Fests and shorts.

China View is naturally quite happy to pass along news of last night's awards at Tribeca. After all, the Chinese film The Green Hat took the prize for best narrative feature and its director, Liu Fen Dou, who wrote Zhang Yang's Shower, was named best new narrative filmmaker.

Haaretz trumpets Arna's Children, the Israeli film which shares the best doc award with another from Australia and South Africa, The Man Who Stole My Mother's Face. Brazilian Paulo Sacramento was named best new doc filmmaker for The Prisoner of the Iron Bars: Self-Portraits.

In indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez has more details. Meanwhile, Brian Brooks has been snapping away at the fest and posts his photos of Feux Rouges (Red Lights) director Cédric Kahn and star Carole Bouquet, "with current beau, actor Gérard Depardieu," as well as Jim Jarmusch, Amos Poe and others. Wendy Mitchell rounds up the festival buzz.

In news of other fests, Wendy Mitchell, back from the Nashville Film Festival (April 26 - May 2), where she also took some pix, surveys the lineup for the Los Angeles Film Festival (June 17 - 26). And Sarah Keenlyside reports from the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (April 23 - May 2).

On the iW blogs, Matt Dentler argues that if Fahrenheit 9/11 is released internationally before it hits American screens, whoever picks up US distribution and Michael Moore as well stand to lose loads to piracy. Michael Eisner, in the meantime, sends a few words but no news to the New York Times while Michael Moore has posted a new message at his site. Yes, it's laced with Moore's trademark rhetoric, but the argumentation is solid and his version of events rings true. He signed a contract. Eisner dressed down Moore's agent, said Disney wouldn't distribute F-9/11 and mentioned those Floridian tax breaks.

But Michael Eisner did not call Miramax and tell them to stop my film. Not only that, for the next year, SIX MILLION dollars of DISNEY money continued to flow into the production of making my movie. Miramax assured me that there were no distribution problems with my film.

But then, a few weeks ago when Fahrenheit 9/11 was selected to be in the Cannes Film Festival, Disney sent a low-level production executive to New York to watch the film (to this day, Michael Eisner has not seen the film). This exec was enthusiastic throughout the viewing. He laughed, he cried and at the end he thanked us.... Miramax did their best to convince Disney to go ahead as planned with our film.... Earlier this week we got the final, official call: Disney will not put out Fahrenheit 9/11. When the story broke in the New York Times, Disney, instead of telling the truth, turned into Pinocchio.

Moore then quotes and debunks the accusations Disney has made against him in the press in the week since. But isn't Moore at least a little giddy with all the publicity? Well, he claims it won't sell tickets, but more convincingly, he points out: " I want people discussing the issues raised in my film, not some inside Hollywood fracas surrounding who is going to ship the prints to the theaters."

Ok, here's another possible way the whole Moore-Disney thing could go. Eisner allows Harvey Weinstein to buy his company back and Miramax distributes the doc after all, albeit long after the rest of the world has already seen it. Whatever. At any rate, maybe the most interesting quote Tim Arango's story in the New York Post, found via Movie City News is this one: "'The whole world would be lined up to back Harvey and Bob,' Weinstein's brother and business partner, said one source." Go up against Eisner and that whole Down and Dirty Pictures flap is so January all of a sudden.

At MCN itself, Guy Maddin tells Leonard Klady the story behind The Saddest Music in the World.

Eugene Hernandez outlines the many ways McDonald's is botching its campaign against Super Size Me. iW's Andrea Meyer conducts the formal interview, and on his own blog, Morgan Spurlock tells us what it's like to be a guest on Letterman.

Gawker passes along students' notes from Elvis Mitchell's last Film Criticism course at Harvard; he brought Bill Murray along. As for Elvis's replacement, Gawker's also helping out culture editor Steve Erlanger by screening applications. The cinetrix, meantime, is already suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Simon Hattenstone talks to Pedro Almodóvar about the autobiographical elements of La Mala Educación (Bad Education), the film that opens Cannes this week (provided those labor disputes don't get out of hand). By way of introduction: "For me, he has become Europe's greatest working auteur. And it's been an unlikely progress from director of kitsch, Day-Glo, gratuitously offensive, defiantly anarchic movies (Dark Habits, Law of Desire, Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) to a film-maker of depth and humanity. The amazing thing is he's managed to do it without betraying his roots." More in French in Le Nouvel Observateur.

