Shorts, 5/11.

Cannes opens this evening and the media are standing by. The Los Angeles Times now has a special section on Cannes going, joining the Guardian, the Times of London, Libération, Le Monde, Variety and, of course, indieWIRE's ferocious blog, already roaring, and special, idling and anxious.

And how are the French anticipating Cannes? With mixed feelings, according to Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau." Writing in Le Nouvel Observateur, Pascal Mérigeau files the usual complaints about the dominance of the Americans and how, "year by year," they're squeezing French cinema into an ever-diminishing market share, but at the same time: "In Moscow, Beijing and New York, French film is seen as romantic, intelligent, humorous, 'different,' though at times irritatingly intellectual; in any case, French cinema has something no other cinema has, or has any longer." Harrumph!

The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson surveys the buying and selling fields and finds the sands shifting. Also: Charles Masters has the first inklings of news regarding David Lynch's next project. It's about time.

Sally Pook reports in the Telegraph on The Man Who Met Himself, the only British short to be screened at Cannes this year. Ben Crowe, 27, made it for all of $750. Via the SXSW News Reel. Also: David Gritten listens Mike Barker rave about Walter Salles's Central Station and SF Said files another report from the Arctic location of the Journals of Knud Rasmussen shoot.

The murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in November 1975 remains one of the most mysterious and contentious events in modern Italian political and cultural history. And it's just gotten a lot more mysterious and contentious. Pino Pelosi, the man accused of the murder and subsequently imprisoned for nine years, has said in a recent TV interview that it was actually three men who beat the director to death, while Sergio Citti has told La Repubblica that it was five. As Benedetto Cataldi reports for the BBC, the inquiry is now being reopened. Doug Ireland comments at Indymedia.

Read this: Brian Flemming: "Independent distribution - it's actually working."

Morgan Spurlock on his FX series, 30 Days: "The [first] episode asks the question, "what's it like to live on $5.15 an hour?" And I'll tell you right now, it ain't easy.... Future installments will deal with Islam and America, Binge Drinking, Anti-Aging, Consumerism, Homosexuality."

"Los Angeles is in love with the idea of its own self-destruction," writes Manohla Dargis. "To watch a movie like Crash or to peruse a Los Angeles bible like Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear (1999), the second book in his proposed trilogy about the city (the first is City of Quartz), is to know that Angelenos have met the enemy and he is us."

Also in the New York Times:

• David Carr on the other coast: "Culturally vibrant, if economically still fragile, New York has quietly been emerging as the world's primary clearinghouse for a fast-expanding pool of very-low-budget movies."

• Veterans of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon be making their first appearances in American movies; in next year's Harsh Times, for example. Caryn James considers the "emblematic screen heroes" of previous wars and notes that the next round will be, at least at first, "determinedly apolitical, partly for practical reasons. With the war in Iraq still raging and the country polarized, few filmmakers want to alienate half the audience."

• Box office is down, and now, "Hollywood is starting to get worried," reports Sharon Waxman. "Are people turning away from lackluster movies, or turning their backs on the whole business of going to theaters?" Variety subscribers can read Gabriel Snyder arguing more or less that everyone just needs to calm down, the year so far has been fine.

• Dave Kehr picks three new DVDs to write about: The Americanization of Emily, Boccaccio '70 and The Longest Yard.

• Gary Gately on the duelling DVDs of Baltimore: the police vs the dealers.

• Waxman on producer Ray Stark's art collection.

"We're living a medieval nightmare, in a world slipping back into cycles of holy war and revenge," writes Jonathan Jones in the Guardian, having just seen Kingdom of Heaven. "Perhaps [Ridley] Scott is not being entirely fanciful in suggesting that the solution, too, is medieval. If we're going to lose the Enlightenment we might at least rediscover chivalry." Related: The LAT's Patrick Goldstein talks to Scott and Maurice Timothy Reidy for the New Republic: "At the heart of Scott's film lies a rather sentimental tribute to American values and the progressive idea that those values can be cultivated abroad." And to think they've all seen the same movie, too.

