Shorts, 5/21.

Tom Mes has a longish, relaxed chat with Ryuhei Kitamura about his hugely successful independent project Versus and his plans to move to Hollywood once he wraps up the Godzilla series for Toho. And Don Brown reviews Kitamura's latest feature, Azumi.

Also in the new issue of Midnight Eye:

• Mes salutes the late Tomio Aoki, whose career stretched from 1929 through this year; and he reviews Katsuhito Ishii's The Taste of Tea ("touching, funny, imaginative and pleasantly low-key").
• Jaspar Sharp on Tetsuya Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls, "with two hot young J-Pop talents Kyoko Fukada and Anna Tsuchiya elevating kitsch to hitherto undreamt of levels"; and on Joanne Bernardi's Writing in Light, a "highly informative look at the infancy of Japanese cinema."
• Capsule reviews of half a dozen films.

Geoffrey Macnab places Fernando Eimbcke's Tempora de Patos at the top of the "Ten Best Films at Cannes 2004 he's drawn up for the Independent. The paper's latest profiles and interviews: Peter Bogdanovich, Gael Garcia Bernal and Deborah Unger.

FAZ Weekly's Elizabeth Book is happy to report on the reception The Edukators has received in Cannes.

The Nation won't let Stuart Klawans's reviews slip online, but Alternet will. This time around, he shrugs off Coffee and Cigarettes yet finds Troy more of a "real movie" than he expected.

Environmental Defense joins the network of activists hoping to turn the release of The Day After Tomorrow into an opportunity to get word out on the myths versus the facts related to global warming.

"Two striking documentaries about journalists in Iraq suggest how rarely the harshest images - and sometimes the unwelcome news - have penetrated American newscasts until now." Caryn James in the New York Times on Control Room (also reviewed by AO Scott) and War Feels Like War.

Skye Sherwin has a good long talk with Jonathan Caouette about revealing his most intimate self in Tarnation - and of course, about it's famous ultra-low budget.

Also in the Guardian:

• BBC DJ Steve Lamacq explains why he's seen only 13 movies in all his life. Oh, and he lists them, too.
• David Mamet carries on. This week, it's "development," that "Dadaist vision of movie-making, the fur-lined piss-pot, the oxymoron."
• China is imposing a seven-week moratorium on Hollywood product next month.

Dana Stevens: "Outside the black-and-white absolutism of the "is he or isn't he?" question, Tony Randall broke new ground by choosing roles that existed precisely in the liminal zone between straight and gay."

Also in Slate:

• Elizabeth Eaves profiles Najla Atef, "a film actress in Yemen, a country with no movie industry to speak of." But along came director Bader Ben Hirsi and his project, A New Day in Old Saana, "the first ever feature film to be shot entirely in Yemen by a Yemeni."
• Ben Williams's zeitgeist round-up, "Summary Judgement," is particularly stimulating at the moment; the reviews gathered and blurbed revolve around Fahrenheit 9/11, readings of the Abu Ghraib photos, the recent spate of revenge flicks, Shrek 2 and more.
• To come full circle, David Edelstein catches up with the original Godzilla.

And finally for today, Michael Moore posts a few pix from Cannes.

Posted by dwhudson at May 21, 2004 4:38 PM