Sunday, September 9, 2012

The Weekly Reader: September 10

It's festival season, with Telluride and Venice having wrapped and Toronto in full swing. Keep up with Toronto at The AV Club or CinemaScope, read Dan Slevin's blog for his Telluride wrap-up, and discover why PT Anderson's film THE MASTER didn't win Venice's top award despite the jury's desire to give it to that film.

Speaking of which, this great Village Voice profile by Scott Foundas on PT Anderson has minor spoilers for THE MASTER, but also lots of great background info on why his followup to THERE WILL BE BLOOD took five years and why Megan Ellison is the patron saint of intelligent filmmaking at the moment.

This week's must-watch isn't a trailer per se, but an absolutely jaw-dropping clip from the commercial fishing documentary LEVIATHAN (screening this week at Toronto). I've watched it three times and still have no idea how it was done, but it's now up with THE MASTER on my must-see list.

Another film I'm dying to see is Brian DePalma's reputed return to form, PASSION; here's an interview with Mark Olsen of the LA Times.

One of my favorite writers on film, Michael Sicinski, has a special talent for talking about avant-garde cinema intelligently but not pretentiously, and has started a column on the titans (durationally speaking) of arthouse cinema and what it means to watch them in a home-screening era: his first column, on Peter Greenaway's THE FALLS, is now online.

FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG was one of the key films in my early filmgoing history that changed my understanding of what a film could be. Its filmmaker Mark Rappaport is now experiencing the horror of having all the masters of his films effectively held hostage by the film professor who promised to take care of them: the whole sad story, or at least Rappaport's side, is here.

And in local cinema, the big news is that The Sorta Unofficial New Zealand Film Awards have been announced for December, thus becoming NZ's largest film awards.

Finally, more pictures than words, but this gallery of abandoned video stores makes me pretty wistful.

I should very much note that many of these links come from Keyframe Daily; if you're finished with these and hungry for more, this should be your first stop.

Any great stories this week in film that we missed? Add them in the comments!

2 comments:

  1. That PTA profile is pretty damn great....

    Also, after falling silent for 18months, www.midnighteye.com/ is back up and full of love for everything filmic and Japanese!

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  2. Good heads up on Midnight Eye - that's a great site!

    More on the Ray Carney/Mark Rappaport imbroglio here on Jon Jost's site: http://cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/chained-relations/

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