Shorts, 6/2.

Lion's Gate heads up an "incredible coalition of the willing" (Michael Moore) to bring Fahrenheit 9/11 to 1000 screens on June 25.

Eugene Hernandez lays out the details in indieWIRE. Meanwhile, Anthony Kaufman wonders what's up with this whole "Fellowship Adventure Group" metaphor.

But Kaufman turns a more serious eye to the state of Italian cinema. It went "bland" in the 90s, but there's hope: "This week, Italian film festivals on both coasts - the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 'Open Roads: New Italian Cinema' (through June 10) and the American Cinematheque's 'Cinema Italian Style' (June 3-13) - unveil a harsher, self-critical reflection of Italian society, both past and present."

Burnt Orange Productions. It's an intriguing, potentially very exciting yet already legally sticky venture dreamed up by film prof Thomas Schatz: The University of Texas in Austin plans to make at least eight movies, the first co-produced by Terrence Malick. The idea, reports Randy Kennedy in the New York Times, is to teach the thousand students in the film program how to make movies by getting them to actually make movies.

On the advisory board: Richard Linklater, Matthew McConaughey and Mike Simpson, an executive VP at the William Morris Agency. Among the questions raised: If the kids make a hit, do they get paid? No. All rights are held by UT. What about sequels? Can they take their own ideas on to new projects? "We're still working on that issue," Ellen Wartell, dean of the College of Communications tells Kennedy. It's going to be messy and not everyone's going to be happy all the time and the very idea of a state school barging so blatantly into such a commercial venture will raise several questions, but as Schatz says, "It's been going on with technology for a long time. But we just don't think about the arts and humanities that way."

Speaking of Linklater, Criterion has announced that Spine #247 will read Slacker.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau in Artforum:

[D]iscretion is the rule in news journalism, even in the tabloids. This is because the serving up of the (visually) horrific - blood, gore, mutilation, and so forth - is the task of the entertainment industry, not the news media.... There is, however, no "dialing back" of images, any more than one can unsee an image once seen.... Approximately one year after Bush's triumphant strut under the banner "Mission Accomplished!" the pictures of torture are released into our now, our present. Conforming to what Roland Barthes described as the specificity of photographic imagery, its evidence of the event or object "having-been-there," it would seem that there are instances when photography, like a lightning bolt, illumines past and present, makes vivid and unforgettable what might otherwise be managed or domesticated. Had there been no pictures, it is unlikely that the torture of Iraqis would have had such profound repercussions.

Barthes comes up again in John Kelsey's wonderful review of John Waters's "little movies": "Alone with only images, directing without company, conversation, or compromise, Waters comes closer to the perfect movie, the potential one he vaguely remembers or hallucinates in its fragments." And topping Lucy McKenzie's Top Ten: Bertrand Tavernier's Deathwatch.

Now that the first wave of immediate reactions to the deluge of films in Cannes has rolled on by, we'll start seeing calmer reflections in the weeks and months to come. Like AO Scott before him, J Hoberman pours his thoughts into two main pools: Film from Asia and Latin America. And it's in that first piece that he also maps other ways the jury might have gone: "Coulda: 2046. Woulda: Old Boy. Shoulda: Innocence, a/k/a Ghost in the Shell 2, the gloriously impenetrable and extravagantly graphic anime by Mamoru Oshii." For a follow-up, he presents an amusing little chat with Oshii.

As for the Latin American offerings, Hoberman deems Lucrecia Martel's La Niña Santa (The Holy Girl) the "best-directed feature in the competition" and he's glad the jury ignored The Motorcycle Diaries.

Also in the Village Voice... a lot:

• Mark Peranson talks briefly with Wong Kar-wai.
• Michael Atkinson previews the Peter Watkins Retrospective and reviews Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
• Dennis Lim meets Hanif Kureishi and reviews The Day After Tomorrow.
• Jorge Morales looks ahead to NewFest 2004.
• More reviews, mostly short: Ed Park on FireDancer, Mark Holcomb on Bukowski: Born Into This, Leslie Camhi on The Story of the Weeping Camel, Laura Sinagra on I'll Sing for You, Ed Halter on Carlos Castaneda: Enigma of a Sorcerer and Joshua Land on Soul Plane.

But it's Armond White in the New York Press who offers more to chew with regard to that comedy: "Capitalizing on rancorous hiphop rebellion and its confused glorification of ghetto fabulousness (what black academics call 'essentialism'), contemporary black entrepreneurship charms audiences away from the old social objectives. The fetishization of money and pleasure has encouraged a pre-civil-rights-era atavism." Related (both Land and White open their reviews by referring to Bill Cosby's recent comments): Margaret Cho: "What Would Fat Albert Say?"

Wendy Mitchell posts "2004's Top 10 Films (So Far)."

Dinner with Roger Avary, Victor Ward and Bret Easton Ellis. The Algonquin Round Table it ain't, but the Jalapeño Yellowtail does sound good.

DW Young reviews Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me. Also in the New York Observer:

• Andrew Sarris: "The eminent film critic and historian David Thomson described Cary Grant as 'the best and most important actor in the history of cinema...' I’m tempted to endorse Mr. Thomson’s appraisal, if only because Grant was so ridiculously underrated by his peers and other pundits when he was alive. I would, however, prefer to place him in a triptych of equal acting greatness with James Stewart (1908-1997) and James Cagney (1899-1986)."
• Rex Reed: "Some Harry Potter cottage-industry acolytes are calling The Prisoner of Azkaban, the new installment, Harry's best adventure yet. I found it the silliest, as well as the most contrived - and confusing - of them all."
• Jake Brooks on Flirting With Disaster, Cary Grant, Trainspotting and Aileen and Monster.

Steve Rosenbaum remembers the subject of his documentary, Facing Arthur.

The auteurism debate bleeds into the world of design via Michael Bierut's post at Design Observer. Via Greg Allen.

Another filmmaker joins the ranks of the bloggers: Bruce LaBruce (The Raspberry Reich). Via Steve Gallagher at Filmmaker.

Online browsing and viewing tip. Oblivion, via Matt Clayfield.

Posted by dwhudson at June 2, 2004 12:29 PM