Shorts, 8/4.

"'Donald Rumsfeld,' wrote some cretin for a big newspaper a few weeks ago, 'told American forces in Baghdad that Abu Ghraib "doesn't represent America. It doesn't represent American values."'" Get real, snaps back George Smith.

Also in the Village Voice:

• Michael Musto romps through the woods in search of a celeb who can guess the ending of The Village before the whole world knows.
• Jessica Winter reviews Maureen Howard's novel, The Silver Screen, and Last Life in the Universe.
• J Hoberman on Code 46, "Michael Winterbottom's stylish, if precious, essay in social sci-fi... [that] feels like Blade Runner on meds," and on two Kino DVD releases Münchhausen and Titanic.
• Michael Atkinson on Collateral ("better than its central idea, and that makes the commercial clichés choke like hair balls") and The Village ("a film a White House full of evangelicals could've written, given a little prodding, a little pot, and a day-long Zone marathon").
• Dennis Lim on Open Water, "a stunt - hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense."
• Jennifer Gonnerman on A Hard Straight, "a riveting new documentary by first-time filmmaker Goro Toshima."
• Ed Halter on Outfoxed, which "gives Fox a taste of its own medicine."
• "Tracking Shots": Laura Sinagra on Stander and The Other World; Joshua Land on Selves and Others: A Portrait of Edward Said and Driving an Arab Street (more from Dave Kehr in the New York Times); and Benjamin Strong on Serpico.

Opening with recollections of television inflicting actual physical damage on its viewers, Susan Gerhard's review of Outfoxed might serve as a sort of sister essay to George Smith's, cited at the top. And then, the crux: "[W]hy do TV viewers like Fox News? Probably the scariest, most important question the film could have answered remained unasked."

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

• Edward E Crouse on Collateral, which "might be the finest HD movie out of Hollywood."
• Johnny Ray Huston on Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis: "Like the recent Warhol-related doc Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story, Highberger's movie is a biography for nonreaders."
• Cheryl Eddy on Open Water, "absolutely a 'shark movie,' and, as it turns out, pretty horrifying."
• David Fear on Garden State, "which could be an instant quirk classic." Zach Braff, by the way, is one of the increasing numbers of filmmakers who blog as their films roll out. And not only is it doing very well on the indieWIRE:BOT, the Cinecultist is a fan, calling the film "a bildungsroman for the emo set."

Speaking of which, while we wait ever so patiently for The Beast, Brian Flemming has released the theme music for the teaser.

Cinemocracy: "One of the best broad-stroke summations on the relationship between Hollywood and Washington comes in this article by Eric Alterman in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly.... Hollywood money, he says, is to the Democratic Party what oil money is to the Republicans [and yet] 'Hollywood contributors are almost alone in not trying to buy themselves anything so concrete as a tax break or a watered-down regulation . . . . [M]ost of the contributions handed out by individual members of the entertainment industry are ideological money that buys them nothing.'"

Matt Haber's take on the piece is far less generous: "Wait, did I drop my copy of The Atlantic and pick up Vanity Fair (circa July 2002)?"

Kenji Mizoguchi's The Lady of Musashino is now available as a Region 2 DVD and Tim Smedley reviews it in Kamera. Also: The title of Tim Applegate's piece, "Denys Arcand Retrospective," is a bit off considering that only two films are taken into account, but still: The Decline of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions are a complete "narrative circle," he argues. Plus: Tim Keane on Chen Kaige's Together and Graeme Cole's review of Jane Barnwell's book, Production Design: Architects of the Screen.

Two wonderful, related entries from Ben Slater in Singapore: First, on Tsai Ming-Liang's Bu San (Goodbye Dragon Inn):

Perhaps Bu San gets to me because I watched it in an old cinema with only a handful of people, with the decrepit staff audibly going about their business around us. Or because I used to work in a cinema with a leaky roof, constantly on the verge of closure, where the taciturn projectionists would disappear for hours on end, and the ticket girls were always in love. And it too was haunted.

This has him recalling his days at The Cube, "a small but beloved cinema that operates on the edge of Bristol's city centre (in England).... But suffice to say, running your own cinema in reality is not at all like you might imagine." Follow his links.

The original Manchurian Candidate was "more kitschy than profound," submits Armond White, but Jonathan Demme "answers the call to make popular art serious again... Demme has caught the temper of our day... With the exception of Altman and Spielberg, no other US filmmaker is as attentive to our diverse polity." Also in the New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz, who quite liked both The Insider and Ali, is less impressed by Michael Mann's Collateral; Proteus, on the other hand, is "a more uncompromising (and certainly more meaningful) experience." And the DVDs.

"The movie, I found, nearly appears to be written almost as if the screenwriter had been given an assignment to create a movie based on a song, and that song is 'The Killing Moon' by Echo and the Bunnymen." The movie, of course, is Donnie Darko, and Sarah is very seriously into it and its soundtrack as well. That's via Marleigh's Hyperkinetic, where you'll also find news that Herschell Gordon Lewis is writing and directing a feature for the first time in over 30 years: Grim Fairy Tales: Win, Lose or Die.

The Guardian selects a few nver-before-seen photos Leni Riefenstahl shot at the 1936 Olympics from a broader retrospective at the Atlas Gallery. Also in the paper: Michael Thornton remembers Margo McLennan and Sean Clarke on the "wave of social paranoia playing as backdrop to the summer's cinema schedules."

Ben Stiller's brownface performance in Anchorman prompts Omayra Zaragoza Cruz to ask, "[I]s it necessary that Latinos represent Latinos? Or is it sufficient that Latinos be represented regardless of who plays them? How does one judge the quality of the representations on offer?" Also in PopMatters: Michael Abernethy on why TV entertainment "news" sucks.

As told by Anne Thompson in the New York Times, and with a dash of further interpretation, the story behind We Don't Live Here Anymore is, among other things, something of a snapshot, a graph of the history of American film since the 70s. When, back in 1979, Larry Gross wrote the screenplay, adapting three novellas by André Dubus about infidelity shot through with what Naomi Watts calls "the god-awful truth," he thought he was working on a "mainstream studio movie." Too late; no one would risk it until the indie movement had aged to the point that it was telling stories about people a tad older than convenience store clerks and such. At any rate, Peter Brunette gives the film a generally positive review in indieWIRE.

Then, via Movie City News, Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter: "From Miramax's co-production of Martin Scorsese's $100 million epic The Aviator at one extreme to Jonathan Caouette's $218 Tarnation at the other, the definitions of Hollywood and Indiewood have never been more unclear."

Back in the NYT: Neil MacFarquhar reports on Arab reaction to Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sharon Waxman asks Vincent Gallo about the billboard on Sunset Boulevard plugging The Brown Bunny. Just checked, and sure enough, a first guess, Defamer, has a photo. Eugene Hernandez passes along word that Gallo and Roger Ebert have met and "buried the hatchet."

"August is Korean Film Month in New York City," announces a gleeful Filmbrain, who's got the lowdown on the first of three series, this one running through the 13th. The New York Korean Film Festival follows: August 13 - 19 at the Imaginasian Theater and August 20 - 22 at BAM.

"I like John and Godard and not Paul and Truffaut," says Jay Anania. Ben Smith checks in with John Edwards's brother-in-law for the New York Observer.

Online viewing tip. A Japanese trailer for Wong Kar-Wai's 2046. Via The Movie Blog.

Posted by dwhudson at August 4, 2004 7:33 AM