Shorts, 6/18.

Let's, just this once, start off with a different Moore, shall we. Via filmfilter, Adrian Brown's review of Dez Vylenz's The Mindscape of Alan Moore, "mapped more clearly than ever by this film." FF then helpfully points to Frank Beaton's interview with Moore and the Ninth Art's Alan Moore List.

There. Now back to our regularly scheduled controversy. At Alternet, Bill Berkowitz has good background on the Republicans trying to ensure that as few people as possible see Fahrenheit 9/11 and warns: "The all-out assault... is just getting started."

Tina Brown in the Washington Post: "It speaks to how desperate New York Democrats feel that a New York premiere audience filled not just with credulous movie stars but top-of-the-line editors, First Amendment lawyers and sober-suited Wall Street donors was so forgiving of Moore's raucous cartoon history." But the she adds, following a description of the scene of Bush in the elementary school on the morning of 9/11, "The usual arguments against Moore - that he's intellectually dishonest, that he's a master of the cheap shot, that he's a loudmouthed neo-Marxist boor - are beside the point against the power of such moments." Even so, Brown's convinced The Hunting of the President is the doc that'll last longest as history marches on. But then, that's a story set in her own heyday, too.

Via the SXSW News Reel, the AP's Madison J Gray on Bill Clinton's comments following the New York premiere of Hunting: "When the Berlin wall fell, the perpetual right in America, which always needs an enemy, didn't have an enemy any more, so I had to serve as the next best thing."

Three great days in a row at Bitter Cinema: Did you know that James Joyce opened and ran Ireland's first cinema? Sean Spillane's also found a list of films sorted by their philosophical bent; and Agostino Ambrosio's argument that, while 2001: A Space Odyssey looks "absolutely convincing," the Aries-1B spacecraft is actually all wrong.

"The movie moguls could learn from the mistakes, and the recent successes, of the music guys," argues Paul Boutin. "An iTunes for movies - a well-designed, super user-friendly video store with fast, reliable downloads... would lure consumers into paying. Not by making piracy feel criminal, but by making it feel inconvenient." Also in Slate: Daniel Kimmage: "Although al-Qaida adherents are commonly described as having a medieval worldview, their rhetoric and self-image owe as much to blockbuster movies and Mortal Kombat as to epic tales of seventh-century Islam." And David Edelstein on The Terminal.

Richard Matheson's short story "Duel" appears only in the printed edition of Zoetrope: All-Story, but Steven Spielberg's brief introduction to it is online.

Almost as if in reply to Julia Stiles's reply to Cherry Potter, Katha Pollitt writes in the Nation, "Domestic goddesshood is definitely back, and, if only as a fantasy, a lot of women are buying it: It wasn't men who made Martha Stewart a multimillionaire." Adds Lakshmi Chaudhry at Alternet: "Far beyond the nip-and-tuck culture of present-day femininity, [The Stepford Wives] reveals how the F-word, feminism, has over the course of 30 years become the great unmentionable -- so much so that the remake of a movie structured wholly around the battle of the sexes must work so hard to elide it entirely."

Also at Alternet, Justin Peters: "How is it that the same economy that gives us bland fodder like Vin Diesel, Evanescence, and According To Jim can sometimes suddenly produce the sort of wonderful, bizarre material that we see on Adult Swim?"

An amazing story, wonderfully told: Thomas Keneally recounts how he "stumbled upon.... one of the essential stories of an awful century," Schindler's List. Also in the Guardian:

• Geoffrey Macnab talks to Ethan Hawke about Before Sunset - and so does Leslie Felperin in the Independent.
• Alexis Petridis on Julien Temple's work-in-progress, a history of the Glastonbury festival.
• You need oodles of money - more for rights than for costumes - to make a period piece, writes John Patterson before segueing into a bit on why cultural memory matters.
• The "World Cinema Classics" compilation of movie music is a little thing John L Walters likes. More soundtrack news from Elizabeth Carmody: Super Size Me next Tuesday.

Joel Coen tells the Independent's James Mottram that the brothers will be back on track soon enough. They're contributing to Paris, je t'aime, a series of shorts by the likes of Woody Allen and Jean-Luc Godard. Tom Tykwer's contribution, "True," featuring Natalie Portman and Melchior Beslon, has already been making the rounds at festivals. At any rate, back to the Coens - they've got another Clooney comedy in the works, plus a Cold War story and they're "writing something... I don't know where it's going yet."

Movie City News has set up a page for coverage of the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Matt Dentler explains why celebs and run-o-the-mill film folk alike enjoy going back to Austin to make movies,

Online viewing tip. Negativland's The Mashin' of the Christ, via Steve Gallagher at Filmmaker.

Posted by dwhudson at June 18, 2004 6:59 AM