Shorts, 9/15.

In Le Monde diplomatique, Pascal Ménoret introduces Tash Ma Tash, a Saudi comedy series clerics hate but audiences love. Also:

Saudi Arabia's first cinema director is a woman. Thanks to her family's support, she can work independently. She fell in love with cinema while studying in Cairo. Of course all filmmakers are voyeurs, but in Saudi Arabia, that cliché's full meaning becomes clear. Her work, like the society, is underground, and her merit all the greater for it.

Her name is Hayfa al-Mansour; click to see her site, read about her in the foreign press and even see two shorts and clips from a longer work.

Brief but beefy: Andrea Meyer's interview with John Sayles for IFC News.

"The DVD boom hasn't peaked, and yet, even for the 'discerning cinephile,' it's getting hard to keep up with the flow of great discs." At Masters of Cinema, Nick Wrigley introduces a highly bookmarkable page, a collection of write-ups on relatively recent ("the last few years") releases on DVD, all regions, from an impressive roster of critics, curators, editors and even a couple of restorers.

Of course, there are still rich territories where even the echoes of the DVD boom have yet to be heard. Just as one of many examples, Adam Hartzell pleads the case for Sopyonje at Koreanfilm.org.

Toronto round-up:

• Just past the halfway mark now, Anthony Kaufman glances back at the highlights so far at indieWIRE. Eugene Hernandez reports on two acquisitions: Focus Features has picked up Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love; and Newmarket has gone for Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart. Meanwhile six prominent European directors have chatted about making movies in a post-9/11 world; Brian Brooks took notes.

• iW reviews: Hernandez writes that Alexander Payne and screenwriter Jim Taylor's Sideways is "even better" than Election and About Schmidt and Peter Brunette finds Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice "for the most part... serviceable and beautifully mounted." As for Palindromes, "It's still too early to muster a definitive or even definite opinion of the film.... What can be assayed here therefore is little more than a first description, an interim report."

• At Movie City News, Leonard Klady notes that studios are rethinking their relationships with festivals and David Poland is reviewing and blogging. And via MCN, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times on David Gordon Green's Undertow: "[T]his film is a masterpiece."

• At the essential Twitch: Reviews of three films each from Opus and Todd, plus two from Nick. And lots of non-Toronto-related news, too.

• For the Detroit News, Tom Long writes up a thorough half-time review of the fest and hands out awards such as "Most Emaciated Performance." Via the indieWIRE torontoBLOG.

• Tom Hall lists his "highlights of the week so far."

• Mr. Rex Reed.

George Thomas verifies "the floating hypothesis that Mahesh Manjrekar's 'original' flick Rakht" is essentially a remake of Sam Raimi's The Gift.

Cinema Minima's Mumbai correspondent, Wilfred Lobo, has been posting more frequently recently; lots and lots of news from Bollywood. And via Cinema Minima, by way of Hollywood Liberation Army, John Virata for Digital Video Editing: "Now accelerate the whole notion of digital moviemaking; scriptwriting and revising, shooting, editing, production and post production, effects, and do it all in 24 hours.... You have entered the zone of the 24 hour film festival."

Greg Allen's entry on Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous is a rush.

Johnny Ray Huston meets Pen-ek Ratanaruang to talk about Last Life in the Universe, Asano Tadanobu - and reading.

Also in this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian:

• Susan Gerhard on Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America, currently touring the continent, "a movie that is both elegiac and feral, a tribute to Brower the environmental activist working the system like it's an extreme sport."
• Cheryl Eddy segues away from Bush's Brain: "Political-doc burnout is a legitimate complaint right about now, which is why writer-director John Sayles's latest jigsaw puzzle of a movie, Silver City, is so well-timed." Also, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: "[T]he most gorgeous scenery in the world can't make up for a less-than-inspiring story."
• Patrick Macias on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, which evidently "feels about as state-of-the-art as an old issue of Heavy Metal gathering dust in the back of the comic shop."
• In the Pacific Film Archive's "Neo-Eiga: New Japanese Cinema" series, Kimberly Chun discovers "dis-ease" in "the lives of young Japanese women struggling for defined identities amid fluctuating gender roles, designer fashion, and the protracted recession of the past decade."

