Weekend shorts.

Phil Stubbs talks to production designer Guy Dyas about his work on Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm. The page is graced with several of Dyas's drawings and the site itself, Dreams, is chock full of Gilliamalia. Via Movie City News.

"I hate making films so much that the only possible reason I could generate that could fuel that sort of process would be the idea that they could make people happy to have been born and raise consciousness... I began this because I wanted to be loved - or liked. I felt that if I were a filmmaker this would happen." Assisted Living director Elliot Greenebaum confesses profusely to BRAINTRUSTdv. David Lowery had a conversation with him just a couple of weeks ago, too.

For Filmmaker, Alan Jacobson interviews Rusty Nails. Topics: The "nuts-and-bolts filmmaking specifics, obtaining music from bands, music composition for no-budget features, and the rest of what it takes to legally make and promote a film with little money." Well, yes, that. But you'll also want to click his links to indie music labels and, at the end, be reminded once again what a great city Chicago is.

Patrick Macias director and screenwriter Kenji Kamiyama and Production IG founder and prez Mitsuhisa Ishikawa. Topics: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and the its follow-up, Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd Gig, and of course, the international rage for anime.

Doug Cummings celebrates "the intensely creative animation of Quebecois artist Frédéric Back."

News of upcoming DVD releases doesn't usually make these batches of shorts (though they probably should more often), but here's a thunderous announcement: According to DVD Beaver, Criterion will be working Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Patrick J Walsh has been teaching Westerns in Bavaria and writes about it for Flow: "Perhaps my students' overwhelming dislike for the current president, and the fact that I asked them to think about what these movies suggested about the US, influenced their take on the films we watched. They seemed displeased by the Manichean logic of screen heroes like Shane and the Ringo Kid, men who were willing to kill without remorse, their vengeful, hateful violence cloaked in moral rectitude, courtesy to women and a show of religious feeling." Perhaps.

Can you believe the saga Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel has become? And it just goes on and on. At The Bloody News, Erik Kristopher Myers probes the already-probed and the as-yet-unprobed bits with the director - and then reviews the film itself. Pretty enthusiastically, too. That's via Todd at Twitch. Meanwhile, Wiley Wiggins and others have noted, Fox's Roger Friedman reported on Thursday that it'll likely get a release after all.

Speaking of early reviews, Todd's got another one he runs right on the site: Nick on Sin City.

ReadyMade's Shoshana Berger interviews Brad Bird. Via Greg Allen.

Via Defamer, Gawker's phone call with Vincent Gallo.

Rebecca Epstein in the LA CityBeat: "The traveling fan festival honoring the 1998 cult film The Big Lebowski hits LA this Friday for a weekend of nuttiness, bowling, live music, and White Russians."

"The film's real interest is not its social aspect. Its true soul lies somewhere else." Sheila Johnston listens to Gianni Amelio describe the impact of Bicycle Thieves on his own work.

Also in the Telegraph:

• Andrew O'Hagan on Bruno Ganz's performance in Downfall: "Nothing reduces the evil, it only complicates it, and ultimately it emphasises it." In the Guardian, six actors who've played the crazed dictator describe the experience.

• Quentin Falk meets Robert Harris, author of the bestselling Archangel, and visits the set where it's been adapted.

• Tom Cox on The Maltese Falcon.

• John Hiscock talks to Uma Thurman.

• Hugh Davies notes that Hollywood's making a bundle off DVDs.

Best performers now working? George Fasel proposes a coupla dozen names.

The Otto Preminger season at the National Film Theatre in London provide both David Thomson in the Guardian and Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent excellent opportunities to survey the career. And there are two interviews in the Independent: Tiffany Rose with Sandra Bullock and Sholto Byrnes with Charlotte Rampling.

Back to the Guardian:

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week, Polanski's Tess.

• John Patterson's mini-profile of the week: John Travolta.

• Hugh Rorrison remembers Brigitte Mira, "the incarnation of Berliner schnauze, the cheeky but disarming bluntness for which Berlin women are known."

• And Dennis Barker remembers David Kossoff, "famous - and much loved - in the 1960s for his simple and humorous paraphrasing of the Bible into his own stories."

Eugene Hernandez: "Indie circles have been buzzing about the launch of a new specialty division from HBO and New Line Cinema... As we tend to do the day after a major announcement, indieWIRE polled a few of the heads of leading theatrical distribution companies to get their take." Also: Hernandez and Brian Brooks have five questions for D.E.B.S. director Angela Robinson and Brooks snaps pix at the film's premiere.

In the New York Times:

• Stephen Holden, Dargis and Scott update their collection of blurbs on the films screening in the New Directors/New Films series. More and more from Michael Tully. And then there's Slant's very fine and thorough coverage as well.

• AO Scott on Darwin's Nightmare: "One of the virtues of [Hubert] Sauper's film is its rigorous commitment to bringing a full measure of bad news, of using images of horror to cast a shadow over the 'positive side' of the story."

• Charles McGrath tells the story behind Murderball.

• Terrence Rafferty talks to Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller about, well, The Ballad of Jack & Rose, of course, but also about all the questions you'd expect to arise in the company of a husband-and-wife team from such illustrious backgrounds. Manohla Dargis reviews the film and Rebecca Traister interviews Miller for Salon.

• Sharon Waxman explains how a tight circle of stars, a director, a producer and a talent agent rule the box office with their own brand of "smart-dumb comedy."

• Eric Lipton reports on a series of some pretty cheerless real-life rehearsals based on "story lines... developed through a collaboration of some of the nation's top antiterrorist and law-enforcement specialists."

• The biz: From Laura M Holson, news of one of Bob Iger's first moves at Disney, "[d]isassembling the strategic planning division"; Blockbuster's dropping its bid for Hollywood Entertainment, as Tom Zeller Jr reports; Waxman hears Warner Brothers redeclare its commitment to Warner Independent Pictures.

Count Jonathan Rosenbaum among those let down by Melinda and Melinda. More from Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. Tom Hall has a suggestion: "Instead of attempting to remake timely relationship comedies in a milieu of which he seems entirely ignorant, Allen would be better served by turning his eye in the direction he was headed in the late 1980s and early 1990s."

Rosie Millard shares a cup of tea with Anthony Minghella. We hear about it in the New Statesman.

Even with April just around the corner, it's still not too late for a couple of 2004 top tens, one from Movie Poop Shoot contributor Alison Veneto, who's fired up a new blog, Electric Shadow, and another from Paolo Bertolin at Koreanfilm.org.

Speaking of MPS, Chris Ryall interviews Roger Ebert.

Donald Melanson (blog) considers three noir classics at Mindjack.

Online browsing tip. Turkish movie posters. Via Bitter Cinema.

Online viewing tip #1. The preview for the Found Footage Festival. Via the cinetrix.

Online viewing tip #2. The Internet Archive is hosting a 15-chapter serial, Dick Tracy (1937). Via The Crime in Your Coffee.

Posted by dwhudson at March 26, 2005 4:40 PM