stuff

[the_grynne]

Bits:

so_spiffed, you're so chummy with the red-white-black colour scheme. Check out this music video for The Knife's "We Share Our Mother's Health". It's pretty cool.

Twitch has links to gorgeous B+W stills from Luc Besson's Angel-A.

Emanuel Levy calls Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow "arguably...the only truly iconic screen character to have yet come out of this new millennium."

Twitch has links to a neat new two-and-a-half minute Jack Sparrow featurette for Dead Man's Chest, with interview clips from the cast and crew.

• Superman Returns
  "Superman has returned, but does the world want him? As the American way faces increasing scepticism, the original superhero confronts his biggest battle yet - to be relevant." Sacha Molitorisz (Sydney Morning Herald) looks at Superman, then and now.
  
  This buzz surrounding Singer's Superman Returns that's about whether past values can be translated to appeal to today's audiences, is reminding me a lot of Peter Jackson's King Kong. (US hegemony being the context for one, colonialism the context for the other.) It doesn't exactly bode well for Superman, if the other movie's earnings are any judge, although King Kong was a good enough film (at least, I enjoyed it better than Jackson's LOTR movies), and I'm sure that Superman will be too.



• The Road to Guantánamo
  Critical concensus for this documentary-style film about the Tipton Three (a group of young British Muslims who were travelling to Pakistan for a wedding not long after 9/11, but landed up in Afghanistan and were detained by the US on the infamous island) seems to be "powerful", "provocative" but "flawed".
  
  Andrew O'Hehir of Salon thinks it is "the most important and most challenging film we're likely to see in the United States this year," however Stephen Williams (Newsday) is unhappy with the way it blends fiction and fact. Lou Lumenick (NY Post) calls it "a wasted opportunity", and Lisa Rose (Newark Star-Ledger) agrees, saying that "While the story is significant, the filmmaking is flawed". A. O. Scott (New York Times) points out right at the beginning of his review that this is not a documentary - although Winterbottom (see interview below) clearly feels that in a way, it is. It's about the story of three young men's experiences, from their point of view. Is that narrowness necessarily something that stops it from being a documentary? I guess that depends on what is being looked at, the validity of "truth" to the situation, and your own personal point of view.
  
  Winterbottom has been doing interviews about the film. He talks with the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas, PixelSurgeon, and CHUD's Devin Faraci. In the CHUD interview he says:
  "I don't like docudrama - I hate the phrase anyway. But we were deliberately trying not to dramatize. These guys were telling their story; they were narrating the story and we recreated the bits we could recreate to make it easier to understand and to make it more vivid. And just to get across more information - you show people the mountains of Afghanistan where they were and you get more sense of what it was like than if you just described it. We certainly tried to avoid fictionalizing it. We tried to avoid making characters. We tried to avoid having dialogue scenes, we tried to avoid all the stuff of drama and just say, 'This is what happened.' So I don't know what you would call it."
  
  There's also a brief mention of one of his upcoming films, Murder in Samarkand, which is a adaptation of the true account book by British former ambassafor to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. Winterbottom calls it (wryly, I can only assume) "a funny movie about torture. It's sort of Dr. Strangelove meets torturers."
  
  > collected reviews at GreenCine Daily
  > @ RottenTomatoes