Fests and shorts.

Another day, another festival. Today the Los Angeles Film Festival - or, rather unfortunately, LAFF - opens and is set to run through June 26. The ever-sharp Andy Klein introduces the LA CityBEAT's LAFF recommendations. Dennis Romero's cover story, by the way, is a profile of Stacy Peralta: "I was stuck in television for six years, trying desperately to get out, and Dogtown and Z-Boys enabled me to get out. I felt that way about Riding Giants, too."

In a single paragraph introducing his LA Weekly interview with programmer Rachel Rosen, Scott Foundas tells you all you need to know about the fest's rocky history and its recent "concentrated effort to transform the identity of what many considered a stagnant, second-tier Sundance into the most important film festival in a city where the air runs as thick with movies as it does with smog."

The LA Weekly critics offer their reviews and recommendations and Greg Burk spotlights three rock docs.

Also this week, Nikki Finke finds Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter all but hoping that he's important enough to be a target of a Republican smear campaign, Peter Fletcher meets the superheroes of Hollywood Boulevard, and then, Ella Taylor: "Absurd as it is, Viktor’s situation couldn’t be more topical, or more pointed about the arbitrariness of US policy toward foreign nationals. The pacing of The Terminal may be as breezy as Spielberg’s fetchingly cheeky caper Catch Me If You Can (though it’s never as stylish or as light on its feet), but its central dilemma comes closer to the bleak existential predicament of his Philip Dick–inspired Minority Report."

For Movie City News, Leonard Klady maps LAFF's modest spot on the whole of the festival circuit and then pulls back even further to assess the shot any filmmaker has of truly making a career out of remaining independent. In short, it's a long one.

Meanwhile, back in Seattle. NP Thompson has no fewer than six volumes of "SIFF Short Takes" plus one "Post-Mortem," all of them very well worth looking into and perhaps even arguing with here and there, but you know, constructively.

"It's a short trip between Saigon and Baghdad," director Peter Davis said on Monday night after a screening of a restored print of his Oscar-winning documentary, Hearts and Minds. As Sarah Boxer writes in the New York Times, "Today the film has not lost any of its punch. Now the punch is packed with new meaning."

Charles Taylor in Salon on Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Braveheart Will Take the Bride):

DDLJ is one of the most successful films in the history of the world's largest film industry.... This is a picture that should be part of our shared experience of movies. It offers the large, unsubtle, overwhelming satisfaction of the best popular entertainment. It's a flawed, contradictory movie - aggressive and tender, stiff and graceful, clichéd and fresh, sophisticated and naive, traditional and modern. It's also, I think, a classic.

Julia Stiles defends her work in Mona Lisa Smile against accusations Cherry Potter made on Monday on the same commentary pages in the Guardian: "After Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, women of my generation have not employed self-censorship, but rather we challenge the notion that being a feminist is in opposition to being feminine." Also: Aida Edemariam profiles Lee Evans and Kate Stables offers another seven online viewing tips.

Via MCN, Caryn Rousseau's report for the AP on the premiere in Little Rock of The Hunting of the President.

Online viewing tip. That conversation at the Tate Modern pointed to a while back, the one between Todd Haynes and Richard Dyer on Edward Hopper and film, has now been archived.

Posted by dwhudson at June 17, 2004 6:05 AM