Shorts, 5/18.

At indieWIRE, Erica Abeel assesses the goings on at Cannes so far, and if you haven't been following any coverage of the fest at all, this is probably the spot from which to get oriented. Also: "We at Reverse Shot thought it might be an opportune time to look back over the last ten years of Palme d'Or winners and see where they went."

Meanwhile, iW editor Eugene Hernandez has fantastic news at the indieWIRE @ Cannes blog: Sony Pictures Classics "is leading the charge" get Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares into US theaters. Plus: Thoughts on Sith and Manderlay.

J Hoberman sums up the fest as of yesterday. Besides the handful of first impressions, Hoberman offers this in the Voice on Last Days: "Van Sant's masterpiece, which is to say, his best filmmaking in the 20 years since the similarly direct and affecting Mala Noche."

Another round from George the Cyclist at Rashomon.

Manoha Dargis talks with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne about Dostoyevsky and their bad cop/bad cop approach to directing just before The Child premieres at Cannes. Among the positive reviews: Scott Foundas in Variety and Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

Meantime, AO Scott takes stock of all he's seen at the festival so far, first the films by Cannes regulars, then by the newcomers, and both Dargis and Scott blog on.

Tom Hall responds to one of Manohla Dargis's posts: "[T]he state of film distribution in the United States is far worse than she thinks... From my point of view, there is an entire campaign required in order to turn American audiences on to the pleasures of foreign film, a campaign that utilizes film festivals, grass roots marketing campaigns and an expansion of foreign titles from urban art houses into suburban and rural theaters." Plus: "Envy (...or Remembrance of Cannes Past)."

Back to the New York Times:

• From the International Herald Tribune, Joan Dupont on Canadians at Cannes - because there are two this year, of course, David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan; for closer analysis, see Emanuel Levy - and Thomas Crampton with "The Buzz."

• Stephen Holden holds down the fort back home, turning in a review of the "unsettling" Shake Hands with the Devil. More from Joshua Land in the Voice. Related: Amy Taubin at Film Comment on Raoul Peck's Sometimes in April.

• Dana Stevens: Mojados: Through the Night... manages to capture firsthand the danger, fatigue and sheer tedium of an arduous illegal border crossing from Mexico without ever becoming tedious itself."

Like unto wind, Miranda July whirls through Cannes.

Roger Ebert isn't just sending back instant reviews from Cannes; he's also taking some very fine photos, including a rather haunting shot of Bill Murray. And Jeffrey Wells has one of Murray, Tilda Swinton and, sliding off a tilting corner, Jim Jarmusch.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw has enjoyed Jarmusch's Broken Flowers but is truly impressed with the Dardennes' The Child. Also: Xan Brooks meets a somewhat rehabilitated William Hurt, who appears in two films at Cannes, James Marsh's The King and Cronenberg's A History of Violence, and Charlotte Higgins reports that the Chapman brothers plan to make a horror feature.

Also in the Guardian: Alexander Linklater interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian who's made a remarkable journey from supporting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a young woman to writing Submission, the film that provoked the murder of its director, Theo van Gogh.

Cinematical editor Karina Longworth gathers the most notable dealmaking-in-Cannes news in one clean entry.

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "[I]n order to keep ourselves entertained through all the constant Cannes updates, we'd like to present the rest of this post in screenplay form..." You know, it kinda works.

Brian Miller kicks off the Seattle Weekly hefty preview of the Seattle International Film Festival, opening tomorrow and running through June 12:

• Tim Appelo on two "portraits of spotlight-averse Hollywood legends," The Last Mogul: The Life and Times of Lew Wasserman and Going Through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern.

• Sheila Benson on Tell Them Who You Are and the advent of families sorting themselves out in front of the camera. More from Michael Atkinson in the Voice.

• Miller on The March of the Penguins and other wildlife docs.

• All three SW critics list their must-sees; and a list of 57 highlights plucked from over 300 films to be screened. At Twitch, Kurt picks his.

Also in the SW: John Moe's Star Wars jokes and Miller's review and NP Thompson on Karel Kachyna's The Ear: "Some of [cinematographer Josef] Illík's images are worthy of Kubrick."

In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann reminds us of the many ways in which Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is about a whole lot more than Enron. Related (and via MCN): Dana Calvo on the doc's impact in Houston.

Until I was just reminded by Ray Pride at Movie City Indie, I'd forgotten that, when the Los Angeles Times brought Calendarlive.com out from behind the subscribers-only wall, it's also made the Book Review available to us again. I won't simply declare the LAT's Book Review necessarily better than the NYT's, but I do prefer it myself. At any rate, Ray points to Richard Schickel's review of John Wranovics's Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay. And it's in there, notes Ray, that Schickel "disinters a predecessor at Time magazine as a movie reviewer, James Agee, and has a happy-dance on the remains."

More books:

• For the New York Observer, Scott Eyman reviews Eli Wallach's The Good, the Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage.

• Dennis Drabelle reviews Edward McPherson's Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat in the Washington Post.

• At Film-Philosophy, two reviews of Wheeler Winston Dixon's Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Culture: Karin Badt and Daniel Herbert.

• And Mary Helen Kolisnyk on Scott Bukatman's Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century.

