GreenCine Daily: Shorts, 5/31.

May 31, 2004

Shorts, 5/31.

For the New York Times Magazine, Stephen Rodrick checks in on Christopher Walken during the shooting of The Wedding Crashers:

His bizarro word rhythm and gleeful disregard for punctuation makes even his most banal utterances sound dramatic. At the grocery store, he stared at a plump tomato and then put it back. ''I DON'T. Buy the tomatoes with. The stems. On them. They don't. Degrade. They go. Down the sink. And into the WATER. Then. They get lodged in the throats of little. OTTERS.''
Armed with the voice and the hair, Walken merrily hoofs his way through the Hollywood minefield with the blissfully oblivious demeanor of someone who doesn't know any better or, more precisely, doesn't know any other way.

In the paper:

Marcelle Clements watches the Criterion edition of 3 Women, listens to Robert Altman's commentary and notes that "the film's notorious ambiguity seems to have dissipated."
AO Scott files one last Cannes piece. About dogs.
Annette Grant visits Gregory Crewdson, whose photographs bear the "trademark look of tableaus that suggest complicated narratives, as if a whole movie were being condensed into a single shot."
Virginia Heffernan profiles the women of Six Feet Under.
Thomas Hine: "In the age of the remote control, of HBO and endless cable choices, and of TiVo, the recording device that lets viewers skip commercials, the marriage of mass entertainment to 'a word from our sponsor,' appears to be in trouble."
At first glance, it looks as if Sharon Waxman has your usual story about a big dumb Goliath of a corporation - in this particular case, Fox - bringing its mighty club down on a swift innovative David of an indie - here, Bryan Michael Stoller - for daring to parody one of its properties. Second glance: The twist here is that Stoller's short features Michael Jackson.
Nancy Ramsey tells the story behind The Story of the Weeping Camel.

Anne Thompson's "LA Diary" in the Observer opens with speculation surrounding James Cameron's upcoming sci-fi blockbuster, tracks DreamWorks's current success, notes the dangers of making docs and asks for the umpteenth time this long, long weekend, "How much destruction can New Yorkers take?" For the Washington Post, Thompson profiles Roland Emmerich.

Via Bitter Cinema, Kathryn Joyce in The Revealer: "If Gojira was 'the A-bomb made flesh,' Godzilla is the gospel as A-bomb." More from Filmbrain.

So Michel Gondry's directing an adaptation of Rudy Rucker's Master of Space and Time with Jack Black taking the lead. That inticing bit of news comes by way of drew.

Via Defamer, Lia Haberman passes along news from the LA Times to E! that MTV's running that ad for Super Size Me after all and "blamed a 'junior-level employee' for the mix-up."

Mira Nair? Very, very busy, surmises Steve Gallagher at Filmmaker.

Some of us don't have subscriptions to the LA Times, which makes us all the more grateful to Matt Langdon for excerpting the bits from Manohla Dargis's Cannes story related to Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-wai.

Amanda Doss offers a brief history of the Producer's Action Network.

Elizabeth Carmody has been casting kids and she's bumped into a few surprises.

Just because, a few summertime travelers:

~~Elena rides through the "dead zone" surrounding Chernobyl (eerie, captivating photos; thanks, Francine).~~ Update: A reader has pointed out that Neil Gaiman recently passed along a message revealing that this travelogue is a hoax. Can't help but agree with Gaiman: "This one left me blinking. Not so much because it was a fraud, as why anyone would bother to create such a fraud..." Even so, still grateful for both the link and the correction.
Matt Clayfield: "Jeremy Harrison, eternally deluded filmmaker-cum-backpacker, has hit Belgium [and is having trouble typing as a result]."
Via Eugene Hernandez, the "Year of the Goat."
Morgan Spurlock's new diet? Kangaroo.