While Occupy Wall Street goes global, Martha Colburn has made two short films documenting the movement and Cinefoundation launches #OccupyCinema. One of the more popular recent OWS speakers has, of course, been Slavoj Žižek, and Anne Thompson reports that he and Sophie Fiennes have just completed shooting on their followup to The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, the timely Pervert's Guide to Ideology.
Even as This Is Not a Film runs a sort of victory lap through the festival circuit since its triumphant premiere in Cannes, an appeals court in Tehran has upheld the sentence against Jafar Panahi many of those same festivals have been protesting for practically a year now. Laurent Maillard, reporting for the AFP, turns to a government-run newspaper in Iran for confirmation: "The charges he was sentenced for are acting against national security and propaganda against the regime." Maillard: "Panahi was convicted in December last year over a documentary he tried to make about the unrest that followed the disputed 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The daily said that a six-year jail sentence against another Iranian who co-directed that film, Mohammad Rasoulof, 38, was reduced to one year in the same appeal…. Panahi's upheld sentence orders him to six years behind bars, plus a 20-year ban on directing or writing for movies, a 20-year ban on giving interviews, and a 20-year ban on travel except for the Hajj holy pilgrimage to Mecca or for medical treatment."
Frank Lloyd's Hoop-la (1933) would be Clara Bow's final film and, as Melissa Anderson notes for Artforum, it "amply showcases the star's earthy charms." It screens this afternoon and Wednesday evening as part of To Save and Project; the most recent overview of this Ninth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation is Dave Kehr's in the New York Times.
Karina Longworth previews a program of shorts screening this evening under the banner Industry Town: The Avant-Garde and Hollywood. Also in the LA Weekly is Nick Pinkerton's overview of Days of Glory: Masterworks of Italian Neo-Realism, running at the UCLA Film & Television Archive through November 16.
Friday saw a pair of announcements promising a tantalizing selection of forthcoming releases on DVD and Blu-ray. As J Hurtado notes at Twitch, Olive Films' lineup includes Fassbinder's Despair (1978, out on November 1), Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998, out on two discs on December 6) and Sion Sono's Love Exposure (2008, December 20). The Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth scan's Criterion's lineup for January: Three films Jean-Pierre Gorin made in California, Ishiro Honda's Godzilla (1954), Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967), Francesco Rosi's The Moment of Truth (1964) and Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000).
Sunday reads: Manohla Dargis and AO Scott on Pauline Kael, Jonathan Rosenbaum on the biggest splash he made during his 20 years as chief film critic at the Chicago Reader, and Joshua Cohen in n+1: "If you're a reviewer, once in a while you're sent a book in the mail so chintzily produced by a publishing house too busy to edit that you wonder how it is that its sensationalist claims aren't better known. This was certainly the case with the full-color illustrated, under-proofed Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan. Written by two journalists, Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, with Milchan's cooperation, it tells the story of how one of the world's most successful movie producers spent decades spying for Israel, and still had time to introduce Angelina to Brad (that Brad)."
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