Shorts, 5/4.

David Dylan Thomas, see, who's working on a list of the 50 greatest character actors, is pretty damn funny, while J Alden is ambitious.

For indieWIRE, Jason Guerrasio reports on five ongoing indie productions. Also: IFP/Los Angeles is now Film Independent, but you can call it FIND. Eugene Hernandez has the story and the story behind the story. Plus: a first peek at Gus Van Sant's Last Days.

"We are approaching the day when the movie itself will constitute the interface to the movie." Nicholas Rombes, who recently edited the book, New Punk Cinema, has launched a blog: Digital Poetics.

"[W]hat could everyday life in Lebanon during the civil war possibly look like in film?" asks Iman Hamam in the Al-Ahram Weekly. "Certainly [Maroun] Baghdadi's Little Wars seems to present an answer to this question." Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

Doug Cummings on Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, now restored and blown up to 35mm (look for it in theaters and on DVD this year): "[I]t deserves every bit of the acclaim it has received as one of the few authentic, sensitive, and complex portraits of inner city black community."

Wajda's trilogy of war films, writes Saul Austerlitz at the New Republic, "is about Poles' World War II experiences, it is also, more clandestinely, about the disasters that came after the war.... A realist in temperament, Wajda loved a well-composed, symbolically weighted frame, and A Generation, much like the films to come, balances the director's desire to realistically depict the war, which demands that the auteur recede to the background, with a stylistic tendency to stage visually impressive, high-contrast set pieces. There is a nightmarish clarity to the imagery in A Generation even in the happy moments." Also: Lee Siegel on the new Kojak.

"[I]t would seem that the contemporary horror rennaisance in Japan just keeps on giving." Howard Peirce has two quick recommendations for you.

Yakuza Eiga asks Patrick Macias ten questions.

James Seo points to a new Flickr group: Wong Kar-wai. "Dig the photos of the locations from WKW films." More: Wong Kar-wai calendars.

Kim Ki-duk round-up in the wake of Jonathan Marlow's interview: Filmbrain approaches The Bow cautiously and Todd at Twitch has news of a release on DVD of Address Unknown in Korea.

In the Korea Times: Kim Tae-jong interviews Song Il-gon (via IFC and Twitch) and Kim Ki-tae reports that Hong Sang-soo's Tale of Cinema has been added at the last minute to the Competition lineup at Cannes. At Twitch, Todd points to the trailer and IndieWIRE has word on half a dozen more recent additions, all out of Competition - and here's another trailer for another headed to Cannes, Wilson Yip's Sha Po Lang, via Twitch.

Did you go to the Tribeca Film Festival at any point during its run? If so, Aaron at Out of Focus would like to know what you thought. Not just the films; the whole experience.

More on Tribeca. Howard Feinstein has a good long look back at the fest at indieWIRE: "Without a doubt, some of the strongest films of the festival were documentaries." Brian Brooks, in the meantime, collects more pix; lots of fun captions with this batch.

And Michael Musto offers another look back; at the fun parts, that is.

Also in the Village Voice:

• Noticed a trend at your local art house lately? Dennis Lim has, too: "Pedophilia has become the favorite party trick of the American indie - movies from Happiness to L.I.E. to The Woodsman are on some level predicated on a discomfiting, almost stunt-like empathy for the ostensible monster." As for Mysterious Skin, it "offers catharsis but not escape."

• Michael Atkinson: "For the most part, Kingdom of Heaven is stupefyingly dull" (FWIW, the German critics concur; more from Cheryl Eddy in the SFBG, Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press and Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer). Also: "Full of well-observed supporting riffs, Crash might've accumulated more frisson had it cast a clearer eye on how social tension actually plays." More from Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

• Walking through the oeuvre, Jessica Winter previews the retro, "Michael Powell: Beauty Unending," at the Walter Reade.

• 1, 2, 3: "Tracking Shots"!

• DVDs: Lim on Devils on the Doorstep and Atkinson on F for Fake.

At Cinematical, Karina Longworth asks, "[D]oes Tribeca want to be more of a trade show, or more of a community event?" Also: That Emanuel Levy piece was one too many for Karina, who leaps to Woody Allen's defense.

The festival circuit wound itself entirely differently a few decades ago and, at Movie City News, Leonard Klady shares a few fond memories before turning to the problem at hand: What should Tribeca do about Cannes?

The SXSWclick Festival (used to be SXSWeb) is now accepting submissions - DVD, VHS or SWF - through June 10. Which is closer than you think.

Steve Rosenbaum lists the audience favorites at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, which wrapped on Sunday; the Jury, of course, has made its own choices.

Steve Silberman has dropped by to note that the National Film Board of Canada would make Arthur Lipsett's short, 21-87, the one that so impressed George Lucas, available as a DVD on demand. You might want to give them a call.

It's a Disney film, but England is stamped all over it. Even so, Thomas Jones, an editor at the London Review of Books, hasn't seen it yet: "But that, in its way, is true to the spirit of The Hitchhiker's Guide, which, like all the best adventure stories, and the best jokes, relies on a constant sense of deferral."

Theater of the New Ear? "Sound plays" by Joel and Ethan Coen and Charlie Kaufman "with eight extraordinary actors, scripts in hand, joined on stage by a sound-effects artist and a live band to create multiple characters and parallel realities, located somewhere between melodrama and comedy." Those extraordinary actors: Steve Buscemi, Hope Davis, Peter Dinklage, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brooke Smith and Meryl Streep. May 13 at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Jeremy McCarter has the story.

