Shorts, 4/11.

"Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980) is 25 years old this year," writes Richard Armstrong at Flickhead. "Reflexive and interior, Stardust Memories echoed the postwar European art cinema that Allen's own generation had been brought up on. But it made few concessions to its 80s audience."

Armstrong's rereading, both personal and critical, is about more than the film's form, though; Allen's view of women does not get a free pass here. Also: Ray Young on Piccadilly.

New York's Logan Hill is looking forward to a better Tribeca Film Festival (April 19 through May 1): "[T]his year’s less glitzy competition films - which, last year, felt like Sundance's reject pile - have improved significantly. And you’ll be stunned to discover that at least one of the New York films in this year’s competition - The Great New Wonderful may be brilliant. Judging from a rough cut of the film, this wonderfully acted ensemble piece may be the best fiction film about post-9/11 life to appear on screens." Also: Gavin Edwards meets David Duchovny.

Hollywood Bitchslap's Scott Weinberg is having a blast in Philadelphia and will continue to do so through April 20: "[T]his is a film festival on the rise." Besides listing his own highlights, he points to guides at Monsters at Play for horror fans, the previously mentioned City Paper and the previously unmentioned Philadelphia Weekly.

"In the English-speaking world at least, no one has done more than Christopher Frayling to make Sergio Leone a name to drop in cinephile circles," writes Kevin Jackson in a profile of the professor who turned in a thousand-page draft of Something To Do With Death to Faber (which promptly cut the book in half), has recorded DVD commentaries for the major features and is organizing an exhibition set to open in LA in July. And quotes him, too: "Now it's a great cliché to say that Leone is a major director, but at the time I first made the case for him, everyone thought that I was quite mad... and that Leone was utter crap."

Also in the Independent:

• Evidently prompted to write something about the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (through Wednesday), David Thomson proposes we consider the gay subtexts of Raging Bull, The Godfather, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Rebel Without a Cause and, um, Casablanca.

• It's long been acknowledged that the switchover to digital in cinemas was inevitable; now it's finally happening. Wendy Grossman looks into why it's taken so long.

• Ed Caeser meets Jonathan Caouette.

Filmbrain finds Fruit Chan's Public Toilet "a fascinating curiosity... Though not as profound as, say, Jia Zhangke's The World, Chan's take on globalization in China (and other parts of Asia) is still quite impressive."

Raves for the soon-to-be-released Hanzo trilogy from Ian Jane at DVD Maniac via Patrick Macias.

Which are "the most important or significant American independent films of the past two decades"? IndieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez will be teaching a course this summer at The New School and is taking suggestions.

What's drawn the likes of Denzel Washington (on Broadway) and Ralph Fiennes (in London) to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar? Deborah Warner, director of the London production, tells Kate Kellaway, "This is a moment to look at issues of power and whether democracies can survive.... This is not a time for TV-style documentaries about politics. We need insights, important truths about the human condition."

Also in the Observer:

• Two productions in the Royal Opera's current season are directed by filmmakers, Massenet's Werther, directed by Benoît Jacquot, and Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, in a production by Mario Martone. Peter Conrad considers the relationship between the two arts.

• "An entrancing film is being shown at Modern Art Oxford: nine minutes of pure fascination." Laura Cumming on the work of Fiona Tan.

• David Smith reports on "newly discovered, colour footage which renders [Hitler] more vividly and uncomfortably real than ever before."

• Liz Hoggard redoes the Hollywood comedy cabal story the NYT ran a few weeks ago.

• Book reviews: Andrew Anthony on James B Stewart's DisneyWar and Stephanie Merritt on Kevin Booth and Michael Bertin's Bill Hicks.

The Museum of Television and Radio's Television Documentary Festival opens Tuesday night with the seminar, "The Passion of the Partisan: What is the Future of the Political Documentary?" Panelists: Robert Drew (Primary), Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), Alexandra Pelosi (Journeys With George), Thom Powers (Guns and Mothers), Ted Steinberg (Celsius 41.11) and Paul Stekler (Last Man Standing). Moderator: Steve Rosenbaum.

"We've been punished for the very success we've had with documentaries," Mark Urman, head of the US Theatrical Division at ThinkFilm tells the San Francisco Chronicle's Hugh Hart: "After we did Spellbound, the prices went up. Everybody came to us with films where the sales pitch was, 'It's just like Spellbound,' which is idiocy.... There's been inflation, and we've contributed to that." Via Movie City Indie.

In the New York Times:

• "Television and media," Bob Luff, chief technology officer at Nielson Media Research, tells Jon Gertner in the Magazine cover story, "will change more in the next 3 or 5 years than it's changed in the past 50."

• AO Scott on what makes Lucrecia Martel "one of Argentina's - and the world's - bravest and most original filmmakers."

• Scott on Saul Bellow: "He had political opinions and allegiances, some controversial, but his mind leaned away from abstraction toward the inexhaustible strangeness of life, toward an ideal of the novel not as a form or a tradition but as a vessel of personality."

Online listening tip. Cyndi Greening talks Sundancing with Alec Hart.

Online viewing tips #1 through #622. Music videos. Good ones. Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tips #623 through #628. Trailers via Twitch:

• Tzang Merwyn Tong's A Wicked Tale.

• Song Il-gon's Git (Feathers in the Wind); trailer and Darcy Paquet's review at Koreanfilm.org.

• Stanley Tong's The Myth, with Jackie Chan (more from Monkey Peaches).

• And, following a search launched by Nick Holdsworth's Reuters piece on the Russian cinema boom, Todd's found three illustrative trailers.

Online viewing tip #629. If you're at all reluctant to even entertain the possibility that America could ever slip into some new 21st century form of totalitarianism - given the prompting, say, of another terrorist attack - watch the crowd's reaction to a simple statement of fact - there were no WMDs - in the trailer for This Divided State.

Posted by dwhudson at April 11, 2005 6:33 AM