Newsweek knows its readers.

No points for guessing which edition aims to lure the eyes of American shoppers and which is meant to ring up sales at corner kiosks abroad.

Sean Smith heads up the US edition's Spider-Man 2 cover package with a little conjecture on why the first movie clicked, a little background on the tension between Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi, a little gossip on Kirstin Dunst's "awkward" situation and a final thumbs-up plug. Jeff Giles takes it from there: "Sam Raimi has made a terrific film... a better movie [than the original] by almost every standard."

Though he's got no news for anyone who's been following this blog or thousands of others, David Jefferson's overview of the Fahrenheit 9/11 story is pretty amusing - and appears in the US edition as well. So does Michael Isikoff's brief exercise in fact-checking. But Newsweek's international edition is the one with Christopher Dickey's piece on why Michael Moore is so dearly beloved in Europe. He's got a nice representative set of quotes, too:

• Gilles Delafon: "The problem for the French is that they don't want to appear anti-American, even if they are. So they like Michael Moore because they can say, 'Look, he's an American who's anti-Bush!"
• Rob Blackhurst of London's Foreign Policy Centre: "Moore represents an honest - or at least demagogical - voice which perhaps we [British] lack."
• And: "As Wieland Freund wrote in the Berlin daily Die Welt, Moore has made Germans feel like 'point men for the good cause - finally, for once.'"

No wonder Morgan Spurlock had such a good time here in the German capital, too. Even so: "In Germany, two of the biggest TV stations in the country - SAT 1 and PRO 7 - wanted to do interviews with me. The journalists were ready to go when their bosses pulled the plug. The reason: McD is one of their biggest advertisers and they didn't want to jeopardize losing their money. Scary. Just like America, countries around the world also have free speech... so long as it's okay with the sponsor."

More Sunday reading: Chuck Klosterman in the New York Times Magazine on Some Kind of Monster,

the most in-depth, long-form psychological profile of any rock band that has ever existed. It's also the closest anyone has ever come to making a real-life This Is Spinal Tap. You could even argue that Some Kind of Monster is a rock 'n' roll film that really has nothing to do with music, and that it's actually a 2-hour-20-minute meditation on therapy, celebrity and the possibility that just about everyone is a little damaged. That's because the men who made Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the directors) and its on-screen therapist (a sweater-clad 65-year-old named Phil Towle) seemed to need therapy as much as Metallica.

Also in the paper and magazine:

• Leslie Camhi previews the exhibition "Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985," opening at the Whitney on July 1. She was, writes Camhi, "the most prolific artist-filmmaker of her generation."
• Rob Walker knows why you really want that thin plasma screen: It ain't for the picture quality.
• Kevin Kline's closet is a tad fuller after De-Lovely, reports Ken Gross.
• Charles McGrath defends dodgeball. The game, not the movie.

Sean Spillane points to an "Extraordinary Metafilter uber-post on Nicholas Ray with 42 (yes, 42!) Ray-related links." Also: Sergio Leone on John Ford.

Sean O'Hagan profiles Richard Jobson, the former Skids lead singer who interviewed Luc Besson in 2000 and has now completed two feature films, 16 Years of Alcohol and The Purifiers.

Also in the Observer: Gaby Wood reviews Gavin Lambert's biography of Natalie Wood, Vanessa Thorpe reviews Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past and Stephanie Theobald reviews the gap between what the porn industry pumps out and what women want.

Via Movie City News, Tom Ryan's piece in The Age on Hollywood endings. Particularly good here are Douglas Sirk's 1973 remarks:

That the happy ending counts as something typically American is completely understandable. Especially when one considers that the American spectator, above all others, must not know that he can be a failure, in his profession, in love, in his struggle with himself. So when he is in the dark womb of the auditorium, constantly flanked on both sides by those doors above which shines, in blood-red, ‘EXIT', then he hopes that there is such an emergency exit for the characters with whom he identifies in the film.

Christopher Goodwin profiles Antonio Banderas for the London Times.

Read French? Via filmfilter, une discussion avec l'artiste Abbas Kiarostami, conducted by Shahin Parhami for Hors Champ.

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2004 7:57 AM