Also in the Guardian:

• Edgar Reitz's Heimat 3, all 680 minutes of it, is headed to British cinemas. Stuart Jeffries asks him about this epic about Germany in the 20th century that Reitz has spent nearly three decades making. More from Gerard Gilbert in the Independent.

• George Monbiot: "Darwin's Nightmare is an allegorical tale of the exploitation of Africa, and a moving and beautifully filmed portrait of the little fish living in the global pond."

• Agnes Poirer previews three British films screening at Cannes this year.

• "Inspired by Bollywood romance and emboldened by wider social freedom, increasing numbers of starry-eyed young Afghans are defying an age-old custom of arranged marriage in favour of 'love marriages'," reports Declan Walsh.

• Lee Hall breaks down the story of Billy Elliot, year by year.

In the Independent, David Thomson ruminates on the endurance of Death of a Salesman and Jonathan Romney interviews Todd Solondz. In the SFBG, Kimberly Chun does as well (while Johnny Ray Huston reviews Palindromes, calling it "a bracing tonic for these times"), and the page leads right into Dennis Harvey's preview of tomorrow night's screening of George and Mike Kuchar's films that "flabbergasted the gasbags in a downtown art scene that had never quite glimpsed anything like them" back in the early 60s.

Also in the SFBG: Cheryl Eddy on the "tiny self-starter," Fighting Tommy Riley.

"I believe in truth. And in the pursuit of truth." Read and/or listen to Errol Morris on NPR. Via Movie City Indie.

Hugh Davies in the Telegraph: "Nick Hornby has confirmed his status as one of Hollywood's favourite novelists by selling the film rights to his latest book before it has even been published."

For Kamera, Beth Gilligan reviews The Trouble with Men, edited by Phil Powrie, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington.

Those reviled pre-show ads movie theater chains have been forcing on us? James Barron reports that Loews, at least, is going to respond to moviegoers complaints. Not by actually cutting the ads, of course. Heaven forbid. But instead by listing two starting times for each screening, the first as the more or less official starting time, the second denoting the actual start of the actual movie. In the immortal words of Graham Chapman, this is getting altogether too silly.

Also in the New York Times: Stephen Holden on The Girl From Monday, "a weightless, sentimental and intellectually lazy effort from an independent filmmaker whose movies seem increasingly insubstantial" (more: Ed Halter in the Voice), and Manohla Dargis on Writer of O, a doc shot through with "missed opportunities" (more: Jessica Winter in the Voice).

Via the IFC Blog, Rachna Kanwar selects and annotates "The 10 Most Erotic Moments in Hindi Cinema" for the India Times.

George Thomas: "Rediff is polling readers [sic] about which Hollywood films they would like to see remade as Hindi films. Just what we need now: encouragement for the increasingly powerful wave of dumb-me-down prevading the sociosphere."

Know of a remake that beats the original? Add to the list building up at A Girl and a Gun.

"What's the first movie you went to unchaperoned and under your own steam?" asks the cinetrix. "Share. Share."

Following a break-in, Twitch's Todd needs to rebuild his DVD library. Help him out, won't you?

Richard Vernon in Sojourners on the recent wave of horror flicks: "Where does America go to understand how it feels about communism, atomic science, immigration, AIDS, or terrorism? Where it always has - the back row of the movies."

"Craptastic," "turkey" or "film maudit"? In the Nashville Scene, Jim Ridley presents the facts (and yes, a few outstanding opinions) of three cases and leaves it to you to decide: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Manson Family and Reflections of Evil.

Thomas Groh and Sean Spillane love it: Monstrous Beast.

"It's idiotic to watch State of the Union as a thrill ride and ignore its cultural signals," fumes Armond White in the New York Press.

Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, has another piece in Slate, this one breaking down the numbers on Fahrenheit 9/11. In short, Michael Moore, the Weinsteins and Disney all did very, very well.

Has it been a year already? Happy B-day, Defamer.

In the Hollywood Reporter, Martin A Grove considers the implications of Steven Soderbergh and 2929 Entertainment's plans to release six movies, each in theaters, on DVD and on TV simultaneously.

Online browsing tip. Paintings by Martin Mull. Yes, that Martin Mull. Via Rashomon.

Online viewing tips #1 and #2. Vloggin'. Today's edition of Rocketboom features Chuck Olsen reporting from the Living Green Expo in Minneapolis and Steve Garfield from Harvard, talking to Steven Johnson about that book. You know the one. Meanwhile, Matthew Clayfield: "So, finally, my first real vlog entry... Lo-fi rocks my world, I guess."

Online viewing tips #3 and #4. "Harlan McCraney." Via Alternet's Peek, also currently pointing to Sarah McLachlan's "World on Fire" video. It cost $15, you know. The remaining $149,985 slotted for the budget went to benefit developing and war-torn nations. Before you roll your eyes, go ahead and actually watch the video.

Online viewing tip #5. Greg Allen notes that the "urban explorer/cinephiles of La Mexicaine De Perforation were featured on Laurent Weil's program, La Semaine du Cinéma Sunday (Dimanche Mai 01) on Canal+." WMV off that page or QT here.

Online viewing tip #6. The trailer for Blush. What is it? Who else could explain but Todd. At Twitch.

Posted by dwhudson at May 4, 2005 4:03 PM