Adam Hartzell has two new interviews up at Koreanfilm.org: Park Chul-soo and Byun Young-joo.

In the Korean Times, Kim Tae-jong reports on strategies distributors are dreaming up to try to ensure longer stays in art houses for Korean films.

The AFP passes along the hopes of European culture ministers and film industry types that the Internet might boost chances for European films to find their audiences. Via Movie City News.

Erik Kirschbaum for Reuters: "Cheered at a gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival late on Monday, Joyeux Noel is also a powerful illustration of Europe's revitalised and increasingly confident film industry - with a story that would make Hollywood proud." Via the Alternative Film Guide.

Via Wiley Wiggins, Liza Foreman at Backstage.com: "Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are in final negotiations to star in Bathory, which Bauer Martinez will finance, produce and distribute. Delpy will make her directorial debut on the picture, working from her own script about the legendary Elizabeth Bathory, who inspired many a vampire myth with sadistic rituals that included bathing in the blood of virgins."

On the Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith front:

• Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap." Also: Five Salon staffers dump on Star Wars - and dump well.

• Slate's David Edelstein: "It has certainly been a long slog through two and a half movies to the second hour of Episode Three, marked by lifeless pageantry, tectonic-plate pacing, Jar Jar, effects-cluttered frames, and Medusa dialogue (i.e., it turns actors to stone). What a shock when George Lucas finds his footing and the saga once again takes hold."

• Ed Halter in the Voice: "Visionary, perhaps, but also super-sized, surfacey, and not slightly cheesy." Plus: Lucas goes avant and Episodes VII - IX.

• Jim Ridley compares the run of the two trilogies and concludes: "More than anything, Episode III just seems... obligatory." Also in the City Pages: Rob Nelson, in Cannes, grabs a few Lucas quotes and observes: "[W]ith its corrupt Imperial Senate swaying public opinion by falsely accusing the Jedi of having stockpiled WMD, it's a lot closer to the here and now than any of the other Star Wars films ever were in their time."

• Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly: "It almost becomes The Passion of the Vader - a well-known tale retold in brutal, elliptically cinematic language."

• Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "Easily the series' bleakest installment, Sith is a doom-spiral blockbuster that dares admit the narcotic allure of dread."

• Patrick Macias in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "It's a Star Wars film that actually remembers to depict star wars."

• Bill Gibron's open letter to Lucas in PopMatters.

• Mike Palmquist's quiz in the SF Weekly.

• John Horn and Chris Lee in the Los Angeles Times: "George Lucas may not endorse it, but the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org is summoning the Force to help preserve the Senate filibuster."

• The posters, historically, at Posterwire.com.

• Star Wars at the Triennale di Milano.

At Cinema Minima: Wilfred Lobo's Bollywood bulletin.

How's Kingdom of Heaven playing in Egypt? Amina Elbendary in the Al-Ahram Weekly, via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

In the Village Voice:

• Brandon Stosuy previews the three-week series of experimental film and video work at the Anthology, "Eye & Ear Controlled," tomorrow through June 11.

• Dennis Lim on a "black-comic thriller from Thailand's most inventive commercial filmmaker, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's 6ixtynin9."

• Michael Atkinson on Paul Schrader's Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist: "It's pulp in defiance of its own reading level." Plus: Bad Day at Black Rock.

• Ed Park on 2009: Lost Memories: "Why not travel back in time and not make this movie?"

The cinetrix: "But here's the thing that sets Shattered Glass apart from its paranoid progenitor All the President's Men No one smokes. At a magazine. No one. That pretty much sums up the problem with Shattered Glass: The stakes aren't mortal; there's no smoke, no fire."

Flickhead: "The President's Analyst survives as one of [James] Coburn's absolute gems, and a precious artifact of the post-modern age."

Jette returns to the Forbidden Zone.

Vince Keenan on Lawless Heart: "It's a small movie, and in its own way almost perfect."

"Progress eludes film culture when garbage like Crash is praised for its 'brutal honesty,'" reads Armond White's most polite criticism of most previous reviews. Also in the NYP: Saul Austerlitz on Nights at Cabiria.

Any PR company that turns goths away from a Tim Burton film is in the wrong business. Dave Canfield writes an open letter to the director at Twitch.

Aaron is back at Out of Focus and interviewing film and new media types for the Gothamist.

Slate's "Hollywood Economist," Edward Jay Epstein, explains why the Sunday afternoon box office numbers "have little real significance other than to measure the effectiveness of the studios' massive expenditures on ads."

Cory Doctorow has the lede of the day at Wired News: "America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters - the BBC - is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it."

Online listening tip. Cinemix.

Online viewing tips #1, #2 and #3. Rant's parodies: "Who Makes Movies?" Via Peter Sciretta at Cinematical.

Online viewing tip #4. The trailer for Red, White & Blue.

Online viewing tip #5, seconding Matt Clayfield's recommendation for the outstanding May 17 edition of Rocketboom.

Online viewing tips #6 and more. Todd at Twitch, where you'll find pointers to an ongoing shooting diary for Tsui Hark's Seven Swords, has pieced together the trailer for Kim Ki-duk's The Bow.

Posted by dwhudson at May 18, 2005 2:34 PM