Daily post 16 Feb 2008 09:37 am
Academy rush
- Oscar season is winding down as we approach the event next Sunday. Magnolia Pictures is distributing the live action and animated shorts to theaters across the country. In New York, the program opened yesterday at the IFC theater. The reviews in the local papers have been glowing. Stephen Holden‘s NY Times review places particular focus on Madame Tutli-Putli, as well as My Love and Peter and the Wolf. They deserve the attention. I look forward to seeing which film will win.
This past Wednesday, the Academy screened the four documentary short films nominated. They were an interesting and varied group and almost any of them might make for passable winners. I was taken, however, by one film called Sari’s Mother. It followed a mother living on a farm in Iraq trying to take care of a son who was infected with the AIDS virus. She had many other kids to attend to, and still had to follow through with all her attention given to Sari, trying desperately to get helpful medication that the boy wasn’t allergic to.
The film was different from the others screened in that it told its story without a narrator. There was little dialogue throughout the film, yet a complex story was told. Everything from the army of US soldiers everywhere in sight, including loud, roaring helicopters overhead, to many children playing. We were left to figure out the story for ourselves. There was never even a statement that the film took place in Iraq. (For a while, I actually thought it might have been Afghanistan.) I liked being given credit for using my own intelligence with the movie.
After the event, Shiela Nevins and HBO sponsored a post-screening dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel. All of the key documentarians in the City usually attend, and it’s a wonderful event that I look forward to annually. It always sort of marks the end of the Oscar run, for me. I was pleased to sit with John Canemaker and Joe Kennedy. I was able to pump John to tell me about the Annie Award ceremony and his trip to LA.
- Premier NY artist Meryl Rosner has done an interesting exercise and posted it on her blog Zoopolis, Film Noir, Fractured Fairy Tales. She’s taken a sequence from The Big Sleep and has storyboarded it. What a great idea, not only as a way of studying a film, but as a way of learning how to storyboard. Taking an excellent film, as Meryl has done, gives you the chance to see and to try to understand why the cuts and transitions, the camera placement and the compositions are done as they are.
To boot, Meryl’s done a good job of it. Scrolling down through all these storyoard drawings is exciting in itself. If you visit, take a look at some of her other pieces as well.
- The NY Times, this week, has posted Jeff Scher‘s latest video for them on their editorial page. The Animated Life is a series he has been creating. Once a month a new film piece is place on the on-line editorial page.
Tulips is an animated study of kissing.
Take a look.
Michael Barrier has written a couple of times about this theatrical muscal. I saw a short review in the SF Weekly. The review’s almost too short to quote, so I include it all.
- Disney & Deutschland
By Molly Rhodes
Imagining the details of a historically documented 1935 meeting between Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler is a great spark for a play, but playwright and director John J. Powers’ production never ignites. The 20-minute history lesson that starts the 90-minute play fails to build up the excitement before the big get-together. Once Disney and Hitler are in the same room, along with Hitler’s right-hand man, Joseph Goebbels; and his personal filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl; there is hardly any dramatic action to push the play along. There are occasionally tense moments, such as when Hitler wonders how much of a Jew-hater Disney really can be if he works in Hollywood. But most of the hour is spent sitting around a big oak table, drinking sherry, and swapping tales of German efficiency and American pluck. Powers teases us with some provocative themes, such as the true roots of Disney’s fantasy playland for children, but the tease never pays off.
Details:
Through Feb. 24 at the Garage, 975 Howard (at Fifth St.), S.F. Tickets are $10-$20; call 829-2301 or visit www.975howard.com.
