Shorts, 6/15.

• Via Movie City News, a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by Ruthe Stein that doesn't exactly shed flattering light on Michael Moore. Did he hold incriminating footage that might have helped prevent further abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the hopes that his film would pack a bigger punch?
• More urgently, MCN posts: "Deep Distributor (Who Defintely Leans Towards Moore In This Case) Tells MCN That At Least Two Exhibitors In The Major Cities In Rural States Have Recieved Death Threats Regarding Plans To Show Fahrenheit 9/11 And There Is Word Of Other Exhibitors Are Getting Similar Calls Since The Launch Of The MoveAmericaForward Site." This is followed by a link to Daily Kos.
• Here's a surprise, coming across this at Fox News, of all places; specifically, Roger Friedman: F9/11 "turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail."
• IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez reports on Lion's Gate and IFC's efforts to fight the "R" rating the MPAA's slapped the film with.
• A reminder: JOlmsted is running blog dedicated to the film.

Back to indieWIRE: Howard Feinstein's review Facing Windows, one of the big winners at SIFF and, evidently, "a joy to watch." Speaking of winners, Brian Brooks lists the bunch coming out of Newport, with Maria Full of Grace in the lead.

The New Republic occasionally runs highlights from its archive and there's a delightful one up at the moment: John Peale Bishop, writing on "Sex Appeal in the Movies" in 1927: "They move in silence, and to the accompaniment of a music that is hardly ever distinctly heard. In consequence, it is possible for the spectator of the movies to identify himself with the actor to an extent unknown in the theater."

More currently:

• Stanley Kauffmann on Control Room and Coffee and Cigarettes.
• Ruth Franklin on how The Stepford Wives has "Stepfordized" the original.
• Lee Siegel on flops - the whole concept of flops, he points out, is more complex than the immediate verdict inherent in the term implies.
• Chris Orr: "Mystic River is [Eastwood's] most complex and assured effort to date, a near-classic that falters due to an accretion of many small flaws and one large one."

For DVD Talk, Geoffrey Kleinman files a full and highly informative report on the current state of the DVD format wars. Good solid stuff, especially if, like me, you haven't been following this all that closely.

In the Telegraph, John Whitley listens to Peter Greenaway explain why Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad is "the most successful film of all time."

Once again, if it's Tuesday, this must be New York. The New York Press gets first mention this time because they're running a movie-related cover story. Of the weekly's two regular reviewers, it's actually Armond White who's most known for his consistent defense of and admiration for Steven Spielberg, so it's a bit of a surprise that Matt Zoller Seitz is taking up the cause just when the buzz on the director's latest, The Terminal, has been so negative. But here we go: "Spielberg is not merely one of the greatest American entertainers, but the kind of committed popular artist the auteur theory was invented to describe."

Armond White, meantime, is sticking to the regular beat: "Napoleon Dynamite offers an eccentric form of humanism that derives more from pop music culture than from film." Cameos in the closing paragraphs: The Chronicles of Riddick and Stepford.

This week, J Hoberman also reviews The Terminal ("While one can only imagine what Jacques Tati would have done with this arena, Spielberg uses it mainly for product placement") and The Stepford Wives ("It has two speeds - obvious and more so") - but also Father and Son ("amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian").

Also in the Voice:

• Michael Musto checks in with Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, who "seem to have developed a near monopoly on pop-culture cable shows that plumb the depths and heights of our childhood fixations and fears."
• Jessica Winter reviews that "punch-drunk, committee-driven adaptation" Around the World in 80 Days and Facing Windows.
• Joy Press reviews Craig Seligmann's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me.
• Ed Park is afforded exactly three questions for Korean documentarian Kim Dong-won.
• Next week sees Criterion's release of both Renoir's and Kurosawa's adaptions of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths. Alisa Solomon catches a more recent theatrical version.
• Michael Atkinson previews the New York Asian Film Festival and pans I'll Sleep When I'm Dead.
• "Tracking shots" and a short: Marc Holcomb on Seducing Doctor Lewis, Ed Halter on Anonymous, Benjamin Strong on Riddick and Ben Kenigsberg on Garfield.

Christopher Hitchens sounds the alarm in Slate: More and worse images from Abu Ghraib are "not likely to remain secret for very long." Hitchens can be infuriating at times, but this is a very important point: "Almost the whole of public opinion is complicit in this, as is shown by the fury over the administration's failure to pre-empt the Sept. 11 assault: a pre-emption that would almost certainly have involved some corner-cutting in the interrogation room."

Online viewing tip. Kyle Cooper's showreel.

Online browsing tip. We Work For Them. Both via the site for OFFF04, the festival of experimental audio, unusual video, in Valencia, July 1 though 4. By way of Net Art News.

What, more Kyle Cooper? But of course: Imaginary Forces, his resume at DirectorsNet, a 1997 write-up in Filmmaker, another by Barnaby Marshall for Shift and the latest, by Jon M Gibson in the current issue of Wired.

Posted by dwhudson at June 15, 2004 4:22 PM