing Metropolitan online “in the near future.” Although, of course, Last Days of Disco remains all but unavailable…
• Related, sort of: Peter DeBruge writes of the “bootleg director’s cut” of 54, which restores Ryan Phillippe’s character to his original conception as an “overtly bisexual bartender, one of those erotic beings (like Terrence Stamp in Pasolini’s Teorema)…he woos club owner Mike Myers, makes it with record exec Sela Ward, kisses out-of-reach soap star Neve Campbell, gets frisky with best friend Breckin Meyer and then bangs his friend’s wife Salma Hayek in a bathroom stall.” You’ll allegedly be able to sample the excitement for yourself next weekend at the Sunshine in NYC, where Mark Christopher’s recut will screen at midnight.
• “Zacharek’s first assumption is that Godard’s films went downhill after 1967. I’ll be blunt here: Zacharek musters absolutely no defense or evidence for this position.” Another review of a review of Everything is Cinema; this time it’s Only the Cinema on the first of the NYT reviews. Via The House Next Door.

Why has the NY Times published two reviews of Richard Brody’s Jean-Luc Godard bio Everything is Cinema––less than two weeks apart, and two months after the book hit store shelves? Are film critics really so lacking in ways to fill their time that the Times has taken pity and allowed them to just publish whatever, and at their leisure?

I know, I know––too far. I retract. It just seems odd that the paper would give space to two pieces of criticism on the same thing, from two critics whose overall take on the thing seems to be not so far away from a shrug. At least the two reviews seem to enter the text from slightly different angles… …Read more

Sympathy for the Devil has a bad reputation. Like most of the work produced during Jean-Luc Godard’s so-called “revolution” period in the late-60s and 70s, it rarely screens without a disclaimer advertising its difficulty. The synopsis selling last month’s screening of the film at New York’s Film Forum (as part of a month long tribute to Godard’s work of the 1960s) was just 55 words long, but it managed to contain three red flag inferences of Sympathy’s “difficulty” (italics all mine): the “camera endlessly prowls,” it’s “shot in long, long takes,” it’s “deadening and hypnotic.” A Reverse Shot blog entry led off with the poster quote: “One helluva cocktease.”

One million critics with a common case of blue balls can’t be entirely wrong, but writing off the film formerly known as One Plus One as a novelty from a filmmaker determined to be difficult (not to mention attempting to sell it by scaring the audience away) is a lot easier than actual engagement. Certainly, Sympathy is a provocation––political, formal, pop cultural––before it’s a coherent work of narrative drama; certainly, most of its most memorable moments involve juxtaposition of political critique with infantile sex farce. But the same could be said for the average YouTube video, and the kids seem to be able to eat those up without a warning label. If it comes off as impenetrable, it may just be because no penetration is needed––everything Godard wants to say is laid into the film’s surface. If anything, Sympathy for the Devil is a blatant (and, at times, blatantly transparent) cinematic flail from a filmmaker at a crisis point.

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• Anne Thompson sorts out truth from rumor in the fallout of the Paramount Vantage absorption. Notable: Vantage’s Nick Meyer will still be able to produce and acquire films, “It won’t be the originally planned 12 movies a year. It will be more like six, and they will be more likely to be commercially accessible, less arty films.”
• The Museum of the Moving Image has launched a long in-the-works website called Moving Image Source, featuring criticism, promotion of international events, and access to and information about some of the museum’s resources. I’m currently reading this piece by B. Kite on Jean-Luc Godard.
• “I forgot, until someone reminded me this morning (and I can’t remember which blog, sorry), that yesterday was the anniversary of Congress approving the 19th Amendment,” blogs Jette Kernion. And what better way to celebrate than with a little “Sister Suffragette”?
• At the Indiepix blog, Danielle points to the above clip, which I really should have seen before but haven’t. It’s Called Lucky Three, and it’s a short film by Jem Cohen, starring Elliott Smith.

• “One thing’s for certain: no other rock-and-roll band has aligned itself with more great directors than the Stones,” notes Glenn Kenny. He’s particularly fond of Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One, AKA Sympathy For The Devil.
• At Indie Eye, Alison Willmore has a round-up of links related to Fitna, the short, Dutch, anti-Qur’an doc that allegedly provoked two Taliban attacks on Dutch forces in Afghanistan.
• Sean P. Means is compiling a running tally of print film critics who have lost their jobs since 2006. He’s currently up to 27. Via Jeff Wells. Related: David Carr’s April 1 “wither critics” piece in the New York Times, which I had nothing to say about and thus didn’t link to earlier in the week.
• Karina has been on the road, hence the slowness around here for the past few days. We’ll be back to regular speed tomorrow.

So this afternoon, I’m banging my head against the wall trying to finish this thing I’m writing about the Pierrot Le Fou Criterion release, and as I always do in times of trouble, I turn to YouTube for guidance/inspiration/distraction, and I find the above clip from Pierre Koralnik’s 1967 TV musical Anna. I’ve never seen the film, but I remembered reading a Filmbrain post about it a couple of years back. Anna Karina, singing songs by Serge Gainsbourg, stars as a love-lorn, bespectacled ad agency illustrator who apparently fantasizes about transforming into some kind of comic book biker vixen … ? I don’t know, but this clip made my day.

