Shorts, 4/20.

So we've got two major festivals going on, one on each coast. The Tribeca Film Festival opened last night in New York with The Interpreter and runs through May 1.

• Over at Bravo, you can watch previews of ten films featured there.

• IndieWIRE's launched a Tribeca blog and has Anthony Kaufman taking a good hard look at the festival's selection of films from abroad.

• And you'll definitely want to keep an eye on Cinematical; start here, then move back to the first review: Alicia Scherson's Play.

A few thousand miles to the left, the San Francisco International Film Festival opens tomorrow night with Costa-Gavras's The Ax and runs through May 5.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian is ready. First week blurbed? You bet. And at first, Jenni Olson's The Joy of Life might seem feature-worthy enough for a local alternative weekly - it's "about" the 1300 who've leapt to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge - but of less interest elsewhere. Susan Gerhard will correct that impression:

Olson's film mourns the way a film by Hirokazu Kore-eda does - with distant shots that won't let you come right up and touch the trauma but that make the aftermath all the more real by being opaque. Its essayistic narrative feels Su Friedrich serious, and its visuals James Benning concentrated. But Olson's film finally pivots on the kind of archival fascinations that motivated Thom Andersen's documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Chuck Stephens: "That a new wave of Malaysian independent filmmakers should begin storming the barricades during the last three or four years now seems inevitable." SFIFF's focus on Malaysia, then, is "certainly timely," but "our local programming visionaries only managed to get the queerest part of the story straight."

"One could easily argue that Argentina is home to the most exciting filmmaking in the world at the moment," marvels Johnny Ray Huston, and what's more amazing is that "the country's new wave has risen from - and crashed againt - economic ruin."

Two "Evenings With" are previewed: Kimberly Chun examines Taylor Hackford's "romance with pop" (April 27) and Cheryl Eddy revisits a few of Joan Allen's finer performances (April 29).

"Czech Dream's comedic take on large-scale deception is counterbalanced in the festival by a slew of docs that take a more sober view of the subject." Eddy looks at half a dozen in all.

Adam Curtis, writer and producer of The Power of Nightmares, the documentary series whose current stops on the festival circuit include Tribeca and SFIFF, does not mince words: "At the heart of the story, which begins 50 years ago, are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists born out of the failure of post-war liberal optimism, and both had very similar explanations for why that failure had occurred. Both groups did change the world -but not in the way either intended."

Also in the Village Voice:

• A Save the Green Planet package. Chuck Stephens on Jang Jun-hwan, whose "debut feature isn't just an exhilarating erasure of all the ink and online emotion being spilled over the inferior Oldboy; it's one of the best films of the year," and J Hoberman's review: "What's most remarkable about this lurid, wildly busy spectacle is how serious it can be - that is, how poignant and poetic." More from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "At once a sick comedy, a bile-raising thriller and a genre pastiche, Save the Green Planet is a welter of conflicting tones, dissonant moods and warring intentions (conscious and perhaps unconscious)." Then, three more takes from the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE.

• Michael Atkinson on One Missed Call - "By this time, it's clear that Takashi Miike can and eventually will make every kind of movie" - and Dead & Breakfast, which "virtually falls over itself informing us how lame it is." In the NYT, Anita Gates concurs.

• Charles McNulty: "[T]his new crop of playwrights has no interest in railing at a corrupt system. Led by Martin McDonagh and Neil LaBute, they simply want to spin baleful tales that reveal just how short, nasty, and brutish life really is."

• Ed Park previews the Harold Lloyd retro at Film Forum: "[T]he typical Lloyd plot is one of manhood attained, despite penury, apron strings, superstition, shyness."

• Edward Crouse on the New York African Film Festival, today through April 28.

• Melissa Anderson meets Isild Le Besco.

• Joshua Land on the return of Little Fugitive.

• "Tracking Shots": Hoberman (who also interprets The Interpreter; more from Max Goldberg in the SFBG) on Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; David Ng on The Amityville Horror; and more notables.

Tren de sombras, a Spanish magazine covering all things cinematic - the name is taken from the title of a film by Jose Luis Guerin - is running a piece in English: Adrian Martin's lovely remembrance of seeing Naomi Kawase's Shara.

More reports from the Philadelphia Film Festival from Todd at Twitch: The Voyage Home, Niceland and Lonesome Jim; next day: Cutie Honey, Soundless and Survive Style 5+. GreenCiners have been offering their takes as well.

Here's the question Rob Nelson asked Martin Scorsese at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival: "Do you think there's anything we can do to make sure that celluloid continues to exist outside of museums? And can the new, corporate distribution and exhibition of digital cinema stay somewhat open to independent filmmakers?" Nelson transcribes the full, four-minute answer. Also in the City Pages, Michael Tortorello: "The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival is good at a lot of things, but projecting movies isn't one of them."

"The stink from last year's summer movie output has barely cleared our nostrils as the aroma of a brand new summer is heading our way. But will this summer smell like fresh picked roses, or a bucket of steaming road apples?" Film Threat's 2005 Summer Movie Preview. Guaranteed to provide more laughs than the movies themselves.

Slant's Ed Gonzalez: "Why is it that a serious writer like [Charles] Taylor, a fearless critic of shallow entertainment punditry, is out of a job while a shill like Rex Reed is allowed to continue spewing his venom from atop his perch at The New York Observer?" Following Reed's "review" of Oldboy, variations on this question flooded online forums and blogs, but Gonzalez, far as I know, is the first to address it seriously and soberly. Via Dennis Cozzalio.

In the meantime, Taylor's work has been appearing in the NYO; this week, for example, he reviews Greil Marcus's Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. Of course, Reed's in there, too, on The Interpreter ("muddled") and Palindromes ("as amusing as lung cancer"). Also: Jake Brooks digs into the nasty legal battle between Stephen Carlis and Steven Rosenbaum.

