Alternative Film Guide

Not too long ago, the Alternative Film Guide published a q&a with filmmaker Lynn Hershman-Leeson, whose Strange Culture (above) deals with the bizarre case of Steve Kurtz, a professor of Visual Studies at the University of Buffalo and a founding member of the award-winning collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), who was accused by the FBI [...]

"2001 in 2008: A Cinematic Odyssey" is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ next event dedicated to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull (right) and actor Tom Hanks will discuss the making of 2001 at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, May 21, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly [...]

Pangea Day, billed as "the result of documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim’s 2006 TED Prize wish" is a global film event to be held on May 10, 2008.
According to the organization’s press release, "Pangea Day aims to leverage the unifying power of film by encouraging everyone in the world to watch the same films, submitted [...]

In the Los Angeles Times, Matthew DeBord offers what amounts to a promotional puff piece on Julie Andrews ("that bold Andrews sexiness, maternal and theatrical at the same time") and her autobiographical tome Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. (According to DeBord, this Sunday it’ll land on the No. 1 spot among hardcovers tracked [...]

In her blog Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikki Finke posted an "exclusive" scoop about Robert De Niro’s departure from Creative Arts Agency (CAA) to look for greener pastures at Endeavor. One commenter, purportedly a disgruntled (and anonymous) "CAA Agent," posted the following message that has been circulating all over town (make it "all over world" by [...]

Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times:
"I thought Francis Ford Coppola was being cranky last fall when he badmouthed Al Pacino and Robert De Niro — the stars of Coppola’s immortal Godfather films — for taking parts for the money and losing their passion for doing great work. ‘I met both Pacino and De [...]

In the London tabloid Daily Mail, there’s a write-up of a bizarre interview with Tony Curtis. For obvious reasons, I hardly ever post anything related to trashy tabloids, but since Curtis is quoted directly a number of times I’m assuming it’s all true — unless he sues. Below are a few quotes from the (highly [...]

In the New York Times article "The Playboy Was a Spy," Stephen Koch discusses Noël Coward’s behind-the-scenes work during World War II. Here’s a brief excerpt:
"’Celebrity was wonderful cover,’ Noël Coward said near the end of his life. ‘My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot … a merry playboy.’
"In [...]

In the San Francisco Chronicle (via ScrippsNews), Edie Adams talks to Ruthe Stein about the making of The Apartment, one of Billy Wilder’s most successful films and the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1960. Below is a brief excerpt from the SFC’s q&a:
Q: Billy Wilder was one of the most sought-after directors, especially after Double [...]

Céline Sciamma, the director of Naissance des pieuvres / Water Lilies, talking to Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net:
"I wanted to make a film for the biggest possible audience in Europe and perhaps beyond. The film itself reflects that as well, borrowing from two distinct traditions: the US teen movie and French adolescence dramas. The way [...]

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil (1926)
 
Jack Neely’s "The Forgotten Director: Who was Clarence Brown?" at Metro Pulse:
"Dr. Gwenda Young, a film-studies professor at University College Cork, came across [Clarence] Brown by an unlikely route. Her Ph.D. thesis was about Jacques Tourneur, the French director of cult classics like Cat People [...]

Geoff Boucher’s "Remembering Bonnie and Clyde" in the Los Angeles Times:
"’I remember a creative impatience by almost everyone involved," [Warren] Beatty said, "and there was so much energy on the screen.’ The really interesting thing, though, was how audiences latched onto Bonnie and Clyde as a flexible symbol. Already feeling far removed from the Summer [...]

Nick Turse’s "The Golden Age of the Military-Entertainment Complex: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Pentagon-Style" at TomDispatch.com:
"So let’s play a new version of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, with the military standing in for Bacon. The object is to follow a few of the thousands of linkages and connections between Hollywood and the [...]

