Shorts, 1/7.

A Better Tomorrow III

"She was not the Madonna of Chinese music, but its Garbo." Richard Corliss remembers Anita Mui in Time Asia. With the finesse of a seasoned practioner of Timese, Corliss captures Mui's broad on-screen range in two mid-story paragraphs. Hats off.

Chris Anderson writes a memo in Wired to the next head of the MPAA. "Subject: How Hollywood can avoid the fate of the music industry." Brief and plainly stated, its bullet points are bolded, all of them good common sense.

I don't know how it happened, but at some point several months ago, I forgot to pay attention to Wired, and so, completely missed the whole Uma Thurman-Philip K. Dick cover package last month:

At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn't really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds.

Besides the background stories to Minority Report, Total Recall, Blade Runner, and of course, Paycheck, the news hook, I also learned from Frank Rose that Uma is the daughter of Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. Did not know that. Then there's the excellent sidebar on Dick's philosophy by Erik Davis.

"[Aileen] Wuornos is this year's Brandon Teena - the strange and pathetic media darling (as Teena was in the late '90s with Boys Don't Cry and The Brandon Teena Story) whose scarred life and grisly death, like that of transgendered Teena, is a source of eerie fascination." In indieWIRE, Nick Poppy introduces his long interview with Nick Broomfield, whose latest doc is Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. The Boys counterpart this year is Monster, reviewed in the Village Voice by Laura Sinagra, who also has a piece on Broomfield and Aileen, which is, in turn, reviewed by Jessica Winter. Got that?

Also in the Voice:

Anthony Kaufman on how the screener ban court case has solidified a sense of identity and community among independent filmmakers.

Elliott Stein on the Victor Sjöström retrospective at MoMA.

Michael Atkinson on The Battle of Algiers.

And Joy Press: "With Sex and the City on its last legs (see review) and the media salivating over all things queer-eyed, The L Word straddles the zeitgeist."

"If you've watched a recent horror film, chances are you're under the influence of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa." This isn't just a cute opener for a piece on the release of Cure on DVD. Johnny Ray Huston backs up the assertion solidly in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Also: Dennis Harvey on Amos Poe's documentary on Steve Earle, Just an American Boy, and David Fear previews the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival.

In the Guardian, Xan Brooks explains why so many Hollywood productions - 8 are blurbed - are being shot in the UK these days - driving British filmmakers, in turn, to eastern Europe.

Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane are on board for the film version of the Broadway version of the original film version of Mel Brooks's The Producers, reports Jesse McKinley in the New York Times. Also:

Sharon Waxman reports on Victoria Riskin's resignation as prez of the Writers Guild of America, West.

Elvis Mitchell reviews two films on Yves Saint Laurent (so does Leslie Camhi in the Voice).

Julie Salamon talks to legendary doc filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who's directed a play in Paris, filmed it and then brought the English version to an Off Broadway theater.

Charles Taylor reviews the 15 finalists in MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad campaign contest:

For all the Republican ire any of these spots would raise if they made their way onto TV, the Democrats would be unwise to ignore their effectiveness. If the candidates collectively, or the nominee after he is chosen in July, cannot match the bluntness of these ads, if he decides to take the high road (that is, wuss out), then the party is going to find itself alienating the very people who constitute one of the strongest forces that might gather to defeat Bush.

Posted by dwhudson at January 7, 2004 9:25 AM