Shorts, 4/14.

Jean-Luc Godard's Notre musique, blending fiction and documentary and set in Bosnia at the height of the war, will screen out of competition in Cannes this summer, reports Variety. The Festival itself doesn't know how to keep a secret: "The Festival de Cannes has prepared a surprise for Jean-Luc Godard at the screening." Hm. At any rate, this leads us straight to an online viewing tip, though it's probably best to let Filmbrain tell you about it.

"In the 1950s, giant bug and alien movies externalized Cold War paranoia about atomic power and communism. The late '60s and '70s horror flicks featured demonic children, literal spawns of Satan, while real-world youth countered culture." So why are zombie movies back now? Toni Nigro has a theory, laid out in Flak.

Matt Zoller Seitz has been thinking along similar lines, but he travels them a lot farther and longer. In a New York Press cover story, he notes that the opening of the new Dawn of the Dead "feels more uncanny" in the present moment than the original did in its own. And that's just a way in to a broader consideration of the whole post-9/11 cinematic menu: "Recent history has seeped into movies, and manifested itself in powerful, if mostly oblique, ways. With some overlap, the movies tend to fit into one of two categories: revenge dramas and religious pictures."

Then Saul Austerlitz previews the Cinema India! series; So does Nita Rao in the Village Voice, where Michael Atkinson looks ahead to another one, Forever Changes: Polish Cinema Since 1989: "[T]he series' best films belong to Jan Jakub Kolski, a disarmingly primitivist, Grimm-esque voice who made his first film, The Burial of the Potato (1990), immediately after the Communists' fall but whose bewitching vocabulary harkens back to the Mitteleuropa heyday of fairy-tale absurdism."

Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Motor City-based filmmaker John Walter's documentary, How to Draw a Bunny, is about at least three enigmas: fame, obscurity, and Ray Johnson... In Mayor of the Sunset Strip, director George Hickenlooper assembles the commercial rock doc equivalent of Johnson's pen-and-ink bunny family trees.

"Through bitter experience, the cinetrix knows better than to cop to politics on a film blog. She will merely point out that these are interesting times to watch Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene's film Ceddo." But the cinetrix also has news: Jules Dassin will be appearing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Saturday, April 17, following a showing of Rififi.

Lee Smith casts a critical eye on Jehane Noujaim's Control Room in Slate.

"It is Mr. Castro's ill-concealed fragility, more than his tyranny, that makes Looking for Fidel interesting," writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times.

In the Guardian:

• "It is extraordinary to be celebrating the centenary of a man who died a mere four years ago, one who, up to the moment he died, seemed so very present." Simon Callow on John Gielgud.
• Geoffrey Macnab chats briefly with Isabella Rossellini about The Saddest Music in the World
• Simon Hattenstone is late for an interview with Judi Dench; so he conducts most of it from his car, via phone, botching a considerable bit of it, but pretty amusingly, then comes running into her sitting room like Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition - just in time to be cut off.

Todd Harbour has two pieces on Wes Craven in Kamera, one on The Hills Have Eyes and the other on Anchor Bay's Special Edition DVD. And Young Adam is already out on DVD in the UK; Charlie Phillips takes a look. Then Antonio Pasolini reviews Andrew Robinson's Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye.

Indie distributors are rethinking their whole approach to trailers, reports Rania Richardson in indieWIRE.

Brian Flemming on HD; and via Brian Flemming, Phil Hall in Film Threat on why it's been so hard to catch Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep.

Nick Hasted in the Independent: "Hip hop and Hollywood have become uneasy but inseparable bedfellows."

In or via Movie City News:

• David Poland: "Jesus! That was one ugly weekend at the box office." Also: "The Terminal looks like the first great dark horse smash hit of 2004."
• Gary Dretzka on the line between R and NC-17: It's sex, not violence.
• Ray Pride on a "big random batch of stuff, including forgetting The Alamo; noting Jonathan Caouette's exhilarating iMovie blowout, Tarnation, at Ebertfest; a few words with Nir Bergman about his heartening Broken Wings..." and the May issue of Esquire.
• Premiere's "100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time."
• Tarantino is American Idol's next celebrity judge.

Posted by dwhudson at April 14, 2004 3:12 PM