Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- The National Film Registry has announced 25 additions including Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, and Richard Linklater's Slacker.
- Critic and filmmaker David Phelps has premiered a new short film, On Spec, via the online Spanish publication Lumière. For the Notebook, Gina Telaroli has interrogated the film and discussed its evolution with Phelps in images, text and audio; Daniel Kasman has also written on it. At Idiom Magazine, Phil Coldiron has interviewed Phelps. And the filmmaker himself has provided notes in English and Spanish.
Finds.
- Above: we'd be lying if we said we weren't somewhat fascinated by the trailer for Michael Bay's new film, Pain & Gain, a foray into comedy.
- Ben Sachs revisits the ending of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village:
"Shyamalan described The Village as his "post-9/11 movie," and its plot twist becomes more provocative if read as an indirect critique of the Bush administration's war on terror. The final passages confirm that this phony American idyll not only requires that its denizens remain ignorant of the outside world, but that they live in perpetual fear of an enemy they never actually see."
- Richard Brody reviews Judd Apatow's This is 40:
"The stuff of “This Is 40” is the stuff of life, and it flows like life, and, like life, it would be good for it to last longer. It’s something of a double movie, and it could easily play as long as two movies in one, woven together, and would feel even truer to its loamy, intimate, loose-ended material."
- In contradiction with Richard Brody, a piece by Ted Fendt on Jean-Luc Godard's little seen Adieu au TNS:
"In 1998, Jean-Luc Godard made a short video entitled Adieu au TNS (Farewell to the TNS). Never released (or intended to be), the video is nearly impossible to see and has not been included in any Godard retrospectives to date. A consequence of this deliberate unavailability has been instances of inaccurate descriptions of the video in Godard criticism [1]. More important than the manner in which the video’s form and content have been inaccurately described, however, is the manner in which its production history and Godard’s reasons for making it have been purposefully decontextualized in Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books, 2008) in order to misleadingly implicate the video in some kind of cryptic, but sympathetic, engagement with anti-Semitism and/or Fascism that Brody feels runs throughout Godard’s work. Ultimately, these claims – at the very least in regards to this video – are just smoke and mirrors."
- Above: the trailer for Terrence Malick's To the Wonder.
"A few hours after I heard about Tony's death on 19 August, I got stung by a hornet. I was sitting on the kitchen floor of a cottage in France swearing my head off and a hummingbird moth, tiny and delicate, flew round me twice. Of course I didn't think that was Tony, but the image seemed appropriate: the hummingbird with a hornet's sting."