Republicans and shorts.

"[T]he Democrats may know how to make a movie in Hollywood, but the Republicans have long since perfected the art of making a movie in 'life.'" J Hoberman buckles up as the week rolls on:

Is master terrorist Osama at large? Is Afghanistan ungovernable and Iraq a free-fire zone? Do the North Koreans still have their nukes and are the Iranians busy building theirs? Does that anthrax guy roam free? And what about the dirty bomb? Who cares - one way or another, New York City has been pacified! Republicans rule! Smoke and mirrors, or tear-gas canisters and TV cameras? Either way, the mission is accomplished.

Meanwhile, Michael Moore has turned in his first and second USA Today column covering the show. Salon's Amy Reiter explains how he landed the gig. In brief, the paper's assigned a conservative, Jonah Goldberg, to cover the Democrats' convention last month, so now it's a liberal's turn. And via Alternet, the Nation's John Nichols considers the "McCain vs Moore" moment Moore himself addresses in that second column and notes that it isn't often that "a film achieves the level of public awareness that leads a prominent politician to attack its maker in a primetime convention speech. And it is certainly not common for the filmmaker to be in a position to respond in real time."

This also brings up another Fahrenheit 9/11 pointer, by the way. (Let's face it; this is a film people are going to be talking about and referring to for some time.) Marco Roth, in n+1, offers a clear-the-tables assessment of the set of dilemmas the film presents to the left field.

No surprises in Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech last night - for a consideration of the role he's playing at the convention, see Cinemocracy - but as Bruce Weber reports in the New York Times the mere presence of Ron Silver at the convention is a surprise to many. Also: Mark Landler on German producer Thomas Schühly's years-long effort to get Alexander made and two reviews: Stephen Holden on Vanity Fair and Anita Gates on Everybody Says I'm Fine!

Back to the Village Voice:

• Michael Musto sips tea with John Waters and Tracey Ullman.
• J Hoberman on Red Lights ("an exceedingly mordant comedy"), Suspect Zero ("Merhige... shows his facility as a hack") and Judex ("remains unsettling").
• Michael Atkinson on the "Cairo Tales: Discovering Salah Abou Seif & Recent Cinema from the Arab World" series ("You could think of him as Cairo's answer to Stanley Kramer") and on Darius Mehrjui's "two earlier, most revered masterpieces," The Cow and Hamoun.
• Ed Park: "Though it's hard to imagine a more manipulative film, Tae Guk Gi has a formidable intensity, as if to burn the adjective off the last century's 'forgotten' war." In the New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz adds: "Once you accept its operatic contrivances - and remind yourself of how much slack you'd cut if it were a Hollywood blockbuster with handsome Anglo stars - you may marvel, as I did, at the film's sheer momentum and emotional purity."
• Leslie Camhi on Vanity Fair: "The colonial presence is felt everywhere in Nair's movie." Armond White in the NYP: "What's the point of making a long movie of such unrelenting heartlessness?" Anyway: indieWIRE's Wendy Mitchell interviews Mira Nair.
• Jessica Winter on Wicker Park, "Paul McGuigan's dippy romantic thriller."
• "Tracking Shots" and briefs: Ben Kenigsberg on Anacondas, Marc Holcomb on Warriors of Heaven and Earth, Ward Harkavy on Persons of Interest, David Ng on Remember Me, My Love, David Blaylock on Everybody Says I'm Fine, Joshua Land on FDNY Dream Bike and Andrei Zagdansky's Six Days and Jorge Morales on Rockets Redglare!.

One more from the NYP: Saul Austerlitz previews the "Political Campaigns on Film" series at the American Museum of the Moving Image.

It's an unusual move, but it works well in the case of a film like The Brown Bunny, a divider, not a uniter. The San Francisco Bay Guardian offers six shortish takes from six different critics. Also: Dennis Harvey on Vanity Fair and Andrew Repasky McElhinney: "Like the longer 'restored' Touch of Evil (1998) and The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen (2000), Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut has much more in it, but the result is far less satisfying." But Susan Gerhard is more patient; while she doesn't find the new cut "adds or subtracts much," it nonetheless provides an opportunity to consider why the film hasn't gone the way of most initial box office disappointments.

