Shorts, 6/19.

Audrey Tautou and Jean-Pierre Jeunet are teaming up again. Amelie made more money than any other French movie in history, so they're being rewarded with one of the biggest budgets for a French movie ever. Reuters's story is brief, but it seems to be fullest to be found at the moment.

It's an odd page, but hardcore Hitchcock fans might want to pay it a visit: The MacGuffin is featuring a daily series of guest posts by 'xperts. Entails heavy scrolling, but profs and authors really are filing generous chunks of text each and every day.

"Yes, the smell of beer and horse manure wafting from Animal House is still redolent, 25 years after its release." James Verini attends a special screening of "the college comedy that launched a thousand imitators and untold numbers of campus disciplinary hearings (and Kevin Bacon)." Also in the Los Angeles Times: Scarlet Cheng on the troubles indie director Eric Byler has had getting his film Charlotte Sometimes accepted by the Asian-American community; and Kevin Thomas, filing from the Los Angeles Film Festival, on the "disturbing and provocative" documentary Flag Wars (very touchy subject: gays and lesbians upgrading a neighborhood to the point where African Americans - "many of them elderly and impoverished" - can no longer afford to live there), Takashi Miike's Graveyard of Honor and Masato Harada's Bounce Ko Gals.

In case you haven't caught this on other blogs - Geisha Asobi, for example, or Boing Boing - there is one helluva thread over at Rotten Tomatoes bursting with pix and videos of a massive turnout for the premiere of Matrix Reloaded in Osaka. Click through all six pages and counting for the sights and sounds of a seemingly infinite number of Agent Smiths, more than a few Neos, Trinitys... you get the idea. Time for just one video? A reasonably sized and energetically cut mix by Macar Cube is highly recommended.

It's Double Blockbuster Day at Moviehole with interviews with Hulk director Ang Lee ("I don't really like 'summer' movies myself...") and T3 director Jonathan Mostow ("We technically could enter this movie in Sundance").

Scott Green's got a less encyclopedic (and more manageable) anime round-up this week at Ain't It Cool News. News, reviews and links, for example, to the new trailer for the Sakura Wars movie.

Meanwhile, Christopher Macdonald revisits the fansubbing controversy at Anime News Network.

At the New York Times, Thursday means a new issue of Circuits, and this week, David Pogue not only reviews DVD recorders, he also offers brief and comprehensible background on why the market's flooded with incompatible formats. Eric A. Taub gives his piece on the state of digital projection a sense of place while Steve Lohr profiles a program to digitize newsreel archives so they can be used as teaching tools. Sounds dry, but hey, it opens with a quote from Martin Scorsese who then returns to talk about visual literacy.

Online viewing tip. "FW:Fwd is an exhibition of viral films by international artists which explores new ways of accessing work online... You are looking at the opening selection of films which have been chosen for their diversity - of approach, content and technique." Which is why you won't like them all but are bound to find at least one or two that you do. Via ArtKrush.



Posted by dwhudson at June 19, 2003 9:25 AM