Shorts, 3/14.

Heavens. No wonder the cinetrix and Aaron are so enthusiastic: A Girl and a Gun, our freshest addition to that righthand column. Another new one to keep an eye on: Filmbrain.

Also via the cinetrix, Wesley Morris's suggestions for Hollywood adaptations of 70s-era TV shows.

Charlotte O'Sullivan has a problem with Audrey Hepburn, though just how serious it is is a little hard to discern: "So maybe Audrey herself (sigh) isn't the Anti-Christ. The idea of her, nevertheless, needs exorcising. Some academics have referred to the current wave of Audrey love as post-feminist. Pish! It's anti-feminist, anti-human." Then there's the touch-n-go interview with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Also in the Independent, Nick Hasted meets Sienna Guillory.

"There are genuine criticisms to be lobbed at the Academy for the manner in which its chosen to honor foreign-language movies but, generally speaking, the press has opted for taking cheap, uninformed shots at the process. Once again, one has to keep in mind the Faustian nature of selecting a single film to represent all films made in a language other than English." For Movie City News, Leonard Klady explains. And via MCN, a few items in the Globe and Mail:

• Stephen Hunt meets Jim Carrey.

• Secret Window gives Lynn Crosbie an opportunity to write about writers on film.

• Mark Achbar, one of the directors behind The Corporation, takes his orange knapsack to the Vanity Fair Oscar party.

• Take a look at Hidalgo, The Passion of the Christ and the exhibition of Egyptian art at the Royal Ontario Museum, says Kamal Al-Solayee, and you'll find perfect illustrations of the question Edward Said posed in Culture and Imperialism regarding the west's take on the Middle East: "How could there be so much interaction on one level, and so little actuality on the other?"

And speaking of The Passion, Katha Pollitt chimes in in the current issue of the Nation which features, by the way, a fine cover. But Gregg Easterbrook notes: "Working on a shoestring, Beliefnet has produced better coverage of The Passion of the Christ than all the newsmags and newspapers combined."

Mindjack, the fine online zine that dubs itself "the beat of digital culture," has opened up a film section and the most recent addition is Jesse Walker's review of Antero Alli's Hysteria.

Jerry Capeci, author of two books on the Mafia, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who's covered organized crime for New York magazine and the NYT Magazine, discuss the new season of The Sopranos in Slate.

Vadim Perelman's favorite film? Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves, hands down. David Gritten asks him about that in the Telegraph.

Lisa Bear interviews Lone Scherfig for indieWIRE. You might cringe at the unintentionally news-hookish intro, but in the end, there was probably no way around it.

If Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow is a hit, John Kerry could be "swept to an unlikely victory thanks to a blockbuster movie that focuses on the effects of big business and the agro-industrial complex," hypothesizes Dan Glaister. Wishful thinking, probably, but however major or minor, there may be an effect of sorts, a possibility I toyed with some time ago myself. Anyway, also in the Guardian and Observer:

• The 18th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival has scheduled Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia I and II as part of its "Gymslips" series; "C'mon, Riefenstahl as camp entertainment?" asks B Ruby Rich. "Yes, I know: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Yet surely there are some objects that are unrecuperable." That'll sound overly stringent at first, but hear her out.

• Anna May Wong is suddenly everywhere; in the UK, too. With Piccadilly scheduled at the Barbicon on March 26, Geoffrey Macnab surveys the career.

• Ben Stiller again, this time profiled by Gaby Wood.

• Porn at the turn of the century was carefree and natural, no big deal, Will Hodgkinson learns from Michel Reilhac, who put together the collection The Good Old Naughty Days; last year, Daze Reader pointed to a collection of reviews when the compilation was making the rounds in US theaters.

• As for the present, Philip French spells out the ways in which "pornography - hard-core, soft-core, crude, sophisticated, alleged, disguised - is everywhere, above and below the counter."

• Rosanna Greenstreet's quickie with Elisabeth Shue.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, opening in June, promises to at least look like a very different sort of summer movie, even though it's got Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie in it. In case you haven't heard, it's a bit like Tron in some fantastic high modernist get-up. As John Hodgman explains in his New York Times Magazine profile of its creator, Kerry Conran, it's been composed entirely of...

...computer images, built and animated in a virtual 3-D environment, or stitched together from photographs, which are then draped around the flesh-and-blood actors, who have been shot separately on an empty set in front of a blank "blue-screen" background, along with those few minimal props with which they actually interact (a ray gun, a robot blueprint, a bottle of milk of magnesia). The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.

And in the paper:

• Elvis Mitchell on David Mamet, Michael Mann and William Friedkin: "These directors' pictures are, quite possibly, the last reliable and consistently watchable school of noir filmmaking."
• Kristen Hohenadel on recent French movies that've broken the nation's "ultimate taboo": mentioning money.
• That piece follows Stephen Holden's thorough preview of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series in the city.
• Another film hits the editorial pages. This time, Eleanor Randolph opines that the 1996 election in Russia was a whole lot more interesting than this year's in that the conclusion was not foregone. I'd link to Spinning Boris, but Showtime shows me this instead: "We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States." WTF?
• Dave Kehr talks to Mahamat-Saleh Haroun about his film, Abouna, and the "metaphorical identification of film and father as the two forces that shape the personalities of his young protagonists but that remain ultimately elusive and mysterious."
• An excerpt from Spalding Gray's Life Interrupted.

Online viewing tip. The trailer and site for Immortel (thanks, M. SignalStation!), and if that intrigues you, the site for the film's director, Enki Bilal.

Posted by dwhudson at March 14, 2004 7:40 AM