Shorts, 6/3.

With well over 660 film festivals staged each year, it's always festival season. But summer, when everyone's feeling particularly festive, always seems to have a busier schedule. For indieWIRE, Brian Brooks preps for the Frameline San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (June 12 - 29) and Christopher Henderson previews the New York manifestation of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (June 11 - 26). On the 13th, its online counterpart, the Media That Matters Festival will be viewable for all of us, even if we don't live on one of the coasts.

State of Denial

While we're ticking them off, one more, back in San Francisco. By comparison, the SF Black Film Festival is short (June 11 - 15) and young (this'll be its fifth year), but it's growing fast and, what's more, focuses on workshops and panels as much as it does on watching movies.

Susan Wloszczyna kicks off a package with a very USA Today opener: "If you recently caught a movie at the multiplex, clicked on the TV remote or attended a Broadway show, you may have noticed the world looks a lot more gay lately. And we aren't just talking about happy and carefree." Pretty cringe-worthy. Even so, there's a bit of a look forward to gay moments coming soon in mainstream entertainment and a handy cut-out list of "watershed moments."

In the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein takes in two docs on the 70s, "Hollywood's last golden era," and finds that while Easy Riders, Raging Bulls "offers more entertainment value," A Decade Under the Influence is "more illuminating, with the respectful tone you'd expect from a graduate school seminar." Hm. Put both on my list.

This business between Vincent Gallo and Roger Ebert is getting ugly.

"An entire dream factory that was built around virile boys and their unquestionable love has exchanged brimming youth for what is called 'character role'... They are aged between 37 and 43 today but Shah Rukh, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol, Anil Kapoor and Suneil Shetty will not go quietly into the night." Manu Joseph in Outlook India on Bollywood's aging Romeos.

Bamboo Dong is back with a fresh batch of DVD reviews at Anime News Network.

"He has directed more than 50 films in the past 10 years... But where Kitano takes an impassive, understated approach to his movies, Miike favours excess. Lots of it. He must be one of the most gifted directors ever to apply himself to the creation of thoroughly tasteless movies." Steve Rose meets and talks with Takashi Miike. Also in the Guardian: Adam Roberts on sci-fi's long love affair with Mars.

Online viewing tip. Wim Wenders has done a series of ads for Audi (and this isn't the first time he's done TV commercials, either). The best way to view them - there are several, strung in a row, with recurring characters and all as if this were one single coherent narrative; it isn't, really - is to go to this month's News Reel at his official site and there, scroll down - on the lower left corner, you'll see the billboard for The Other Side of the Road. That's it.



Posted by dwhudson at June 3, 2003 8:28 AM