• Lady Wakasa makes a strong case in defense of Lust, Caution. “It’s true that there are elements in the story that won’t be clear to some Western audiences…There are universalities that can be picked up: about the effects of environment and upbringing, about the nature of love, about what in relationships is and isn’t an act, how war is hell with a twist. But these universalities are filtered through a Chinese lens. As such, I think it’s up to the Westerners to go the extra mile and fill in blanks they find. The shoe on the other foot, to a certain degree.”
• The Shamus thought Contempt was “about nothing more than the pneumatic perfection of Brigitte Bardot’s ass,” but a later Godard film went over much better. “Masculin-Feminin strikes me as a Warhol-esque montage of the ’60s as we wanted them to truly be, with more going on under the surface than we might want to admit.”
• A holdover from the heady days immediately following Dumbledore’s outing … you know, last week: Joe Leydon writes that he’s “occasionally had students ask me — earnestly, not snickeringly — if certain movie characters are intended to be interpreted as gay…The two names that pop up most often during these “Is he or isn’t he?” queries: Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) of Citizen Kane and Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor) of Singin’ in the Rain.”
• The Flaming Lips sent 1000 skeletons on parade in Oklahoma City. Scott Solary links to the video evidence.
• For the record, I would like to note that I recorded my segment of this week’s episode of Film Couch, about actresses who have played Joan of Arc, way back on Tuesday. At the time, I had no idea Jeff Wells would use multiple Saint Joan references to mock Tom O’Neill’s unflappable faith that Sweeney Todd has a chance in hell of winning multiple Oscars.

Brandon Harris sent me a note about his stylish short film, Happiness is No Fun, which purports to be “a short blaxploitation tinged remake of Godard’s seminal Breathless.” It’s not as jokey or spoofy as that logline might lead you to believe–which might lead to some initial disappointments. On the whole, I thought it’s refusal to go to the genre+genre=joke route was refreshing, if at times it gets a little didactic and speechy in its insertion of racial politics. Watch it above, and check out Brandon’s blog here.

• It’s an ultra-crowded weekend at the box office, with four major films (Michael Clayton, We Own the Night, Tyler Perry’s latest, and the sequel to Elizabeth) either opening or expanding. It’s so bad that neither studio prognosticators nor Variety are even willing to venture a guess as to the eventual winner. “Studio sources uniformly agreed that the weekend looks like a toss-up, with any of the four debuts having the potential to break out,” goes the Variety story. “The four bows are aiming at somewhat different auds, leading studios to hope they can co-exist peacefully.”
• J.J. Abrams is stocking his Star Trek movie with stoner comedy veterans. John Cho (better known as Harold) will play Sulu, and Simon Pegg (better known as Shaun) has been cast as Scotty.
• 77-year-old Jean-Luc Godard is expected to show up at the 20th European Film Awards in December to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award.
• The Band’s Visit, Israel’s choice for the Foreign Language Oscar entry, has been ruled ineligible for the award by AMPAS for containing “more than 50% English dialogue.” The film was recently picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for US distribution, ostensibly in part because the studio was hoping to launch an Oscar campaign. The producers say they’re already filing an appeal.

Todd Haynes. photo by Karina Longworth.

At Tuesday’s press conference following the press and industry screening of I’m Not There, writer/director Todd Haynes talked about referencing Godard and Fellini (but not, he insists, Don’t Look Back), the ability of film to collapse time, and why he chose to cast a woman and a black child to represent two of the six disparate facets of Bob Dylan’s life. We have audio from the press conference after the jump; to skip to a specific section of the 28-minute clip, see these handy show notes:

00:01: Getting Bob Dylan’s music and life rights
04:03: Why six Dylans?
04:49: Working in different film stocks/formats
05:41: Dylan didn’t have approval of details
06:29: The collapse of time, in the film and in Dylan’s work
09:21: On breaking free of the constraints of the biopic
11:23: Casting
12:51: Don’t say Don’t Look Back
16:05: References to other films
21:41: Fitting the strands of the story together
23:48: Why have Dylan played by a woman?
25:45: Portraying Dylan’s cultural influences, and Dylan-as-wannabe

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Over the weekend, Ray Pride posted a long interview with Chicago music scene stallwart/budding filmmaker Tim Kinsella. I’ve been a fan of Kinsella since discovering his first band, Cap’n Jazz, when I was in high school. By the time I moved to Kinsella’s home base of Chicago in the late 90s to go to art school, Kinsella was on his second album of experimental quasi-electronic indie rock with Joan of Arc. He’s since released half a dozen records under the Joan of Arc name, and countless more with tangential side projects such as Make Believe and Friend/Enemy.

Frustrated with what he calls the “lousy cost/benefit ratio” of life as a semi-well-known indie musician, Kinsella also recently wrote and directed his first feature film, titled Orchard Vale. It’s set to open the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Wednesday.

It’s a logical transition, as much of the Joan of Arc output has been infused with clear cinematic elements. The cover art for Joan of Arc’s 1999 album Live in Chicago 1999 (which was not a live album) featured recreations of scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend; on one of that record’s tracks, Kinsella lamented that he’d “only want to make a film if it was in French/and I don’t speak French.” Later JoA records like the The Gap and In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust sounded like self-contained soundtracks for neo-realist disaster films. So I guess it’s no surprise that Orchard Vale is, as described by Pride, a “claustrophobic experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization.”

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A massive fire broke out last night at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios, the mega-complex that has hosted hundreds of productions, from La Dolce Vita to The Life Aquatic. Ironically, the only set damaged beyond repair by the blaze was that in use by the HBO drama Rome. Above, you’ll find an English-language news report about the fire; click through the jump to watch the trailer for one of my favorite films shot in and around Cinecitta, Godard’s Contempt.
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