Yes Men and shorts.

Two fresh and fine feature stories make today the day of The Yes Men. In Salon, Shana Ting Lipton tells their story, with particular emphasis on their origins as online activists.

Then there's Doug Harvey lively piece in the LA Weekly:

Inspiring, outrageously funny, suspenseful and surprisingly hopeful, The Yes Men movie is the latest installment in what has emerged as America’s newest version of the town meeting - theatrically released political documentaries. And while this West Coast jaunt is ostensibly a promotional tour for the film, the Yes Men, as usual, have another agenda hidden in plain view.

Rather than embark on a traditional promo tour for the film, [Mike] Bonanno and [Andy] Bichlbaum decided to stage the "Yes, Bush Can!" campaign - a grassroots initiative to "explain Bush's policies more clearly and honestly than the official campaign ever could."

The Yes Men and... Drew Barrymore? She, too, has a new political doc, and it's currently airing on MTV: The Best Place to Start. Click that title, by the way, to see a clip in which Michael Moore names a hypothetical running mate - to whom we then cut. It's enough to make Nikki Finke ask out loud:

So why am I writing about this?... [W]hat makes Barrymore's small film less than nauseating, and even revealing, is that she doesn't make herself the center of attention, but rather uses her political awakening to drive a larger narrative about voting in America. It's also aided by a distinctly nonpartisan message. But, best of all, it's not often that an actress wants to go on the record describing what a dumb-ass she was.

A fun chat follows, in which we learn that Drew's "political awakening" wasn't easy, nor entirely painless.

Also in the LA Weekly:

• Ella Taylor meets John Waters, and not for the first time: "You could parse A Dirty Shame as nostalgia for a libertine past that Waters acknowledges will not come again during his lifetime, and about which even he has mixed feelings now." Those mixed feelings evidently extend to Catherine Breillat, too, by the way.

• Scott Foundas finds in Jia Zhang-ke's The World a fine way into an overview: "Jia's curiosity about worlds once exotic and all-too-familiar was reflected in several of the most compelling new films unveiled during this year's Toronto International Film Festival, films that chose to see the world not as ever-smaller slices of a pie but rather as one surprisingly close-knit human community."

• Robert Abele argues that HBO's The Wire is the best show on television right now. And he urges you to watch it.

Back to Salon for a moment: Lesley Chow profiles Andy Lau, "perhaps Hong Kong's most bankable, respected star who hasn't yet crossed over into American films," and zooms in on his "unique take on masculinity."

Daniel Handler, more famous as Lemony Snicket, author of the bestselling Series of Unfortunate Events, has one foot in the world of low budget indies and the other in Hollywood. What's that like, wonders Julie Salamon in the New York Times:

"I would have coffee in a diner and plot this tiny little effort with Curtiss Clayton and Ruth Charny," he said of the director of Rick and one of its producers. "We would say things like, if it snows that day there will definitely be snow in the motion picture and if it doesn't snow there won't be snow. Then I'd head back uptown and meet with people who would say, 'We're meeting with Industrial Light and Magic to talk about creating leeches.'"

Now that Britain has essentially two major conservative parties, the Liberal Democrats, currently convening in Bournemouth, are increasingly able to present themselves as the only viable alternative. Many, like Jackie Ashley, commenting in the Guardian, are understandably hesitant to buy in, but still. In the meantime, Vanessa Redgrave arrived at the conference yesterday to praise party leader Charles Kennedy for keeping alive the issue of British detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay by the American military. Matthew Tempest reports.

On a related note, by now you'll have heard about the Department of Homeland Security's latest pratfall, the diversion of the plane carrying Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. Tania Branigan has the story and Margaret Cho has the soundtrack: "I'm being followed by an air marshal, air marshal, air marshal."

Guardian news bits:

• Michael Moore's Sicko.
• Cinema Libre rescues David O Russell's anti-war doc, Soldiers' Pay.
• Ronald Bergan remembers Russ Meyer.

In the Austin Chronicle, Marc Savlov talks to Michael Almereyda about This So-Called Disaster, Spencer Parsons meets the Shaun of the Dead gang and selections from the Cinematexas 9 fest are highlighted.

Online viewing tip. "Bush vs Kerry" a la Spy vs Spy. Yes, it's a cheap appropriation of an ad. It's silly and short, that's all.

Posted by dwhudson at September 23, 2004 7:54 AM