Shorts, 4/13.

As New Yorkers rev up for the Tribeca Film Festival, opening April 19 and running through May 1, they're sorting through their options: 158 features and 96 shorts. Enter the Village Voice with what's become an almost obligatory yet always welcome alternative weekly feature: the string of blurbed highlights. This team's whittled their batch down to "a handpicked selection of the 40 best."

But the 19th is nearly a week away. In the meantime, there's Todd Solondz and his Palindromes to contend with. The Voice sends in Laura Sinagra to interview the director and J Hoberman to review the film. There are many keen observations in that review, of course; but, as with the film itself, no ultimate verdict. The buck is passed on to you, dear viewer.

More from Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, the Reverse Shot crew at indieWIRE (where Brian Brooks has got pix of the NY premiere) and Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly, who certainly doesn't shy away from an opinion: "D-". And then, an online viewing tip: Margaret Pomeranz of Australia's ABC talks to Solondz about the film - before delivering her final one-word verdict.

Back to the Voice:

• Dennis Lim on the series, "In the Company of Arnaud Desplechin": "Brutal and tender, academic and pop, contrived and realistic, cerebral and visceral, his double-jointed narratives stretch to contain the extremes of human sentiment."

• Lim and Ed Park have their way with Rex Reed.

• Sinagra on It's All Gone Pete Tong and State Property 2. More on #2 from AO Scott in the New York Times.

• Hoberman on "Albert Brooks's first and funniest feature," Real Life, and on Fever Pitch.

• David Ng on 15: "Once a specialty of mainland Chinese and Taiwanese cinema, the alienated Asian youth subgenre inevitably finds its way to Singapore." More from Dana Stevens in the NYT.

• Ben Kenigsberg on Torremolinos 73.

• Jessica Winter on Sahara.

• A healthy bundle of "Tracking Shots."

In the New York Observer, Rebecca Dana and Jake Brooks also look ahead to Tribeca. In its first two years, they write, the festival "seemed to parallel a city that continues to transform into a parody of its own grandeur. But this year feels a little different. The fest seems to have moved beyond its awkward adolescence, if not grown into maturity... [to] become a sophisticated smorgasbord fit for a city of New York’s various tastes." The guide that follows is broken down not alphabetically, but rather, day by day. And a lot wordier than the Voice's guide. Dana and Brooks talk you right through to May 1.

Also in the NYO:

• Ann Patchett reviews Jane Fonda's My Life So Far.

• Andrew Sarris admits that just about everything he knows about Stephen Chow he read in the New York Times; as for Kung Fu Hustle, "one must be more familiar with the genre than I am to appreciate the effort." Well, that's honest. Sarris moves on to more familiar ground: Torremolinos 73 and Mondovino.

• Everyone's favorite punching bag of the hour, Rex Reed takes on Sahara, House of D and Eros.

• James Kaplan: "[W]hy have the English... appropriated Saul Bellow?"

The Philadelphia Weekly presents its second week of blurbage on the Philadelphia Film Festival (through April 20). Those in a hurry can skip to the letter grade at the end of each entry.

Also: Bill Cosby's ignited a debate that's far from over, of course. Michael Eric Dyson, who's written the soon-to-be-released Is Bill Cosby Right?, clarifies his position after having been soundbitten far too often over the past half a year: "It's no sweat off Cosby's back if he turns out to be wrong; but it may bring greater social stigma to the poor, and threatens to plunge those who buy Cosby's argument deeper into regretful self-loathing because they believe they haven't solved the riddle of their poverty."

The cinetrix, still viewing hard at the Full Frame Documentary Festival, takes in if not the best, potentially the most important film I caught at SXSW, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Barbara Kopple's Bearing Witness, "a rare glimpse into the gritty reality of the lives of female foreign correspondents." Consider that one something of a Tribeca preview as well.

At the New Republic site, Christopher Orr on Hotel Rwanda: "[I]t's hard to shake the sense that the film would have been considerably more celebrated had its hero and victims not been so dark skinned and far away." Also: Stanley Kauffmann on Mondovino and Melinda and Melinda.

Speaking of. Christian Lorentzen's piece for n+1 almost seems to have been written in response to Richard Armstrong's in Flickhead (though, of course, it's a response to conventional critical wisdom in general ["Critics for more than a decade have made an annual ritual of castrating Woody Allen"]: "Hostility toward his muses is a crime Allen somewhat fesses up to - 'I'm not evil or anything, just sort of floundering around' - yet it has not prevented him from writing the most unforgettable female leads of the last four decades of romantic comedy."

