"Against the now undeniable arrival of cinema's digital future, LA Filmforum's Festival of (In)appropriation goes surprisingly old-school in its found-footage sources and methods," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the LA Weekly. "While oddities like Evan Meaney's image-sound fracturing Ceibas: (we things at play) and Catherine Ross's clever Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. — a montage of mechanical devices complemented by vocal imitations of their attendant Foley effects — delve into cinema's usually unnoticed micro-components, a large portion of the festival's lineup confronts the iconic." Tonight at the Egyptian.
"Over the years," writes Rob Nelson, "perhaps unsurprisingly, the Voice hasn't been terribly kind to the late John Hughes — father of the modern teen dramedy and, a year after his death at age 59, the subject of a Lincoln Center retro-cum-eulogy-cum-Brat-Pack-reunion called John Hughes: We Can't Forget About Him.... Dear John, wherever you are: We were wrong." Today and tomorrow.
"Cambridge is in pre-term cocktail mood, almost," writes James Woodall at the Arts Desk. "Its Film Festival slips in after Locarno and Venice, and as Toronto ends, and before Rome (increasingly important) and London (internationally a struggler) start. It tilts in the same direction as the aforementioned, with fully fledged art movies, provocative documentaries, work from a dozen language groups or so, though it's very small and many people might not know it exists." But there it is, in its 30th year, running on through September 26.
JAMES BACON, 1914 - 2010
"The Hollywood columnist and AP reporter, who died [Saturday] at age 96, was of another era when stars actually hung out regularly with journalists, and stories stayed out of the news in a kind of tacit agreement," writes Variety's Ted Johnson. "That's what made a conversation with Bacon so memorable, for in the passage of time he was not shy about sharing the nitty gritty details of his friendships and encounters with just about any legendary name from the 50s and 60s.... You always got the sense that Bacon was nothing but professional — he worked for the AP for most of his career — but you also understood that it was another time, the rules and standards were different, and he fit quite well into the role of drinking buddy and confidant. That was perhaps no more so true than with what Bacon said he knew about Marilyn Monroe and John F Kennedy, and why he and his bosses didn't publish it."
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