Speaking of Donnie Darko, Ben Slater's posted a terrific entry on Hi-Res, the design team behind donniedarko.com and a slew of other intriguing and seductive sites for films (see their showreel at the site): "It would be unfortunate if this kind of unclassifiable hybrid art/design/interactive/multimedia/narrative/game/cinema is always in the service of corporate or promotional interests - even if a company like Hi-Res can continue to successfully steer their vision past marketing teams with nary a scratch. Because it has rich potential, and it feels like the future."

George Fasel: "If you're going to take an extended urban vacation and want films to be a part of your entertainment, it's harder to do better than Paris." Then again, there's New York. See, for example, Tom Hall's day at the movies.

Todd Haynes interviewing Brian Eno? It's enough to think about getting over to NYC some way, somehow on October 7. Filmmaker's Steve Gallagher sends out the alert: Three evenings on music and the moving image, beginning September 23 at MoMA. The other two: Wallace Shawn talking with Laurie Anderson and Ed Halter interviewing Michel Gondry.

Charles C Mann in Wired:

In coming months, anime's three most prominent directors will release major films in the US. [Mamoru] Oshii's Innocence will hit theaters in September. Soon afterward, Katsuhiro Otomo will debut Steamboy, an Indiana Jones-style adventure that takes place in an alternative Victorian age where turbo unicycles and pressure-powered jetpacks battle for supremacy. Then Hayao Miyazaki will deliver Howl's Moving Castle, about a teenage girl who flees a curse by hiding in a gigantic mechanical castle that prowls about on insect-like legs. In addition, Disney will issue three older Miyazaki films on DVD early next year, two of which have never before been released in the US.

The confluence of these films could finally put anime at center stage in a venue where success so far has been elusive: the box office.

Meanwhile, back in Japan, the popular anime series is being adapted as a live action feature. The Movie Blog's Bubba points to the site, where you can see a teaser. In fact, Bubba's loaded with trailers - Café Lumiere and Survive Style 5, for example - and info on, among other films, Tsui Hark's The Seven Swords and the Narnia movies.

"I must turn to theory, even though it may sound somewhat strange when one deals with a motion picture so blatantly anti-theoretical." Natalia Skradol in Film-Philosophy: "Adaptation, 'Adaptation' and Adaptation: Zizek and the Commonplace." In 1998, F-P ran Andrew Murphie's essay on a collection Zizek edited, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, which I bring up as a segue to the cinetrix's latest find, Jim Emerson's "Plumbing the Depths: How the movies use plumbing as a pipeline to the subconscious," in which we learn that a toilet had never been seen on screen before Hitchcock's Psycho.

The Edinburgh fest has wrapped and the awards have been announced. The Guardian New Directors Award has gone to Morgan Spurlock, and Andrew Pulver explains how the paper whittled down its list. Also in the Guardian: Michael Mann tells Dan Glaister why Collateral begins with the third act: "Dr Strangelove's the same, in that it begins with the ending. Sterling Hayden launches, that's it, they're gone. Two acts probably built up to that."

Jonathan Romney, too, looks back on Edinburgh and recalls the films that made the greatest impressions. Also in the Independent: David Thomson's been thinking about 1954, about Blackboard Jungle, James Dean, Elvis.

Doug Cummings on Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds and The Far Side of the Moon, "beautifully constructed meditations on the modern world and humanity's place in it."

Back to USA Today: Mike Snider updates readers on a few of Quentin Tarantino's plans, especially with regard to future versions of Kill Bill. Via Movie City News, where Ray Pride writes up a slew of films you're likely to be interested in.

In German: For Spiegel Online, Ulf Lippitz interviews Oday Rasheed, who's directed Underexposure, the first film shot in post-Saddam Iraq.

Online viewing tip. Via Cyndi Greening, the trailer for Der Ostwind.

And finally, a bit of self-reflexive fun. Jim Biancolo has sent along word that folks at his site, Listology, are working hard to identify all the films that are represented in the GreenCine Daily header graphic up at the top there. Now's an excellent time to point out that it was designed by GC's graphics wiz Kenny Aber, who's impressed by the number they've nailed so far...

Posted by dwhudson at September 1, 2004 12:20 PM