Shorts, 7/12.

"I want to make a great film," Robert Greenwald tells Robert S Boynton in the New York Times Magazine. ''But I'd like to do so without losing my house and spending the rest of my life in court." Boynton explains: "Over the past couple of years, Greenwald has developed a ''guerrilla'' method of documentary filmmaking, creating timely political films on short schedules and small budgets and then promoting and selling them on DVD through partnerships with grass-roots political organizations like MoveOn.org." His latest is Outfoxed, "an obsessively researched expose of the ways in which Fox News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its coverage to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch." But will Murdoch let him get away with it? The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz remains skeptical regarding Greenwald's motivations and techniques. But then, Greenwald isn't claiming to be fair and balanced, is he?

More from Alternet executive editor Don Hazen, who asks, "Is it possible that Murdoch is doing us a favor by bringing media politics out in the open, and forcing the rest of corporate media, often content to hide behind an illusion of objectivity, to be more aggressive in support of some of its values, or at least be more feisty?"

David Thomson in the Independent: "Sooner or later, I hope, some venue will play these two films together - what a night they would have made on the old Z channel in Los Angeles. The films are Sam Peckinpah's West: Legacy of a Hollywood Renegade (directed by Tom Thurman) and Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (directed by Xan Cassavetes). They are as good as, or better than, most fiction films playing now."

Interviews with doc-makers at indieWIRE: Lisa Bear talks to Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky about Metallica: Some Kind of Monster; Lily Oei chats with Stacy Peralta about Riding Giants. Also: Sandra Ogle previews the New York Video Festival (July 14 through 18).

Chris Hastings and Roya Nikkhah report in the Telegraph (free registration req'd) that John Schlesinger's papers reveal that he pretty much blamed Madonna for doing him in. She was such a pain during the making of his last film, The Next Best Thing, that he suffered a heart attack from which he never fully recovered before dying in July 2003.

Harriet Lane tells the breezy story behind The Second Assistant, "another tale of wage slaves trapped on the hamster wheel of corporate humiliation in a supposedly glamorous industry." Only this time, it's Hollywood.

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• "Che lives! all right, but not in the way he or his fellow revolutionaries could ever have imagined in their worst nightmares. He has become a global brand." Sean O'Hagan considers the "Christ-like" image, as Jorge Castañeda calls it, and its appearance on the screen in The Motorcycle Diaries and two more films coming down the pipe.
• Mark Kermode probes the cinematic endurance of another "countercultural icon," Charles Manson.
• Geoffrey Macnab celebrates the restoration of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One.
• Gaby Wood profiles Clive Owen; Polly Vernon interviews Camilla Rutherford.
• Blur bassist Alex James just wild about Fahrenheit 9/11.
• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Orson Welles's The Trial.

Back to the New York Times: Will Ferrell ambushes CNBC and anchorwoman Sue Herera seems quite pleasantly surprised, reports Jacques Steinberg.

Posted by dwhudson at July 12, 2004 1:22 PM