Shorts, 6/23.

With its languorous shots of the American landscape, I Was a Soldier (1970), his portrait of three American boys returned from the darkness of Vietnam, is like a Terrence Malick picture in miniature. A Life Apart (1973), an unpatronising document of working-class life, gave voice to the hopes and fears of a group of Lancashire trawler men. Living on the Edge (1987) told the stories of three British families and the slow disappearance of their livelihoods and self-respect, and is the most lyrical and unemphatic denunciation of Thatcherism that you're likely to see. Lockerbie - A Night Remembered (1998) allows members of that decimated community to give their own accounts of the events of 21 December 1988, and in doing so, makes amends for all the hit-and-run TV journalism they suffered in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. A crying shame, then, that Grigsby now finds it almost impossible to find work in the medium to which he has contributed so much.

A few weeks ago, Wendy Ide interviewed Grigsby for the London Times; and there's a bit more to explore at the BFI's screenonline.

IndieWIRE's Wendy Mitchell turns in a lengthy report on CineVegas. Great stuff on the films and the stars, but you've got to love this sentence: "When a hooker is only a phone call away, endless buffet food is beckoning, and casinos are enticing you with free drinks and the lure of winning big at craps, it can be hard to concentrate on films."

In other fest news, a reminder that Movie City News has a page devoted to the Los Angeles Film Festival, where the most recent feature-length entries are Gary Dretzka's review of The Hunting of the President and Leonard Klady's interview with Yasuaki Nakajima, whose feature debut is After the Apocalypse.

Doug Cummings reviews four films he's caught at LAFF.

Anthony Kaufman notes that the makers of The Corporation are trying to get their trailer added to Apple's collection. Send a kind request to trailers@mac.com.

In the Guardian, Christopher Reed remembers horror producer Max Rosenberg, who was also an early distributor of foreign film to US art houses.

Collected in Stay Free: Silly things people have done imitating things they've seen on TV and in the movies. The magazine's readers have also sent in their own confessions and anecdotes.

In the Village Voice:

• Reviews, long and short: J Hoberman on The Corporation and two films that sound a lot more intriguing than what you find at the page for Erró at the Grey Art Gallery, where they're showing; Michael Atkinson on Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf (see also: Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic); Jessica Winter on Nick Cassavetes's The Notebook; Dennis Lim on Alain Guiraudie's No Rest for the Brave; Joshua Land on Kristian Levring's The Intended; Mark Holcomb on Chris Delaporte's Kaena: The Prophecy; Elizabeth Zimmer on Christopher Herrmann's Ghostlight; Ed Park on Rawson Marshall Thurber's Dodgeball; and David Ng on Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers.

• Previews: Jessica Winter on the Bruno Ganz retrospective at the Walter Reade and Leslie Camhi on the "Premiere Brazil!" series at the Film Forum.

• B Kite reviews Koji Suzuki's Spiral, the second novel in the trilogy that began with Ring.

"Is it possible that The Leopard is the greatest movie ever made?" asks Matthew Wilder in the City Pages. "The Criterion Collection's invaluable new DVD - a dream from which you never want to wake - makes a persuasive case."

Billy Elliot: The Musical. In London's West End in March, reports the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins.

At Alternet, Silja JA Talvi talks to documentary filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman about their new one, Thirst. It's like a primer on the "water rush," a struggle you don't hear much about yet, but as Talvi writes, the struggle over control of global water supplies promises to become "one of the most volatile and potentially galvanizing issues of the 21st century."

For the New York Observer, George Gurley meets the rambunctious Bai Ling: "I have eight little girls in me. They are wearing miniskirts, they’re very cute, always dressed up. I am just a house for them to live."

Chuck Stephens in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "At once a self-mocking documentary about the filmmaking process generally, a portrait of the very different attitudes and aptitudes beneath [Lars] von Trier's and [Jørgen] Leth's working methods in particular, and a feature-length experimental narrative that takes much pleasure in withholding as much information as it manages to kaleidoscope together, The Five Obstructions merges high-concept comedy with potentially ego-bruising psychodrama, resulting in a film that seems somehow both cryptic and enlightening." Also: Cheryl Eddy on The Notebook.

Mysterium Occupation, a trilogy set in Belarus during WWII which was shown earlier this year in Rotterdam, has been invited to the Moscow International Film Festival. Which has led to its being banned at home. Anna Malpas reports in the Moscow Times.

"Until I was 16, I wanted to be Holden Caulfield; from 16 to 23, I wanted to be Neal Cassady. I wasn’t cool enough. I guess after 23, I tried to be me." Ethan Hawke is on the cover of New York. Vanessa Grigoriadis does the honors.

Morgan Spurlock is off to Europe again, and he's packing his wit: "Right now I am working on my next film: eating nothing but airplane food for 30 days straight. It's a horror film."

From Tagline, Stephen Reid points to a "mammoth" interview in Comics Continuum with Sam Raimi.

Filmbrain reviews one of two shorts Stanley Kubrick made in 1951; "the far superior Day of the Flight" is up next.

Online listening tip. Greg Allen notes that WNYC's Sara Fishko has been talking movies lately.

Major online viewing tip. Chuck Olsen has posted two more clips from Blogumentary.

Posted by dwhudson at June 23, 2004 1:13 PM