But in the Guardian and Observer:

• Peter Bradshaw's top ten must-sees at Cannes.
• Geraldine Bedell: "Even though [Neil] Jordan is an Oscar-winning screenwriter and the director of many admired movies... procuring the money to make films remains as hard as ever and this wonderfully elegaic novel owes its existence partly to his failure to finance a projected film about the Borgias. Jordan describes Shade as 'a gothic novel of a kind'; it echoes his preoccupation elsewhere with the irrational, the numinousness of things." Emma Brockes meets Peter Greenaway.
• Alex Duval Smith reports that Robert Biver is trying to bus as many of the homeless who appear in his film SDF go Home (Homeless Go Home) into Cannes, where it'll be screened alongside a handful of Hollywood blockbusters: "I am not an activist. What interests me is giving excluded people a voice. I am not bothered about getting a distribution deal out of Cannes. I want people to see the film for free."
• Andrew Pulver on Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie.
• John Patterson on Ed Harris: "[W]hen he leads a movie, it's his forever."
• "In three decades of making films about police, prisons and criminals, I always steered clear of sex offenders, thinking them a breed apart with motivations I could never understand." And yet Roger Graef did eventually make The Protectors - A Second Chance.
• Gaby Wood interviews Isabella Rossellini.
• We've heard this before, but it bears repeating: "Something's gotta give. There are too many really expensive movies this summer." Anne Thompson does the math.
• Rachel Cooke on Val Kilmer's latest career move.
• After Paul Greengrass made the award-winning Bloody Sunday, he was approached by the Omagh Support Group, asking him to consider making a film about the Real IRA's bomb that killed 29 in 1998. Peter Stanford reports.
• Shawn Levy listens to the Coens and Tom Hanks talk up The Ladykillers.
• David Mamet: "Just as the personal ad is written not to attract anyone specifically, but only to avoid rejection, the screenplay strives to appeal to all - or to those who think it might appeal to all." Fine, but that's pretty much the whole column right there. The rest is filler.
• Tobias Steed's Hollywood cocktails.

Brian Flemming: "I put a lot of working into planting those Easter eggs in the [Nothing So Strange] DVD. The least you could do is take several hours out of your life to try to find them." Brian likes Final Cut Pro HD, by the way; Wiley Wiggins has jazzed up his keyboard for Final Cut Pro and Chuck Olsen is very pleased with Magic Bullet, an After Effects plug-in.

Via Perlentaucher, Ishita Moitra in Outlook India:

Welcome to the age of Gujaratification.... Punjabis have always dominated the film industry right from the Prithviraj Kapoor years through the heyday of Yash Chopra to current kitsch-king Karan Johar. So it's only natural that their ethos translated itself onto celluloid: a Karva Chauth sequence in every second family drama, and the liberal usage of Punjabi in songs. But things are now going Kathiawadi with a vengeance.

In the Independent:

• Joseph Fiennes vs evangelical Christians, reported by Steve Bloomfield.
• Nikki Reed, who actually sounds pretty together for a 16-year-old, tells Geoffrey Macnab that life after Thirteen hasn't been so great: "It was really horrible writing a film about not being able to fit in and hoping this would help and then going back and having the problem start all over again."
• What movie made Charlie Kaufman cry? Charlotte O'Sullivan never finds out. But she does get him to say a few things about George Clooney that, taken out of context, might not play too well in LA.

Matt Langdon: "We are only in May but already I have a top ten list of films."

In the New York Times:

• Anne Thompson on how HBO is adapting to the new market for docs it's helped create.
• Sharon Waxman on this summer's violent good-vs-evil Hollywood fare as "thinly veiled wish-fulfillment fantasies in a complicated world, or even as a coping mechanism after a societywide trauma."
• Where in New York do productions find that gritty noir atmo these days now that downtown's all cleaned up? In Lower Manhattan, reports Susan Saulny: "Manhattan's movie muggings, foot chases and murders have become so commonplace in a few alleyways in TriBeCa and Chinatown that the alleys themselves have become celebrities in their own darkly intriguing way, as time-forgotten stand-ins for what more of the city used to be."
• Stephanie Zacharek: "The big draw of both 13 Going on 30 and Mean Girls is that instead of giving us innocent, blameless heroines, they show us what happens when good girls temporarily turn nasty."
• Ben Brantley: "[A]s a general rule, Mr. LaBute specializes in two-legged wolves and pigs who wear the camouflage of business suits and golf sweaters. The Distance From Here, an MCC Theater production directed by Michael Greif and featuring Anna Paquin... focuses on a social underclass of born losers, hard-up people of primal appetites who wallow in apathy and anger."
• The popularity of a TV show can be judged by the number of spoilers floating around online, reports Emily Nussbaum.
• There'll be no Spider-Man 2 ads on the bases during Major League Baseball games after all, reports Richard Sandomir.
• Bruce Weber: Alan King, 1927 - 2004.
• Ben Sisario: Fred Karlin, 1936 - 2004.

Online viewing tip. "Dance Me to the End of Love," a short by Aaron Goffman with Quentin Tarantino. Found via Roger Avary, who assures us: "Any fan who visits this site will want to download a copy to ensure the survival of this legendary and historic relic."

Posted by dwhudson at May 10, 2004 7:37 AM