Shorts, 11/30.

Sundance. Review the complete competition lineups at indieWIRE, Movie City News, and/or, of course, at the site itself. For more on the docs competition, you'll want to mine Steve Rhodes's mucho resourceful entry at his Tiger Beat.

At Flickhead, Christine Young is enraptured by Metropolis, Ray Young is relieved once Ed Wood's Necrophilia reaches its climax but has a better time reviewing Kenneth Turan's Never Coming to a Theater Near You: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Movie.

In Kamera, Deborah Allison reviews Richard T Kelly's Sean Penn: His Life and Times, which "takes a bold stylistic gamble by structuring the work as an 'oral biography'.... At its best, the use of multiple viewpoints gives rise to many-sided interpretations of a single event.... At the same time, the sheer number of loose ends, repetitions and non-sequiturs that this methodology entails can prove frustrating."

Clive James has a loooong chat at the National Film Theatre in London with Peter Bogdanovich. Names are dropped, stories are told, and the audience laughs bunches.

Jonathan Romney in the Independent: "[C]ould synthespians put traditional star power out of business? It never really seemed a possibility, until now."

Molly Ringwald, the perennial where-are-they-nower. Michael Agger checks in again. She's doing fine. Also in New York, albeit briefly: Logan Hill has a few quick questions for Zhang Yimou.

For PopMatters, Ellise Fuchs talks to Giulia D'agnolo Vallan, co-director of the Torino Film Festival, about American indies, "Americana" in general, Errol Morris, John Landis and more.

Todd Zaun reports on a set-back for Sony and its fellow Blu-ray enthusiasts: "A group of companies led by the Toshiba Corporation made a major advance in the effort to define a new DVD standard as Paramount and three other Hollywood studios announced on Monday that they would release films in the group's high-definition DVD format by the end of next year."

Also in the New York Times: Douglas Heingartner wraps the International Documentary Film Festival: "Major prizes at the Amsterdam festival - where the memory of Theo van Gogh, whose murder this month, the police say, was committed by a Muslim extremist in response to one of Mr. van Gogh's films, loomed large - went to works that took a head-on look at tensions within and around Islam." More from Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE.

Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash? Take a look at Mark Seliger's photos for Vanity Fair.

Posted by dwhudson at November 30, 2004 6:11 AM