Lily Oei interviews Xan Cassavetes for Nerve. Via Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay.

At Movie Poop Shoot, DK Holm finds Taschen's $200 mammoth edition of The Stanley Kubrick Archives "a valuable addition to Kubrick scholarship [but] it is also something of a rip-off."

At Koreanfilm.org, Darcy Paquet reviews Kim Dae-Sung's Blood Rain, the #1 film in South Korea this past weekend.

The crux of Matt Zoller Seitz's cover story in the New York Press goes like this:

[I]f you believe action pictures can aspire to the status of popular art, [Jet] Li's statement [that martial arts films are even better now than in the 70s] sounds less like a pitch than a simple assertion of fact. Some of the most visually, rhythmically, technically assured films of the past 15 years have been martial arts pictures - or action pictures with a strong martial arts component - produced mainly in Pacific Rim countries. And despite baffling missteps by English-language distributors, they've found grateful audiences in the States.

Also in the NYP: Armond White lists the many ways in which Jane Fonda is too good for Monster-in-Law (more from Jessica Winter in the Village Voice) and Saul Austerlitz briefly previews the First Nations\First Features series (in New York May 12 though 23; in Washington DC May 18 through 23). More from Joshua Land in the Voice.

Speaking of which, Arnaud Desplechin gets the interview + review treatment this issue. Dennis Lim's talk with the director is longer than many the Voice has been running lately (a hopeful sign, though his chat with Joseph Gordon-Levitt is brevity abbreviated) and J Hoberman remarks that "Desplechin appears to thrive on the structures that impede narrative progress. Kings and Queen just picks up the baggage and runs - it's terrific filmmaking." Three more thumbs up, way up, in indieWIRE from the Reverse Shot crew.

Back to the Voice:

• Hoberman: "Film Forum's Harold Lloyd retro winds up with a present for fans of the bespectacled slapstick star - a newly discovered and restored silent version of Lloyd's first talkie, Welcome Danger (1929)." And on Westfront 1918: "GW Pabst's first talkie - released in 1930 - is a World War I movie far superior to the same year's All Quiet on the Western Front."

• Laura Sinagra on Mad Hot Ballroom; basically, it's no Spellbound.

• Michael Atkinson on Layer Cake: "If one weren't still wet to the eyeballs with dozens of self-referential Tarantino imitators, [Matthew] Vaughn's film might prove adequately refreshing, but little more."

  Michael Musto talks to Bai Ling about that Playboy cover.

• DVDs: Hoberman on Notre Musique, Lim on Primer and Atkinson on Donkey Skin, Nang Nak and Jan Dara.

• Half a dozen "Tracking Shots."

Noting that the Caligari's Cabinet Awards are back after nearly four years, M Valdemar remarks, intriguingly, "if a low-budget horror film with a failed distribution deal ever deserved the Criterion treatment, I'll vote Messiah of Evil [aka Dead People] over Carnival of Souls any day of the week."

David Thomson: "[T]he season of films that show [HG Wells's] links to film history at the National Film Theatre may be a stunner in revealing just how many situations and ideas in science fiction come from Wells." Also in the Independent: Meryl Streep, as seen by Thomson and Elisabeth Vincentelli.

Cheryl Eddy, who contributes the movies rundown to the San Francisco Bay Guardian's special summer guide, looks ahead to the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, opening tomorrow and running through May 22.

Also in the SFBG:

• B Ruby Rich, not one to wear out her superlatives, revs them up for Lucrecia Martel and The Holy Girl.

• Chuck Stephens on Save the Green Planet, "a very funny film - until you begin to realize just how deadly serious it is."

• Eddy on Lipstick and Dynamite: "[I]magine A League of Their Own with fouler language, vicious dropkicks, and grudges that simmer for 50 years."

So we have a frontrunner in the Oscar race for Best Actor already, according to Emanuel Levy. I'd scoff if it were anyone but Robert Downey Jr. Via Movie City News.

