Weekend shorts.

If you're reading this, you love movies (or at least like them), which is why I can tell you in full confidence that Filmbrain's explication of the dangers (never mind the sheer absurdity) of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, just signed by the Prez this week, is the most important quick read you'll come across today.

Meantime: "I came across this quote from Jean Renoir a few months ago in Film Comment magazine (thanks, Kent Jones!): 'Reality is always magic.' Eureka! A documentary film festival tagline if I ever heard one." Tod Booth unveils the site for the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, May 12 through 22. Now, folks? Mouthing off about quality websites is hardly appropriate after the several days this very blog was kaputt, but anyone looking to cobble one together for a film festival can take a lesson or two from this one. Unique, common-sensical URLs for each film. And on each film's page - let's take the first one, as an example, Awake Zion, the photo, the blurb, the necessary info, all clear as can be, plus, written out and clickable so as to open a new window, a link to the film's own site. Bravo.

And: Congrats to Alison Willmore and IFC: the new design loads faster, it's easier to read and those features are going to come in handy for all of us.

Saul Symonds has been adding some intriguing new items to Light Sleeper. Brian McFarlane introduces "Standing up for Jesus," piece Raymond Durgnat wrote for Motion in 1963: "He could be maddening, sarcastic and labyrinthine but you always felt you were in the presence of a unique sensibility."

Then there are two reprints from Positif by Jean-Pierre Coursodon (and both in French), the first on Clint Eastwood's westerns, the second on Million Dollar Baby. And Schnitt editor Oliver Baumgarten looks back to the catastrophe flicks of the 70s and contemplates what they reveal about the American psyche. In German.

So Darren Hughes has returned home from the San Francisco International Film Festival: "It's a particularly great city to visit with other film buffs; we hit almost every stop on the Vertigo tour." Like Doug Cummings, to whom he points right there, Darren's a bit underwhelmed by the festival itself, but does name a few highlights, adding, "After a second viewing, L'Intrus may have bumped Café Lumière from the top spot of my 2004 list. Just a great, great film."

As it happens, the other film buff Darren was hanging with is Robert Davis, who's just posted some terrific tidbits from his interview with Claire Denis that didn't make an earlier cut.

"In the past few days, the heads of two different distributon companies separately told me about a film they consider to be one of the most important documentaries ever made. 'Ever made?' I asked. 'Yes,' they both answered. So Eugene Hernandez went and saw Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares.

"Iran had its moment, Finland and Korea too. But at film festivals around the world these days, much of the talk is focused on Argentina and the emerging crop of young directors who have been winning prizes and praise from Berlin and Rotterdam to Toronto and Miami." Larry Rohter asks some of the higher profile Argentine directors - Lucrecia Martel, Pablo Trapero, Diego Lerman, Lita Stantic, Daniel Burman - how this can be happening when, in so many other respects, the country's in such dire straits.

Also in the New York Times:

• Terrence Rafferty previews the three-week retrospective at the Walter Reade, "Michael Powell: Beauty Unending": "In Michael Powell's movies everything seems exaggerated, because he turns every subject that interests him into a matter of life and death."

• Budd Schulberg - yes, that Budd Schulberg - reviews Clinton Heylin's Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios.

• Christian Moerk reports that Hilary Swank will be following in the footsteps of Halle Berry, heading into a role in The Reaping, another in a series of "lower-budget horror flicks" for Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis's Dark Castle label, which includes Gothika.

• Vince Vaughn is now an A-lister, reports Sharon Waxman.

Back in March, Dennis Cozzalio popped a movie quiz on his readers. Questions ranged from #1, "The one movie you'd drop everything just to see again," through, say, #27, "Joan Crawford or Bette Davis?," to #40, "Your favorite Dean Jones Disney movie." Dennis has now painstakingly tallied the score.

"And yet already something about this film haunts me." The Guardian's running an extract from Jonathan Coe's collection of short pieces, 9th & 13th. In this one, a prolonged quest to learn more about Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes leads to several wonderfully rendered far-flung encounters.

Also:

• David Thomson tells Jean Vigo's life story and urges you, dear reader, to see L'Atalante - and for that matter, the entire oeuvre. It'll take you all of 200 minutes and it just might have the impact on you that it had on Truffaut.

• Michael Coveney reviews By Jack Rosenthal: An Autobiography in Six Acts, written "in the form of a rag-bag screenplay." It does sound like a fun read.

• John Patterson: "There may be few new taboos for [John] Waters and his ilk to break, but some of the old ones he pissed on first time around - the Catholic church, religious bigots of all stripes, sexual neurosis and hypocrisy - have proven themselves so satanically durable that he might want to take another whack at them now he's getting on."

• Neil Armstrong looks into the strange business of movie memorabilia.

• Television is not an inferior medium to cinema, argues Mark Lawson. It's just different.

For Grist, Amanda Griscom Little calls up Edward Norton at "his hotel in Prague, where he is on location shooting The Illusionist, to discuss his impressive environmental pedigree, his indignation over Bush administration policies, his heroes and his vices."

"How influential was he? Put it this way: without Hitchcock, movies themselves would have evolved in a drastically different fashion." The Toronto Star's Geoff Pevere lists eleven "key lessons he left us." Via Movie City News.

Stefan Kanfer in the City Journal: "[D]espite its profound influence on every facet of entertainment, from the musical to the television sitcom, American vaudeville had a trajectory as astonishingly brief - if sparkling - as a Roman candle." Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Patrick Schabe has a fine, quick piece on Douglas Adams at PopMatters.

Alison Veneto's primer, "The Modern Hong Kong Triad Picture," is being posted at Movie Poop Shoot in - yes, that's right - three parts. Also: DK Holm has a fresh column up, terrific as always.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind co-writer Pierre Bismuth recalls the sheer terror of Oscar night for... Frieze, of all things. Via Movie City Indie. Also, this. Who wrote it? We may never know.

"Have you seen Saved! yet?" asks the cinetrix. "Oh, you should."

Wiley Wiggins: "Issue two of the Chaise DVD zine is out- a free compilation of (printable) art, animation, and various sundry goodies. Send them a SASE and you'll get a disc."

Online viewing tip. Todd at Twitch, where Canfield interviews Todd Solondz, has discovered that the site - complete with a gorgeous, downloadable trailer - for a film that's probably the very one I'm most looking forward to seeing this summer... is up: Fatih Akin's Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul. By the way, what else has Todd found? Screen shots from Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch's Bill Murray movie (every indie icon will make one, eventually). Eric Lavallee has the pix and lowdown at Ioncinema.

More trailers via Twitch: Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud, Alexandre Aja's High Tension, Robert Rodriguez's The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and of course, George A Romero's Land of the Dead.

Posted by dwhudson at April 30, 2005 4:10 PM