Ed Park’s "Arthur C. Clarke’s down-to-earth legacy" in the Los Angeles Times:
". . . [Arthur C. Clarke] left explicit instructions that no religious ceremony accompany his death. (For good measure: In what was possibly his last interview, in BBC Focus magazine last December, he said the greatest danger humanity faced was ‘Organised religion polluting our [...]

In the Washington Post, Desson Thomson’s Anthony Minghella appreciation, "Anthony Minghella, Bringing the Art House to the Mainstream":
"Minghella, famously bald, genial and perpetually clad in black, set his professional destiny with 1990’s critically lauded Truly Madly Deeply, a Ghost for the cinephile set, in which a bereaved wife (Juliet Stevenson) finds love after death with [...]

In his The Guardian blog, Andrew Pulver discusses "Making 2001: A Space Odyssey":
"’He’s a recluse, a nut who lives in a tree in India or someplace.’ So said Stanley Kubrick, according to his biographer Vincent LoBrutto, when the suggestion was made to him that Arthur C Clarke should be his collaborator on a science-fiction film. [...]

Stephen Whitty in the Newark Star-Ledger:
"Progress is never a straight line.
"Gains are made and lost, breakthroughs braked by backlashes. Lasting change is less a result of revolution than evolution — minds slowly won, hearts gradually softened.
"Which is why the enlightened past can sometimes feel like the far-off future.
"Today, Asian actors are coldly marginalized. Yet 90 [...]

At Asian Week, you’ll find several San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) reviews.
Annabelle A. Udo, for instance, calls Michael Kang’s West 32nd (top photo) a "deftly written, detective-style film about an ambitious lawyer (played by John Cho, who can be seen elsewhere at the festival in Harold and Kumar Escape From [...]

Here’s an open letter from Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA) president-CEO Jean M. Prewitt, in which she expresses the Alliance’s "astonishment" at the MPAA’s chairman-CEO Dan Glickman’s remarks at Showest in Las Vegas.
In his outlandish speech, Glickman — – representing the interests of the big studios and their megaconglomerate owners (Time Warner, for [...]

Dan Glickman is the current president of the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the business interests of the big Hollywood studios which, for their part, are out there to defend the business interests of the megaconglomerates that own them.
At the film business Showest convention in Las Vegas, Glickman declared that "no one here [...]

Patrick Goldstein’s "Hollywood’s endangered entrepreneurs" in the Los Angeles Times:
"It’s hard to imagine New Line Cinema without Bob Shaye, its prickly paterfamilias. The company is being absorbed into Time Warner’s Warner Bros. film division, with Shaye and most of the employees being cast adrift. Long after he’d sold his company in 1993, Shaye continued to [...]

Q&A with We Are Wizards director Josh Koury at indieWIRE (which is conducting several Q&A’s with SXSW 2008 filmmakers). Koury’s documentary is described as a "portrait of the unusual and passionate culture of Harry Potter fans." A sample question and answer:
indieWIRE: "What was the inspiration for this film?"
Koury: "I’m actually a big Harry Potter fan. [...]

You’ve seen the video. (Notice how Julie Christie takes a moment to react.) Now check out the mural in Los Angeles. Olivier, of course, is Olivier Dahan, the director of La Vie en Rose.
And this is what was there before Marion Cotillard came along.
 
Kate Winslet’s Oscar-Losing Streak
Amy Adams MISS PETTIGREW Interview
Raquel Welch on MYRA [...]

The Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neil, never one to waste any time when it comes to Oscar season (a year-long event at the GD), is already "assuming" a possible nomination for Kate Winslet for one of two upcoming films:
"Let’s assume that Kate Winslet gets nominated for the Oscars again next year, a safe bet considering she [...]

Howard Gensler of the Philadelphia Daily News asks Amy Adams a few questions about Bharat Nalluri’s (reportedly screwball) comedy Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, in which Adams co-stars with Frances McDormand.
David Magee (whose previous screenplay was Finding Neverland) and Simon Beaufoy (best known for penning The Full Monty) adapted Winifred Watson’s novel about a [...]