Shorts, 9/24.

The new issue of FLM Magazine is out, and I'd do one of those obsessive-compulsive annotated table of contents things if Matt Langdon hadn't already done an excellent job of it himself. His previous entry, too, is a nice round handful of pointers.

The cinetrix meets Barbara Hammer, whose doc Resisting Paradise sounds phenomenal: "[R]esolutely experimental, yet completely accessible, just like its creator."

For indieWIRE, Erica Abeel interviews Walter Salles, which is great and all, but Peter Brunette is way underwhelmed by The Motorcycle Diaries, sparking a couple of angry comments at the bottom of the page.

On a related note, in Slate, Paul Berman, author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 and, more recently, Terror and Liberalism, warns moviegoers not to romanticize Ernesto Che Guevara: "Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster."

For PopMatters, Todd R Ramlow interviews John Waters and files his review of A Dirty Shame alongside Cynthia Fuchs's. More Shame: Stephanie Zacharek in Salon notes that Selma Blair's overblown assets are "an unintentional but fitting tribute to the recently deceased Russ Meyer," and MCN's Gary Dretzka meets the ever-busy, ever-polite Waters.

Quite a guest list at David Geffen's anti-Bush dinner party the other night. LA.comfidential reports; via Cinemocracy.

Film Threat's Eric Campos has a brief chat with Monster Road director Brett Ingram.

Doug Cummings posts reviews of four films he caught in Toronto.

At Twitch, Todd points to Michael Gingold's item in Fangoria on stop-motion animator Henry Selick's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline.

Vince Keenan issues a plea to filmmakers to give Michael Keaton a career-reviving role.

There must have been as many journalists as "regular" attendees at the right-wing American Film Renaissance fest in Dallas two weeks ago. Tales of survival keep making their way to publication; James Meek's makes the cover of the Guardian's Friday Review.

Also:

• Roger Lewis, author of The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which he himself claims "owes more to ETA Hoffmann than to Sheridan Morley," approves of the film starring Geoffrey Rush: "What I love about this biopic they have now made is that structurally much of this Shandyism is retained. Most movies don't use the language of film; this does."
• Steve Rose meets Paddy Considine.
• Censorship is bad enough as it is, writes John Patterson, but it's about to get worse.

In the Independent:

• Roger Clarke structures his profile of Zhang Ziyi like a quest; first, he discovers that neither he nor Christopher Doyle can find the words to describe her, then he finds Zhang Yimou full of words about her, and finally, he gets her on the phone - to discover she doesn't have a whole lot to say herself.
• Sam Ingleby asks Paul Bettany why he takes on such a wide variety of roles.
• Matthew Sweet discovers (or pretends to discover) that there used to be a lot more to Merchant-Ivory than "Sunday-supplement cinema for middle-class people who don't really like cinema very much but can't quite be bothered to read books."

Summer is well and truly over: David Poland has begun his Oscar countdown. And via Movie City News, a BBC report on a poll that finds The Shawshank Redemption an audience favorite among films that didn't win a single Oscar in a major category.

Online viewing tip. Original interview footage for Robert Greenwald's Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism is viewable at the Internet Archive. Via Cinema Minima.

Posted by dwhudson at September 24, 2004 9:10 AM