Shorts, 6/24.

Disney and Dali, together at last! Via Movie City News comes this story in Animation World Magazine of Destino, a short dreamed up in the 40s but only just completed with a big push from Roy Disney. Producer Baker Bloodworth:

Destino was ultimately recut from eight to five minutes because some of it was incomprehensible. Dali had always said, 'If you understand this, then I've failed.' There's some truth to this but we also wanted it to be watchable. Roy was very conscious of holding an audience. We pulled together the love story and compressed. And yet there is a long baseball sequence that no one could make sense of that we only touched on.

Yep, sounds like Disney doing Dali. Even so, kudos for reviving the project at all. Google turns up another piece on the film in the Boston Globe by Christopher Jones with a lot more background. Theft and intrigue, it seems, were involved in the demise of the project in the first place.

A very different sort of story via MCN: In Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, when Demi Moore licks Cameron Diaz's, is this still about empowering women?

"I didn't want to give it a film look, I just wanted to take away the video look. To give it more of a sexy or sensual look, which film has in its very nature and video doesn't. So there is a similarity between what I was trying to do and what film does. It's not necessarily to make it look like film, but to make it look as sensual as film." That's cinematographer Andrew Dunn talking about shooting Robert Altman's The Company on HD video at DV.com. It's an extensive, fairly tech-heavy but more-interesting-than-you-might-think piece, laced with quotes from Altman as well.

Paul Matwychuk talks to Bret Wood in Salon about Hell's Highway, his doc on those hideous driver's ed films from the 60s and 70s: "They're shocking in a way you wouldn't expect. A lot of people think it's just going to be massive amounts of blood. What's more shocking is that people are wearing recognizable clothes and they look like your parents' friends from when you were a kid... You can't relegate it to the world of make-believe."

"His arrival on Hulk went largely unnoticed. The entertainment press obsessively chronicles the hiring and firing of actors, directors or screenwriters on movies, but composers usually get short shrift." Yes, even Danny Elfman gets overlooked when it comes to red carpet time. Patrick Goldstein makes up for it a bit, though. Also in the Los Angeles Times: Here come four big-budget movies set in the 19th century.

Short shorts:

George Axelrod, the screenwriter behind such classics as Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Manchurian Candidate, died this weekend;

Writer and director David Hare blasts his government;

Hong Kong box office may be recovering from the SARS crisis, albeit slowly;

One ought to point to at least one Eric Bana story, I suppose, but this other one on Jackie and Marilyn, also in the Observer, is a lot more interesting (and fun);

Dmitri Puchkov redubs - and completely rewrites - pirated movies; e.g., Hobbits become "bumbling Russian cops" and the Orcs, gangsters;

Monty Python in French;

Sexy stenographers;

and Alex Abramovich on Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.



Posted by dwhudson at June 24, 2003 8:08 AM