At my old stomping grounds, The Reeler, there is a great interview with Arnaud Desplechin, the French director of the excellent A Christmas Tale, current sweetheart of the critical set.
At Film Comment Desplechin interviews his star, Catherine Deneuve, about the film, her directors, dating a communist, her regrets over a missed rendez vous with Hitchcock, and dying her hair blonde in a “gesture of love” for Marilyn Monroe.
There’s more Hitch at Directorama, a comic about movie director heaven. I liked this episode, in which Ingmar Bergman, temporarily transformed into the Hulk, lays waste to Roberto Rossellini while Zapruder films and Hitchcock frets. But kick around a bit, it’s fun; the author, Peet Gelderblom just published his first book. [via The House Next Door]
J. Hoberman takes the full measure of Steven Soderbergh’s Che at the Virginia Quarterly Review. He spends some time on Albert Korda’s iconic photo (and its reappropriation as a “capitalist tool”), the 1969 film Che!, with Omar Sharif as Guevera and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro, and mentions Guevera’s status as a romantic hero of the extreme left: one-time salon communist Graham Greene felt Guevera “represented the idea of gallantry, chivalry, and adventure in a world more given up to business arrangements between the great world powers.”
More web wormhole than film link, but check it out: a few weeks ago I was researching Greene for an assignment and came across this bizarre, slightly sweaty piece of fan fiction by Paul Theroux. In “Greene,” a photographer named Miss Pratt meets with Graham Greene (“One look told me he had no boss, no rivals, no enemies, no deadlines, no hates; not a grumbler, not a taker of orders.”) at a bar to take his author photo. She comes to Greene highly recommended: in the story it is she, and not Korda, who took the famous Guevera shot: “It flattered him and simplified his face into an expression of suffering idealism. I had made him seem better than he was.” Weird!
Stephen Metcalf revisits Risky Business in a terrific piece for Slate, tracing Tom Cruise’s career through his role as a would-be Hitler-killer in this week’s Valkyrie and offering a compelling argument for the end of his relevance, if not his career. Speaking of Hitler-killing, here’s a short story from an obscure Canadian journal on the subject: two guys use a time machine to kill the Fuhrer. Things go awry.