James Verini visits the Institute for Creative Technologies, where "animators, graphic artists, videogame designers, artificial intelligence researchers, engineers, screenwriters and directors emigrated from Hollywood" all work on training simulations for the military. Fascinating stuff. Related: In the SF Weekly, Luke O'Brien visits Forterra, another VR company working with the Army.

Back to the Guardian:

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has Zoe Williams thinking back 20 years: "We had the 80s all wrong, in other words. Or maybe you didn't - I definitely did."

• David Fincher's Zodiac will feature Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal.

• Owen Gibson on a possible Steve Coogan project.

• Lucy Ward: "Hollywood films which portray violence "devoid of human consequences" are fuelling a culture of bullying in Britain's schools, the Oscar-winning producer Lord Puttnam will warn today."

• Adrian Searle on Gregory Crewdson.

Surf's up on Saturday, April 30, at the Barbicon in London. Charlotte Cripps reports in the Independent.

For those in need of a Julie Delpy fix, The Legend of Lucy Keyes looks promising. Filmmaker's Steve Gallagher has info on its all-digital, hi-def making.

Michael Abecassis reviews "a major study," Emma Wilson's Cinema's Missing Children, which argues that "the treatment of absence and loss have increasingly become the focus for the family dynamics of characters in cinema." That's in Film-Philosophy, currently pointing to news of the symposium "TIME@20: The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy," May 6 and 7 at Harvard, free and open to the public. Related: Christian Kerlake in Radical Philosophy, "Transcendental cinema: Deleuze, time and modernity." An abstract, but a hefty one. Earlier: Keith Ansell Pearson, "Demanding Deleuze."

"Something strange is happening in Bollywood," writes Namrata Joshi in Outlook India. "Some atypical characters have been winning over the box office." Two sidebars note the formulaic flops and the iconoclastic winners. Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau," which also points to an interview with Bela Tarr in Elet es Irodalom - and in Hungarian.

Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell review Stephen Glynn's entry in TCM's British Film Guides series, A Hard Day's Night: "[T]his book's depth and analysis go way beyond expectations."

Also in Kamera:

• Stephen Yates looks back on goEast, the 5th Festival of Central and Eastern European Film in Wiesbaden (April 6 to 12), "a unique opportunity to look beyond the new borders of the EU, and to learn a little more about film production from countries such as the Ukraine, Kazakhstan or Macedonia."

• Oliver Berry passes along a call for entries from the Rolling Stock Short Film Festival, "the first ever film festival to take place entirely on moving trains." Not quite. Berlin's Going Underground festival just wrapped its fourth year.

• KJ Doughton interviews Vietnamese director Minh Nguyen-Vo.

• Graeme Cole on Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's Falkar (Falcons).

Via Alternet, Rachel Fudge in Clamor: "As many commentators have pointed out, as all of the old you-can’t-do-that-on-television taboos - sexual content, violence, cursing, nudity, homosexuality - have fallen away, abortion is the one hot-button issue that simply remains too hot for TV."

Danny Leiner's The Great New Wonderful, premiering at Tribeca on Friday, is a 9/11 story, though it's "anything but explicit" about it, reports David M Halbfinger. Hot on its heels, though, are "several sweeping projects that seek to harness directly the full dramatic potential of the cataclysmic 9/11 story: its antecedents and causes, its horrors and its aftermath."

Also in the NYT:

• Manohla Dargis looks over "a classic Cannes selection."

• Sharon Waxman notes that there's been a sudden influx into Hollywood of "Internet magnates, trust-fund entrepreneurs and sports-team owners" over about the past two years, outsiders bent on spending their own money - a lot of it - to make their own movies.

• Dave Kehr (presumably) on the new batch of Errol Flynn DVDs.

• Laura M Holson on producer Scott Rudin's move from Paramount to Disney.

Wiley Wiggins: "I'm not going to call it the greatest movie ever made, but when is the last time you saw the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Watch it again."

Vanity Fair's Patricia Bosworth recommends Mark S Wexler's portrait of his father, Haskell Wexler, Tell Them Who You Are.

NP Thompson celebrates a year of Movies into Film. And so do we.

You may remember a pointer to Twitch's terrific interview with Paul Spurrier, the British filmmaker who's shot a ghost story in Thai. That film, P, has just won the Audience Best Film Award and the Silver jury Award at the Weekend of Fear festival in Erlangen.

Grady Hendrix has a few quick notes on the Asian films at Cannes this year.

Craig Phillips on The Animation Show: "[T]here's no dud in the bunch and much to behold."

Via Movie City Indie:

• Control Room made Lt Josh Rushing a star of sorts, but also ended his military career. The World's Howard Yune hears him speak; Rushing doesn't have a second career yet, though he'll soon be a guest lecturer at USC.

• Christopher Doyle tells the Telegraph's Sheila Johnston why he feels Derek Jarman's Blue is "one of the most intimate films I've ever seen."

• Beliefnet's Laura Sheahen interviews Danny Boyle.

• The trailer for Chris Cunningham's Rubber Johnny is up.

Jia Zhangke's The World screens tonight in Nashville; in the Scene, Joshua Rothkopf.

Tabloidy, but: Natasha Lyonne trashes one of Michael Rapaport's apartments: 1, 2, 3, 4. Cinematical has an update.

Online listening tip #1. For DVD Talk, Geoffrey Kleinman interviews Primer director Shane Carruth.

Online listening tip #2. For Cinematical, Karina Longworth chats for half an hour with the filmmakers behind Kissing on the Mouth.

Online viewing tip. Impactist's Nebraska in Single Frames. Via Greg Allen.

Posted by dwhudson at April 20, 2005 10:58 AM