Shorts, 8/9.

The teaser trailer for Brian Flemming's The Beast is now online. If it seems a bit premature - the film, after all, won't premiere until 6-6-06 - the site, a pretty thorough one for what's clearly a very independent movie, offers a lot to do in the meantime, what with an elaborately structured community, a newsletter and so on. What you definitely don't want to do is overlook that "Click for more information" link on the "About" page.

You can already imagine the ruckus The Beast will stir up, starting in churches and then spreading throughout Mel Gibson's constituency. As it happens, Richard Corliss has a piece in this week's issue of Time on a few spots in the country where such run-ins are defused:

For decades, America has embraced a baffling contradiction. The majority of its people are churchgoing Christians, many of them evangelical. Yet its mainstream pop culture, especially film, is secular at best, often raw and irreligious. In many movies, piety is for wimps, and the clergy are depicted as oafs and predators. It's hard to see those two vibrant strains of society ever coexisting, learning from each other.

Yet the two are not only meeting; they're also sitting down and breaking bread together.

Sidebar: Carolina A Miranda points to Christian readings of the summer's hits. Unrelated: John Cloud profiles Peter Krause.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay passes along word of another new site from an indie filmmaker, Alison Murray. Her debut feature, Mouth to Mouth is executive produced by Atom Egoyan.

And via Steve Gallagher, the D-Word's Doug Block:

We're pleased to welcome two leading practitioners of the political documentary, Academy Award-winner Pamela Yates (Witness to War, Presumed Guilty) and Jehane Noujaim (Startup.com, Control Room) for what's sure to be a provocative week-long discussion. Feel free to join in with your questions and observations on the art, the ethics and, yes, the business of political docs.

That online discussion starts today and runs through Friday.

Morgan Spurlock is still a very, very busy man. Recently, he's shown Super Size Me to oodles of the nation's lawmakers, travelled to Brazil and fought off unwanted advances from Subway.

For Another Magazine, Jefferson Hack asks Samantha Morton, "What is it about Gena Rowlands?" It's one of three brief interviews with actresses about actresses. In the other two, Hack talks to Tilda Swinton about Judy Holliday and to Liv Tyler about Jeanne Moreau.

The big news for the movies section at the New York Times is that Manohla Dargis has turned in her first review: Collateral, set, as it happens, in Los Angeles, the city she chose years ago over New York. In a sort of accompanying Sunday read, AO Scott profiles Michael Mann and traces a few themes running throughout his oeuvre.

Also in the NYT:

• Anne Thompson gets to the bottom of Incident at Loch Ness, a film Werner Herzog calls an "exercise in truth interacting with facts." As to what that means exactly, well into her story, Thompson draws a line: "Read on only if you are interested in clearing up the mystery."
• Terrence Rafferty: "The Film Society of Lincoln Center is calling its gratifyingly large retrospective of the director Anthony Mann 'Dark Streets and Vast Horizons,' a rubric that pretty accurately evokes the elusive, almost self-contradictory nature of this remarkable filmmaker's career."
• Sylviane Gold interviews Bryce Dallas Howard, who not only remarks that her parents are "hippies," but also that she chose to work with Lars von Trier and M Night Shyamalan because, "what I want to do is be a part of works that are unignorable. I couldn't be less interested in how people receive it, honestly. As long as it's unignorable."
• "The specter of male impotence is at the heart of the matter, as are stories of wobbly men and take-charge women." Molly Haskell considers movies about conspiracies.
• David Edelstein has a fun piece on the cult of The Big Lebowski, now threateningly close to "going mainstream."
• Stuart Elliott and Ken Belson file an update on TiVo's ongoing troubles.
• Sharon Waxman's box office report.
• Kathryn L Shattuck: Alexander Hammid, 1907 - 2004.
• Ben Sisario remembers Geraldine Peroni. More from Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Aaron Dobbs and Lily Oei are the guest interviewers at the Gothamist this week. Their first interviewee: Producer Diana Williams.

"Mark Ruffalo is the thinking woman's sex symbol." Heather Havrilesky flirts with him for Salon.