Also at n+1: Lorentzen on how Wes Anderson is inadvertently proving that "the Age of Twee is finally over in hipsterdom" and John Colpitts on DiG!: "This is absolutely the most pointless and narcissistic bunch of lame-asses around which you could center a film. That said, director Ondi Timoner squeezes out some great drama from these mundane and artistically corrupt people."

Roger Avary is surprised to find The Aristocrats "the most hilarious, gut-busting, and enriching moviegoing experience I've had in quite a long while.... This movie is exactly what this country needs, right now more than ever."

As something of a preview of one of the most anticipated features of this year's San Francisco International Film Festival (April 21 through May 5), Adam Hartzell reviews Im Kwon-taek's 99th film, Low Life: "Who better to travail the political and apolitical gangster under and upper world of South Korea in the 50s, 60s and 70s than Im, a director who was able to maintain a filmography across this entire era and onwards." And yet...

"Sure New York and Los Angeles get a lot of screen time, but San Francisco has been the setting of more films than perhaps any other city in the world..." Really? Could be. What a fun chart or list that'd be, though, the number of times the top, say, 50 cities have served as film settings. Anyway, starting Saturday and running through May 11: "The Balboa Theatre is delighted to offer a month-long festival of The Reel San Francisco, with filmmakers and authors introducing many shows."

Susan Gerhard is wowed by Turtles Can Fly: "The image of that tiny boy hanging on for life around the neck of his armless guardian would seem the definition of bathos if it weren't for the incredibly natural way it's pulled off. It's hard to imagine finding one or two child actors with this kind of skill; [Bahman] Ghobadi's found an entire troupe of them."

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: Cheryl Eddy previews the hi/lo Film Festival (tomorrow through Sunday) and recommends Oldboy and Double Dare, "Amana Micheli's winning documentary" about the friendship between two stunt doubles.

Sean Spillane at Bitter Cinema: "Charles Chaplin called him the 'funniest man in the world,' and his stage name became a Spanish verb (cantinflear - an act of doubletalk; a torrent of verbiage for a prolonged amount of time that fails to make any sort of sense at all). Of course, we are referring to the great Mexican movie comedian Mario Moreno Reyes 'Cantinflas'."

Melbourne's pulling out all the stops to make itself Australia's film capital, reports Nassim Khadem in the Age.

In the Guardian:

• What's happened to animator Ryan Larkin is certainly sad, and it may even seem tragic, but neither he nor Christopher Landreth, who won an Oscar for his animated short, Ryan, look at it quite that way, reports Katrina Onstad.

• Richard Christiansen explains the unique relationship between playwright Stephen Jeffreys, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre and John Malkovich. The current play that's come of it, Lost Land is "not very dramatically involving," but we can still look forward to the film Malkovich has wanted to make for years, The Libertine.

• Peter Bradshaw on Anthony Minghella's political ad.

All too often, press junkets produce little more than "It was so great to work with X" fare, but Gary Dretzka's got a report from one that must have been a fun and refreshing change, chatting up the Fabulous Moolah and the Great Mae Young, champion wrestlers and subjects of Ruth Leitman's Lipstick and Dynamite - and they're blogging at indieWIRE, too. Also at Movie City News: Ray Pride on Head-On.

Karina Longworth introduces a new feature at Cinematical: "ReWatching" is pretty much what you'd think; the twist is that its a review of a re-viewing of a film about to be remade, in this case, The Heartbreak Kid. Also, Karina's Tribeca previews: The Great New Wonderful and Mysterious Skin.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay: "Help Bruno."

Virginia Heffernan really seems to have enjoyed previewing the upcoming season of Project Greenlight for the NYT. Also: Ned Martel on Raging Dove, a "ruising but illuminating documentary [that] considers how nationalism flattened one young, sure-footed boxer."

At Twitch:

• Broken looks like a helluva lot of movie for 8000 bucks.

• Love the Google ads running alongside Todd's review of Ishiro Honda's Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People, one of the first "horror" pix my parents let me stay up late and watch.

• Another review from Todd: "Despite the obvious limitations of a microscopic budget first time director Hiroki Yamaguchi has marked himself as a talent to look out for with Gusher No Binds Me, , just released on these shores by Media Blasters as Hellevator: The Bottled Fools. With a visual style that borrows liberally from Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children, Yamaguchi tells a wholly original story of life in a nightmarish, underground dystopia."

Online browsing tip. Raiders of the Lost ArtBase: "During March and April 2005, Michael Connor will be tunneling into the Rhizome ArtBase until his eyes bleed, hunting for buried treasures both ancient and new."

Posted by dwhudson at April 13, 2005 8:13 AM