Shorts, 7/3.

"So what is it that's incited my most recent animosity towards AICN?" Scott Weinberg tells "an enlightening little story" at Hollywood Bitchslap.

For DV.com, Colin Wilson writes about capturing Alarm Will Sound performing music by Steve Reich on HD video.

The, "if you will, 'rockumentary'" may be staging a comeback, but as Alexis Petridis writes in the cover story of the Guardian's Friday Review, "it might be premature to start talking about a renaissance." Good signs in Petridis's view are Dig!, Metallica: Some Kind of Monsterand Festival Express. Bad signs: Tupac: Resurrection, This is So Solid, Right Here, Right Now. Honorable mentions: End of the Century and Mayor of the Sunset Strip. All this is followed a list of the "rock docs they didn't want you to see," featuring, of course, Cocksucker Blues and three more.

Also in the Guardian:

• Jonathan Jones on Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, "a singular view of the earth."
• "If I'd made that, I'd change my name," a helluva list in which 12 names finger movies they deem stinkers. Nick Broomfield kicks things off by singling out Kill Bill; some pretty obvious choices follow, but it's the surprises that are the most fun. Novelist Nicholas Shakespeare, for example, chooses Blue Velvet; JG Ballard goes for Look Back in Anger and Kill Bill.
• Adrian Wootton on Graham Greene: "Film had a profound influence on his writing, but his work also had a lasting impact on cinema. It is no exaggeration to say that he was one of the founders of film noir."
• David Mamet on violence in the movies.
• Leigh Singer files another one of those stories on Hollywood remakes of Asian films.
• Jessica Winter finds out what it's like to direct a camel.
• John Patterson on Andy Garcia: "[W]here, oh where, is the great career that was surely his for the asking?"

"There are very few films - and I mean this quite seriously - where I haven't emerged physically damaged in a way that I never quite recover from." Fans of John Cleese have always had to put up with his complaining about what a drag it is to be so damn successful, but interviewer Ryan Gilby assures us this time around: "There is a danger that Cleese's words can sound defensive, curmudgeonly, even paranoid, so it should be remembered that he delivers his pronouncements on modern life with disarming warmth and jollity." We'll have to take his word for it.

Also in the Independent, another piece to accompany the James Cagney season at the National Film Theatre, this time from Geoffrey Macnab, and Leslie Felperin files from the Moscow International Film Festival.

Terrence Rafferty: "Now that Bresson's films are finally beginning to trickle out on DVD, a new generation will have its chance to be daunted by this imperious, stubbornly uningratiating body of work, and while I wouldn't suggest that the two most recent releases, A Man Escaped and Lancelot of the Lake (1974), answer to any reasonable definition of fun, they are, if you surrender to their inexorable rhythm and the rigorous perversities of their style, utterly compelling. (And they're short.)"

Also in the New York Times:

• It's settled, then. Jack Valenti's successor will be former Democratic Congressman Dan Glickman. Sharon Waxman reports.
• Alessandra Stanley visits the Museum of Television and Radio.
• Mike Hale on Ruan Ling-yu, "the queen of China's silent film industry, who is still revered by generations of Chinese who have never seen her movies."

George Fasel on Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael: "For anyone who cares about the nature and practice of criticism, I don't see how you can ignore this book."

Matt Langdon: "From a stylistic point of view Tarnation recalls - and even seems to emulate - the work of such underground experimental filmmakers as Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger and Derek Jarman. But what sets it apart is that it is so personal that it makes genuine connections with the audience in ways that none of the films by these other filmmakers do."

Slate's Timothy Noah sees a new genre emerging, the "9/11 Apology Flick," and doesn't like it one bit: "'But wait,' stout defenders of liberty may say. 'If Hollywood stops making big-budget movies about the Crusades and Alexander the Great, the terrorists will have won.' The obvious logical flaw here is that Hollywood had no interest in making such movies before the World Trade Center fell. The urge to make them now seems not only reckless, but perverse."

Via Movie City News, Stephen Hunt's profile of Helen Mirren and Johanna Schneller's argument that Hollywood doesn't understand the demographic it needs most, both in the Globe and Mail.

Greg Allen keeps up with an ongoing trend he calls "Dependent Shorts."

Posted by dwhudson at July 3, 2004 11:40 AM