Back in 1988, Thomas Pynchon wrote: "Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love 'forever,' but actually to follow through on it - to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious time where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel García Márquez's new novel Love in the Time of Cholera, one on which he delivers, and triumphantly." And now, despite resisting temptation all these years, García Márquez has sold the film rights to his novel. Jo Tuckman reports. Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• "Benjamin Vanderford had a funny way of making a point about the media: he filmed his own fake beheading and distributed the video over the internet." Jamie Doward reports.
• Alex Cox caught Man on Fire on a plane a few days ago and was profoundly disturbed. In short, he suspects the film is intended as propaganda, perhaps with the support of the US government, and its goal is to loosen us up to the idea that torture is an acceptable means of fighting the war on terror.
• AL Kennedy: "[T]he prison scenes in US police dramas lack the tang of genuine penitentiaries - no one is hooded with urine-soaked bags, strapped naked to chairs for hours, sodomised, traded for favours or routinely doused with pepper spray and beaten in filthy cells."
• Halfway into the seven-week shoot in London, Simon Garfield checks in with Woody Allen when the sun is out (Woody prefers to shoot under overcast skies) to chat about how his current project is going.
• BrianCox, one of the stars of the film, "is 58, but his current schedule would exhaust three teenagers." Leo Benedictus gets 45 minutes.
• Brian Logan rounds up questions submitted to Richard Pryor by up-n-coming comics in the run-up to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where an award will be given "to the outstanding ethnic minority comedy act."
• Luke Harding reports on a recently discovered 40-minute film in which Laurel and Hardy speak German.
• Emma Brockes has a rather depressing encounter with Christian Slater.
• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: The Birds.
• Halle Berry is an unlikely star, writes John Patterson, but she could make the most of it by turning to comedy.
• David Aaronovitch offers a political reading of Spider-Man 2.
• "Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are major players in the literary world." Liz Hoggard explains.
• Peter Conrad and John Berger on Henri Cartier-Bresson.

IndieWIRE's Wendy Mitchell makes the most of her ten minutes with Michael Winterbottom. As for his latest film, Code 46, Peter Brunette writes, it "has so many ideas jammed into it that most viewers will constantly feel, from the beginning to the end of the film, that they're missing something. It doesn't matter. The ideas that Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce do successfully convey are so imaginatively, sociopolitically, and - above all - cinematically rich that you leave the theater overwhelmed with new thoughts and heady sense of fresh visceral sensation."

Also at iW: Wendy Mitchell reports that ThinkFilm is picking up George Butler's Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry.

Tom Hall on Los Angeles Plays Itself: "[W]hile [Thom] Andersen's film is highly entertaining and a must-see for film fans as well as anyone interested in the history of urban space and development, in my mind, his intellectual approach to the question of representation really misses the boat."

Sam Ingleby asks Shane Danielson, director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (August 18 - 29) to chose a fest top ten. Also in the Independent:

• Jennifer Rodger asks Mark S Waters to compare one good and one bad scene of his choosing. He goes for Nancy Meyers's The Parent Trap (good) and Barbra Streisand's The Prince of Tides (bad).
• Andrew Gumbel joins the crowd taking yet another look at Showgirls and then explains the success of Outfoxed to his British readers.
• Interviews: Andrew Buncombe with Matt Damon and Diane Taylor with Ken Loach.

Robert Davis on "a little piece of perfection," Last Life in the Universe: "Ratanaruang orchestrates his characters to attract or repel each other like magnets spinning on axes, adjusting the angles to arrive at an optimally clever conclusion. The movie feels something like Kenji's apartment, overly neat, and I kept hoping that someone would knock things over, but every time someone did, the pieces fell right into place."

Alan Schroeder, author of Celebrity-in-Chief: How Show Business Took Over the White House, is drawing quite a rambunctious crowd in the comments trailing his article "Bush's Celebrity Problem" over at Cinemocracy.

Two angles on Jack Valenti's legacy figures heavily at Movie City News: David Poland asserts that Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, who lays out an argument against the MPAA's handling of the piracy problem in Filmmaker, "so misguided and so anxious to mislead others that he is dangerous... truly dangerous." And Gary Dretzka considers the MPAA ratings Valenti bequeathed to the industry over 35 years ago.

Also: Leonard Klady reviews Collateral and Michael Mann tells Ray Pride that shooting in a cab is an opportunity, not a limitation, and what's more, "Motion picture film could not see the world that these characters inhabit. It can't see into the night. The environments, where there's a red desert of depopulated refineries just at the moment when Max and Vincent become personal for the first time. Film can't see that stuff. [Digital technology is] a very painterly medium." And via MCN:

• Manchurian Global, writes Frank Ahrens in the Washington Post, "is the latest of a long line of corporations, factual and fictional, that have served the cinema as capitalist villains, either as active agents of evil or omnipresent dehumanizers of the human soul."
• The San Francisco Chronicle's Steven Winn runs down the list of political docs out and about at the moment and wonders where this trend might be going.
• Mark Jurkowitz in the Boston Globe on the ongoing war between journalists and publicists.
• Michael Ventre rounds up examples of "good guys gone bad" (e.g., Cruise in Collateral) for MSNBC.
• The Toronto Star's Peter Howell offers a bit of advice and a few words of warning to Ron Howard as he prepares to adapt The Da Vinci Code.

Stuart Klawans's takes on I, Robot, Los Angeles Plays Itself and The Bourne Supremacy are now up at the Nation's site.

Echoing another one-on-one with another indie idol (Kevin Smith, when Jersey Girl was released), Newsweek's David Ansen presents the problems he has with She Hate Me to Spike Lee.

Online viewing tip. The Movie Blog, which points to producer Taka Ichise's new site, J-Horror Theater, is on a trailer kick. Scroll up, scroll down, they're all around.

Posted by dwhudson at August 9, 2004 7:39 AM