Shorts, 3/8.

Via Twitch, where Canfield interviews Danny Boyle: Monkey Peaches notes that the Hong Kong Film Critics Association has announced the winners of its Golden Bauhinina Awards. Among the highlights:

• Best Picture: Kung Fu Hustle.

• Best Director: Yee Tung-Shing for One Nite in Mongkok.

• Best Screenplay: Edmond Pang for Beyond Our Ken.

• Best Cinematography: Christopher Doyle for 2046, for which Tony Leung Chiu-Wai won Best Actor; Doyle was also competing against himself for Dumplings segment of Three... Extremes, for which Bai Ling won Best Supporting Actress.

For the Village Voice, Michael Atkinson previews the "Rendez-Vous With French Cinema" series at the Walter Reade in NYC, March 11 through 20.

Wellspring has picked up Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, reports Brian Brooks. Also at indieWIRE: a trio from Reverse Shot reviews Sergio Castellitto's Don't Move.

Alessandro Camon in Salon: "Looking back at the Godfather trilogy in light of The Sopranos, the reasons for the don's downfall come into clear, harsh focus. The general crisis of fatherhood might be the sign of times, but it was written all along in Michael Corleone's DNA."

An alert from Caryn James in the New York Times: Brace yourself for Jane Fonda's comeback campaign.

In the Guardian, Peter Kosminsky writes about how Tony Blair's Labour government did everything in its power to make it very, very difficult for him to complete his film about David Kelly.

"What happened to the anti-porn feminists?" asks Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe. The answer seems to be two-fold. First, they got tied up in the courts; then, porn's simply become too ubiquitous to argue about.

A society's acceptance of porn is, in fact, a measure of its acceptance of freedom, argues Salman Rushdie in an essay in Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits (and published this week in German in Der Spiegel). Calcutta's Telegraph runs a bare-bones story, though it doesn't emphasize the most interesting point: governments that restrict porn inadvertently turn porn into an icon of freedom.

DVD Talk launches a new column: "Anime Talk"; meanwhile, it turns out that "CineSchlock-O-Rama" columnist G Noel Gross has been blogging: CineSchock-O-Bloggage."

Fascinating interview at Hollywood Bitchslap (which, by the way, has launched a fun new feature, "Great Moments in Junketeering"): Peter Sobczynski asks Dave Bossert, artistic supervisor of the Restoration Initiative about the painstaking work that went into reviving Bambi. You may even find it fascinating enough to want more: Bill Desowitz talks with others on the restoration team, too, for Animation World Magazine; and you might recall Peter M Bracke's earlier interview with Bossert for DVD File when Disney's WWII-era propaganda shorts were released.

Speaking of restoration, the newly pieced-together Battleship Potemkin was recently screened at the Berlinale, and now, in Radar (and in Spanish), Eduardo Montes-Bradley looks into the historical event - exactly 100 years ago as of June 29 of this year - on which the film is based. Very loosely based, as he discovers. Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

At the Artful Writer, Craig Mazin pleads with his fellow scribes to cut the "new age mumbo jumbo." Hear, hear. Dozens of comments ensue.

Online browsing tip. Tarzan Movie Posters, via Rashomon.

Wow, would you look at that theater in Amy King's post listing the winners of the Fargo Film Festival.

Yes, Million Dollar Baby's a winner, but what does it mean? Metaphilm rounds up three readings.

Online viewing tip. The 2nd Nontzeflash Animated Film Competition, with entries from all over. Via The Crime in Your Coffee, which points out that the Spanish entry, The Agend isn't just the winner; it's racked up over 20 percent of the votes.

Posted by dwhudson at March 8, 2005 9:17 AM