The News: All-Positive Friday!

As per tradition, some of today's upbeat movie news of note from around New York:

--If you catch this in time, jump over to IFC.com and see what kind of hell Matt Singer and Allison Willmore are raising at the New York Film Festival. The duo will be Webcasting daily dispatches and interviews from the fest starting today at 1 p.m., and evidently you can sign up with something called Blog.TV to send them questions during the show. "Singer what R U wearing" and similarly prurient inquiries are discouraged; after all, those are the purview of Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant, who are running their own trenchant NYFF podcasts over at GreenCine. First up: an interview with critic Charley Taylor about 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. All this technology! Exciting!

--I know I pushed hard for this week's NYTM Michael Haneke profile as a my favorite story in a while, but that evil genius Matt Zoller Seitz has a dynamite piece over at The House Next Door about David Mamet, the cinematic con job and Criterion's new edition of House of Games. If it were a book, you couldn't put it down.

--Speaking of put-downs, Rex Reed has his middle finger way, way up the asses of Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes and Noah Baumbach in a riotously scathing NYFF preview. For starters: "Headed for the No. 1 spot on my ten-worst list, I'm Not There is a tumultuous disappointment," Reed writes. "Chopped and shredded into shards of avant-garde impressionism, the film is without a thread of narrative coherence. It's a 135-minute Cobb salad, what I call jerk-off filmmaking. It desperately needs cutting, and they should use a hatchet." So what is this doing on All-Positive Friday? Come on; if you're not laughing your ass off, you're not paying attention. (H/T: Vulture)

Posted at September 28, 2007 12:24 AM