"So, seatbelts, people: The almighty Year of Radical Movie Chic rolls thunderously onward." Michael Atkinson introduces the Village Voice's preview of the collision of the electoral and fall movie seasons: Noteworthy titles, listed and blurbed in order of their upcoming release.

Also in the Voice:

• J Hoberman on Goodbye Dragon Inn ("a movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence"), GITS2: Innocence ("You can call me fanboy, but this is the best anime I've ever seen") and TCM's 24-hour "Ulmerthon," a birthday bash for "Murnau's onetime set-builder and aesthetic heir," Edgar G Ulmer.
• Dennis Lim on Infernal Affairs ("[Andy] Lau and [Tony] Leung, lupine and doe-eyed respectively, spark fireworks that make Heat's De Niro-Pacino summit look like an awkward blind date"), plus II ("a madly cross-cutting prequel") and III ("the film runs in circles before finally collapsing from exhaustion").
• Atkinson again, on Silver City ("[a]n ambitious but chickenhearted state of the union address"), Cellular ("buoyant, pleasantly pulpy") and Incident at Loch Ness, definitely on my must-see list.
• Admiring the resilience of the Argentinean film industry, Jorge Morales previews "LatinBeat 2004: Recent Films From Latin America."
• Poor Jessica Winter is assigned Working Title's latest "Britcom made for export," Wimbledon.
• "Tracking Shots": B Kite on The Models of Pickpocket, Laura Sinagra on Particles of Truth, Ed Park on Head in the Clouds, David Blaylock on Merci Docteur Rey, Akiva Gottlieb on Cowboys & Angels and Ben Kenigsberg on Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
• "[N]ervy Neve never says never," says Michael Musto.

In the New York Press:

• Lionel Beehner discovers dueling Spider-Mans in Times Square.
• Armond White on Mr. 3000 ("nearly becomes an embarrassment of riches") and Zorba the Greek (Quinn's Zorba "is, indeed, the Life Force in scruffy human form").
• Matt Zoller Seitz on Cellular and Paparazzi: "[N]either movie can overcome lazy plotting, weak performances and a prosaic single-mindedness that's the antithesis of good pop art."
• Saul Austerlitz on the FW Murnau series at Film Forum and Reconstruction ("too precious by half").
• Jim Knipfel on The Tin Drum, "a sprawling, grim, surreal, almost completely hopeless masterpiece that I love as much now (though for different reasons) as I did when I was 14."
• Mark Ames reviews the preview for First Daughter.

Morgan Falconer's piece in the Independent on Kenneth Anger isn't nearly as long or rewarding as Sanjiv Bhattacharya's in the Observer last month, but if you're in a hurry, there you go. Also in the Independent: Sholto Byrnes talks politics with Danny Glover.

Steve Rosen reviews Nile Southern's The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy.

Der Untergang is a "straightforward, rather conventional drama," writes Mark Landler: "That Hitler has become acceptable grist for a piece of mainstream entertainment, rather than a sober documentary or a biting satire - as it has been the more customary treatment of the Führer in postwar Germany - attests to how far the Germans have come in laying to rest their ghosts."

Also in the New York Times:

• Sharon Waxman reports on George Butler's scramble to shape Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry into the film he wants it to be in the nick of time.
• Rated R: Republicans in Hollywood. Alessandra Stanley sheds few tears for them.
• Andrew Ross Sorkin on Sony's "11th hour" winning bid for MGM. Following up, Sorkin and Ken Belson report that the acquisition will give Sony "considerable power in its fight to set the format for the next generation of digital video discs."
• Laura M Holson's still on the Eisner story; some Disney board members want him out sooner rather than later.

Vince Keenan on THX 1138: "Lucas's movie is so thoroughly depersonalized that if you beseeched its gods, you'd soon find yourself trapped in their voicemail. And I mean that as a high compliment."

"A new John Waters movie is signs for eager anticipation but a whole blog?" wonders the Cinecultist.

Online viewing tip. Slowtron's "How to BBQ a Man."

Posted by dwhudson at September 15, 2004 9:42 AM