On the couch with Atonement's Joe Wright

The weather outside is frightful…

Toronto Now critic John Harkness was 53

A press release from Toronto’s NOW weekly: “It is with great sadness that NOW publishers Michael Hollett and Alice Klein announce the death of NOW’s long-standing senior film writer, John Harkness. With NOW since its beginning in 1981, Harkness wrote with definitive authority on film, music and books. Beyond the pages of NOW, John contributed articles to Sight and Sound, Take One and the Cinematheque Ontario program. He also spent several years as trade reporter for Screen International and Cinema Canada. “Anyone who wants to review film,” he said, “should spend a year covering the industry. It tends to knock out a lot of one’s illusions about the art of cinema.” His book on the Oscars, The Academy Awards Handbook (Pinnacle Press), is currently in its eighth edition. His favourite interviews over the years were with the subjects he found most intimidating — Susan Sontag, David Mamet, Harlan Ellison and Peter Greenaway. “These are people whom you do not want to ask stupid questions,” he once said. Harkness’s preferred leisure activity was poker, and he won several poker tournaments in Las Vegas. Harkness was born in Montreal and grew up in Sarnia and Halifax before obtaining a degree in English at Carleton University. He did post-graduate work in cinema studies at Columbia University, where he studied with the American critic Andrew Sarris and spent a great deal of time in New York’s repertory cinemas. “Fifteen movies a week,” he recalled, “and none of them on tape.” “John Harkness was simply the best film critic in Canada over the last 26 years,” says NOW editor/publisher Michael Hollett. “He has been an essential element of NOW Magazine’s success, and his unique vision, bravery and art in expressing it inspired all of us at NOW to strive. He will be sorely missed by all of us at NOW, his family, friends and the film community as a whole.” [Obit: Toronto Film Critic Found Dead.]

Diablo Cody on David Denby on Juno

David Denby tickles Diablo Cody. “Wonderful review of Juno in The New Yorker. As good as it gets. “She’s a shrewd girl, and very blunt, yet she’s taken in by her own gift for rude comedy, which, as we learn, masks a great deal of uncertainty.” Yup.”

Censored poster: Alex Gibney's Taxi To The Dark Side

A tempest with a t-square is aborning over the MPAA’s decision to compare the poster of Taxi To The Dark Side with the advertising materials for Hostel and Saw and its spawn. Simply put, torture should not be implied in advertising materials that might be seen by the weak of heart or that vast non-voting class politicians pay lip service to, “The Children.” Exec-producer Sidney Blumenthal says: “As executive producer of Taxi to the Dark Side, I am appalled at the Motion Picture Association of America'[s] censorship of the poster for our documentary because its depiction of the reality of the Bush policy of torture is too disturbing. This acclaimed film, which has already won numerous festival awards, including best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival, and is shortlisted for the Academy Award, is the single most important movie of 2008, the campaign year.” Less declamatory is director Alex Gibney’s comments at A. J. Schnack’s blog, All These Wonderful Things. “Gibney doesn’t buy the “protecting the children” argument. “There’s a lot that my kids see daily on the front page of the NY Times. They’re offensive images. But they’re real images.” Gibney… putting finishing touches on his Sundance-debuting doc on Hunter S. Thompson said that the hood has become a symbol worldwide of US prisoner abuses, the topic of Taxi, which is a seering look at the Bush administration’s torture policies. He likened the MPAA’s desire to eliminate the hood to political figures denying that torture or mistreatment occurs in US facilities. “Removing the hood is the ultimate cover-up. (The U.S.) didn’t use to do that sort of thing. Removing the hood sends the same message as the Bush administration with the CIA tapes. It’s OK to do it, it’s just not OK to show it.” In campaigning for its chances as an Oscar nomimee, ThinkFilm big Mark Urman tells Anne Thompson that Taxi is one of the company’s “dark, edgy auteur-driven movies that used to be the province of the independents. We’re not up against The Sound of Music. We’re up against There Will Be Blood.” Let the free media begin! Here’s Variety’s take. A larger version is here. On the other hand, please note approved art for the beguilingly entitled sequel, Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. Hey, no hoods here! [Art also here.]

Forget the writers… is there a graphic designer… in the house??

Did you not cohost with Goebbels before you met Alan?: 10 minutes with Charles Grodin

Short: A More Perfect Union

Andrew Sloat‘s short film A More Perfect Union choreographs the words and letters of the Constitution. [Larger image.]

FYC: How do you spell R-E-S-P-E-K-T?

[A for-your-consideration ad on Variety’s website, which, fortuitously enough, was corrected minutes later.]

They're heeeeeeere: CineFile Video's director T-shirts online

Nice. More at the link.

"Mr. Kubrick, I presume?" "Mr. Hitchcock! How are you this fine evening?"

Jamie Stuart flags this small detail in a familiar film, which a handful of viewers had wondered about at the time of the original release: “Just watching Eyes Wide Shut on my laptop using the full screen. At exactly 57:04, in the Sonata Cafe as Nick greets Bill, and they sit… Stanley Kubrick is pulling an Alfred Hitchcock sitting dead center in the background talking to a blonde woman.” Is it this man? What do you think? [ADD SATURDAY: Authoritative individuals suggest, ugh, otherwise. Isn’t this tippler just a little too frail for the man from the Bronx? I wish I could remember all those conversations of so much detail so much parsing so much love and so much surmise of color palette in those last days of the last summer of the last century…] [ADD MIDDAY SATURDAY: Someone who ought to know passes along word: Nope.]

Once again

Fifty-nine songs are eligible for Academy Award Best Song nominations, including two from once: “Falling Slowly” and “If You Want Me,” which you can stream here. And a bit of a rave. DVD: December 18.

Jodie Speaks!!

Josh Brolin & Eli Roth want to make the world's worst movie

M-word: tracking its predecessors

At Good, Jaime Wolf does a cool job of tracing some of the lineage of recent movie movies that cost little and talk a lot and have been unfairly dubbed a silly collective name and dissed by indie elder Amy Taubin: How about Rohmer, Salinger, and Liz Phair? All’s Phair: writes Wolf of her memorable debut long-player, “Exile in Guyville,” “The lo-fi, livejournal-style indie rock version of a Joe Swanberg movie, Phair seeks self-knowledge via a diaristic series of regrettable hookups, disappointing boyfriends, unattainable fantasies, false hopes, fleeting erotic fulfillment, and meditations on the dichotomy between observer and participant.” And: “It’s rare to watch a movie and believe it could have been made by one of the characters in it, but m——— films have a documentary intimacy and rawness, a level of self-examination that feels new.They’re products of the thinner art/life membrane that affordable digital production tools have made possible, and which the imperatives of self-presentation on Facebook, blogs, and MySpace have made ubiquitous. Of course, it’s not all new. The dialogue in J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” is pure mumblecore; so are the conversational erotics in Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s and the characters’ ditherings in his Boyfriends and Girlfriends; the perpetual hangout milieu of Richard Linklater’s Slacker; and the diaristic songs chronicling Liz Phair’s sexual, emotional, and relationship crises on her album “Exile In Guyville”… Making eloquent use of inarticulacy, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Mutual Appreciation happen to be precise (and to the extent of their precision, thrilling) depictions of post-collegiate flailing. They are set in a world populated by overeducated, unaccomplished, chronically ambivalent people who are starting to take grown-up jobs but still need a roommate to pay the rent; whose unfocused ambition and vague sense of artistic integrity propel them to pursue creative endeavors, even as they remain mystified by how a book might actually get published or a CD get made.”

Read the full article »