Odds: Wednesday - Lhomme and "The Long Goodbye."

By Alison Willmore on 05/03/2006

At our own IFC News, Dan Persons talks with "Army of Shadows" cinematographer Pierre Lhomme (who also supervised restoration of the new 35mm print currently playing at Film Forum) about returning to the film and about working with director Jean-Pierre Melville:

He said, "Mr. Lhomme, would you please come into the car?" So I went into the car, and he then he drove me to his home, just like in a thriller. And he immediately spoke to me of cinema. He was fond of cinema; he was speaking always of cinema, nothing else. And he spoke to me mostly of skin tone. I was so surprised. He told me, "I appreciated a lot the skin tone of your last film." No one had told me that before! But I understood afterwards that the skin tone was extremely important to him in this film, that he wanted pale, he would reject all those warm colors on the skin.

At RogerEbert.com, Ebert discusses Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye," our favorite Chandler adaptation because it's so brilliantly off (though we love the kitsch value of "Lady in the Lake" too — "M*G*M presents a Revolutionary motion picture; the most amazing since Talkies began! YOU and ROBERT MONTGOMERY solve a murder mystery together!").

Samantha Culp has a dispatch and images from the Hong Kong International Film Festival (including one of a tragically orange Louis Koo) at her blog.

At Kaiju Shakedown, Grady Hendrix offers up more of this year's New York Asian Film Festival line-up — yes! "Ski Jumping Pairs: Road to Torino 2006"!

At the Guardian, Stewart Lee pens an ode to the truly terrible film:

The fact is that truly bad films, like undercover SAS men, hide in plain sight. In the 1950s and 60s we knew them by their bad plotting, bad dialogue, bad acting and low production values. Now those same faults are concealed by big budgets, professional production values, star names and skillful marketing campaigns. Peter Biskind, in his book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," cites "Jaws" as the moment where B-movie aesthetics went overground on major motion picture budgets.

Via Gina Keating at Reuters, the AMC theater chain has announced that it will be devoting 72 screens in 39 domestic markets to art-house fare:

AMC, the No. 2 U.S. movie theater chain, said at least one screen in dedicated theaters would show only art house and specialty films under a program dubbed "AMC Select" starting this weekend.

Among the first titles to be offered are the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth"; "Little Miss Sunshine," starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear; and "A Prairie Home Companion" with Lindsay Lohan.

Well, what'd you expect, "Sátántangó"?

At Wired News, Jason Silverman chats with Daniel Clowes about "Art School Confidential."

And at The Age, Hassan Fattah reports on "Keif al-Hal ( How's It Going?)," the first feature film from Saudi Arabia, a country where there are no legal movie theaters.

+ Q&A: Pierre Lhomme Returns to "Army of Shadows" (IFC News)
+ The Long Goodbye (1973) (RogerEbert.com)
+ Dihnyingjit (New Territories)
+ NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL LINE-UP 2006 (Kaiju Shakedown)
+ Give me Godzilla any day (Guardian)
+ AMC to devote some screens to art-house films (Reuters)
+ Daniel Clowes Talks Confidential (Wired News)
+ First Saudi film shows real-life drama (The Age)