Stop Smiling's running an excerpt from Katherine Turman's interview with Mark Mothersbaugh. The occasion is Criterion's release on DVD of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Film-Philosophy launches a special issue, "Gigantic Visions of Mankind: Spectacular Effects and Digital Cinema," with two pieces on the same book, Cinetext editor Robert Blanchet's Blockbuster: Aesthetik, Oekonomie und Geschichte des Postklassischen Hollywoodkinos. Jacobia Dahm:

Blanchet's overall claim - drawing on Tom Gunning and Umberto Eco - is that the development that culminates in the spectacle films of the last decade is not so much a new way of storytelling as it is cinema's return to its roots: the cinema of vaudeville, amusement fairs, Méliès, and Edison, etc. which made up the cinematic entertainment of the very beginning of the 20th century. It is the modes of production that have changed rather than storytelling itself.

Marina Sheppard adds that, "Although [the monograph is] written from an academic point of view and by a film and media scholar from the Vienna Institute of Philosophy, laymen will find it understandable and enjoyable." Laymen who read German, naturally.

At indieWIRE, Wendy Mitchell sends in a dispatch from London, where she hears more about Danny Boyle's next two films and Greg Hall's The Plague, the second feature distributed online by It's All Electric.

Suzy Hansen has a lot to say about Angelina Jolie in the New York Observer: "She has brought back the big, beautiful, silty riverbed of American romance: queen of the photo op, good-will ambassador for the UN, free-loving promiscuite, rippling action hero, adoptive mom, daughter of a Hollywood duke of the 70s, Oscar winner."

Alison at the IFC Blog: "The Onion AV Club has the bestest, most pessimistic summer movie guide ever."

Quick Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith round-up:

• William S Kowinski in the San Francisco Chronicle: "The society and the hero that think themselves good but transform themselves into evil is a bold theme that in some ways goes against the grain of America after Sept. 11, 2001."

• Dale Peck, on the other hand, in the NYO: "[W]hatever else it is, Star Wars is hardly reactionary."

• More first glances from Louisa McLennan in the London Times and Patrick Macias, who - unrelated - passes along word from Matt Alt in Tokyo on a sort of cross between a panel discussion and a PR gig for Production IG.

For Slate, Edward Jay Epstein reads Schwarzenegger's contract for Terminator 3: "It's a state-of-the-art exercise in deal-making."

Todd at Twitch has early and pretty nifty news of what'll be on offer at the New York Asian Film Festival, June 17 through 30.

Via Perlentaucher again: Mohamed El-Assyouti's thorough review of the 11th National Film Festival in Egypt for the Al-Ahram Weekly.

The Microsoft Short Film Competition: "Thought Thieves." Via Greg Allen, who puts it best: "You can't make this stuff up, folks."

Reel Identities, the New Orleans LGBT film festival, running from June 10 through 12, has just unveiled its schedule.

Chuck Olsen, whose Blogumentary opens in Seattle on Friday, cuts loose a transatlantic wave of vlog news.

If you enjoy reading this sort of thing, imagine the kick you'd get writing it: Cinematical is looking for bloggers.

Online browsing tip. The Mary Woronov Website. Via Flickhead. You'll also want to catch Ray Young's review of Hindle Wakes.

Online viewing tips #1 through #5. One of them's an ad for Windows, of all things. But it's cute. What's more, Jason Wishnow interviews the filmmaker, Chris Niemeyer, just as he interviews all of his "Weekly Pics" at Nerve. Some of them require a premium subscription, but these don't: 1 (the ad), 2, 7, 8 (you'll have seen that one if you follow all the links here, and if you do, please consult your family physician) and 9. Via the SXSW News Reel.

Online viewing tip #6. Evan Mather's Moonwater. I have no idea why I love it.

Online viewing tip #7. Stanley Donen's Charade has slipped into the public domain, and therefore, onto the Internet Archive. Via The Crime in Your Coffee.

Online downloading and listening tip. The New Pornographers will be releasing Twin Cinema in August, but you can nab that title track now. Via Salon's "Audiofile."

Posted by dwhudson at May 11, 2005 4:42 PM