Shorts, 9/30.

The Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD won't be released until Tuesday (when, on the same day, Michael Moore also releases two new books, The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader and Will They Ever Trust Us Again?), but within some circles anyway, its rumbling approach can already be heard. First, Nikki Finke: "LA Weekly has learned that CBS, NBC and ABC all refused Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD advertising during any of the networks' news programming. Executives at Sony Pictures, the distributor of the movie for the home-entertainment market, were stunned. And even more shocked when the three networks explained why."

The New York Times has two pieces today on two attempts at counter-programming. Frank Rich reviews one that sounds like it's destined to become a cult classic along the lines of Reefer Madness if Bush loses - but if he wins, who knows, they may be showing it in schools:

Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and Faith in the White House gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh. A documentary conceived as a rebuke to Fahrenheit 9/11 is nothing if not its unintentional and considerably more nightmarish sequel.

John Tierney checks in with the makers behind the other one, Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die, "a documentary made in six weeks that is billed as 'The Truth Behind the Lies of Fahrenheit 9/11!'"

Also in the NYT: Janet Maslin reviews Open Wide: How Box Office Became a National Obsession by Variety editors Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing, who "accomplish the unusual feat of collecting enough arcane detail to cast new light on this process - and do it without cattiness, writing in a style almost unknown to film-business chronicles." And: The movie reviews in Chemical & Engineering News are just one example of what Randy Kennedy finds is "a growing number of Web sites that parse movies in ever more precise ways, from their Christian content to their physics to whether they have continuity problems."

Back to the LA Weekly:

• Ella Taylor: "Undisciplined, teeming with big thoughts and overplotted unto exhaustion, Huckabees is a bitch to review, but tremendous fun to watch." Plus: Almost Peaceful: "The movie has no grand insights, and it always teeters on the border of sentimentality. But..."

• Ernest Hardy on Dig!, "as much a chronicle of the ways in which the music industry hamstrings careers and collapses upon itself as it is about the dazzling rise of one band and the spectacular implosion of another."

• Doug Harvey: "Russ Meyer was a genius. In spite of the fact that for a few years in the 80s it was considered hip to put forth this opinion, it never quite sank in."

  

• Brendan Bernhard: "It may have been Christopher Isherwood who said, 'I am a camera,' but it was [Graham] Greene's fiction that the camera really loved. He supported himself as a film critic during the 1930s, and he was one of the first serious novelists to incorporate a deep knowledge of film language in his work."

Via Movie City News:

• The new site for Tarnation, trailer and all.
• Zoe Cox's long interview with Christopher Doyle in the Telegraph.
• Now one of Roger Ebert's "Great Movies": Three Women.

Samantha Ellis asks Mark Lewis about his "Two Impossible Films," an adaptation of Marx's Das Kapital fused with a love story Sam Goldwyn asked Freud to write - he never did. Also in the Guardian: Aida Edemariam on the UK premiere of Imelda.

In the Independent, Charlotte Cripps profiles rising star Daniel Craig.

Girish, who grew up in Calcutta, reviews Satyajit Ray's Mahanagar, his "first movie set in modern-day Calcutta" and rich in "carefully observed daily detail."

San Francisco's 8th Arab Film Festival opens on Saturday at the Castro and runs through October 24. Even if you can't make it, you'll want to read Robert Avila's preview of the doc About Baghdad for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Also: Johnny Ray Huston on Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y: "The archival mania here possesses a reach and breadth similar to the movies of OCD's Craig Baldwin."

Filmbrain previews the New York Film Festival opener, Agnès Jaoui's Look at Me (Comme Une Image), "a wonderfully entertaining film that, while nothing revolutionary, is destined to be a crowd-pleaser at this year's festival."

Filmjourney.org is all over the recently wrapped Ottawa International Animation Festival.

"Top five non-blonde actors who have dipped their toe in the pool of blondeness with apocalyptic results," courtesy of drew.

"Early Visual Media" has altered its URL slightly; click the name for the new one.

Possible last minute plans for the weekend: Make a movie. Interested? Check out the National Film Challenge.

Online giggle. Horse head pillow.

Online listening tip, available tomorrow: John Sayles is the guest on Your Call.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for Spaced, the TV show Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright worked on before making Shaun of the Dead. Via - where else? - Twitch, where Todd reviews Night Watch.

Posted by dwhudson at September 30, 2004 1:26 PM