Talk about the weather.

I see, by way of Movie City News, that the site for Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow is up. The trailer promises more of what we've come to expect from Emmerich, a 70s-era disaster movie sensibility dressed up in 21st century CGI. In June 2002, when I first heard about this one, I wrote:

But the ways Emmerich's movies have jibed with the post-9/11 world have been particularly disturbing because those movies wear the absurdity of their premises and spectacles on their sleeves. They swagger and shout: This is escapist entertainment at its best because its just too plain crazy to ever actually happen.... So imagine the cognitive dissonance with which anyone seriously concerned about global warming is going to greet news that Emmerich and Murdoch are teaming up again to get The Day After Tomorrow in theaters by the summer of 2003 [which is what they originally had in mind; now the scheduled release date is Memorial Day, 2004]. The team is promising hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and the onset of the next Ice Age. As Bart Simpson would say, Coooool.

It's impossible, of course, to know what the movie's bottom line is going to be, but it sure doesn't hurt to hazard a guess. Let's see, how about: Global warming is bad. It causes hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and could very well hail the onset of the next Ice Age. Is this going to be a movie you want on your side? That question's harder to answer.

Ultimately, I decide, "We'll take it." But not without reservations. In the meantime, follow the planet's real-life disaster via the Viridian Design Movement and get your ire worked up with the films on a list Craig Phillips has compiled and annotated at GreenCine.

Short shorts:

For all the hoopla over the "first-ever global theatrical debut" today, we tend to forget that the Matrix series is in part also a tale of environmental disaster. The Associated Press has sketched out a timeline of the war between men and machines as a reminder: "2098 - As cities fall beneath the might of mechanized forces, desperate military leaders attempt to block the main source of energy for the robot city: the sun. The plan destroys the atmosphere and fills the sky with choking black smoke - but does not stop the machines." A few Revolutions reviews: J. Hoberman in the Village Voice and Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press; David Edelstein in Slate and Andrew O'Hehir in Salon; AO Scott in the New York Times.

Shame on CBS for wimping out and cancelling The Reagans. The NYT editorializes: "His supporters credit him with forcing down the Iron Curtain, so it is odd that some of them have helped create the Soviet-style chill embedded in the idea that we, as a nation, will not allow critical portrayals of one of our own recent leaders." More from Rebecca Traister in Salon.

On the other hand, CBS still has David Letterman. Liked this bit in Joe Hagan's column in the New York Observer: "From the most ironic American comedian - the man who practically gave his generation irony - Mr. Letterman has, like the country he speaks to, become direct, scarred, and strangely, emotionally direct." Also in the NYO: A juicy piece from Jake Brooks on how and why the elite watch movies; and Sridhar Pappu on how The New Republic is slyly cashing in on its own goof, thanks to the film Shattered Glass, while Forbes has completely let its opportunity slip right on by.

For SF Weekly, Matt Palmquist follows a team of film students as they scramble to make a movie in 48 hours.

Tenacious D launch a DVD.

Even if it's only for the pictures, you'll want to take a look at Jessica Winter's piece on Mel Gibson's martyr complex. Also in the Voice: A disturbing phone call and Leslie Camhi on those German movies at MoMA.

Dylan Hicks previews the City Pages Documentary Film Festival.

Prince Charles tours Bollywood. Registration's probably required for this Telegraph story.

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2003 7:01 AM