Shorts, 5/25.

The New York Asian Film Festival (June 17 through 26 at the Anthology and June 24 through 30 at the ImaginAsian) has announced its lineup and Grady Hendrix has already made his personal picks.

Also: "Thai cinema is undergoing a renaissance, but you wouldn't know it unless you live in Thailand." Hendrix draws up a scorecard.

With that, then, a string of festival items before the rest. As is his wont, Robert Davis suddenly and volcanically bursts forth from another long silence. He begins by refusing to join pile-on in the local press in the immediate wake of the San Francisco International Film Festival. To an extent. Granted, he has his criticisms, and he does wrap with a bit of "unsolicited advice," but most critics of the fest, he argues, are missing the point: "[T]he real news, my friends, is not the soap operas within, spats between, and attendance fluctuations of major festivals but the rise of small festivals nationwide."

Two reviews follow: Jessica Yu's In the Realms of the Unreal and Mark Wexler's Tell Them Who You Are. More on that one from Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian; meanwhile, in the New York Observer, Raquel Hecker mingles with Haskell Wexler and John Sayles.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival is going to be happening in August after all, reports Tim Cornwell in the Scotsman, but it's in dire need of a long-term commitment from a strapping sponsor. Via The Movie Blog.

At Cannes, distributors may have been more interested in picking up foreign films for US theaters than it seemed at first glance. Anthony Kaufman explains.

For the Korea Times, Paolo Bertolin measures the "Highs, Lows" for Korean films at Cannes. Via the IFC Blog.

A Cannes wrap-up from George the Cyclist at Rashomon: "My totals for my 12 days of cinema: 66 movies... There were seven that could easily end up on my Top Ten List for the year: Battle in Heaven, Hidden, Down in the Valley, Broken Flowers, The Child, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Death of Mister Lazarescu."

Meanwhile, Cannes coverage has helped girish prep for Toronto.

Cannes dominates the film section of this week's Village Voice, beginning with J Hoberman's disappointments: "What does it take? Beginning with Dead Ringers (1988), or even The Fly (1986), Cronenberg has been, film for film, the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world. But then, Hou Hsiao-hsien - arguably the greatest narrative filmmaker working anywhere over the last 15 years - left Cannes without a prize as well."

In another dispatch, Hoberman proposes that two Mexican entries, Sangre and Battle in Heaven, "suggest a new sort of ceremonial cinema," while Melissa Anderson swings by a few selections from the Un Certain Regard and Director's Fortnight programs and Marc Peranson meets Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and muses on the "Cahiers bunch."

Also in the Voice, John Anderson talks to Werner Herzog about his doc, Grizzly Man.

Anyone following the Siffblog knows that NP Thompson has been less than enthusiastic about what's on offer at this year's Seattle International Film Festival (through June 12), but he does have one hearty recommendation: Going Through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern, screening on Sunday: "SEE IT! This is a '5' on your ballot! Stern will be there for a Q&A after the film; I've seen him at audience Q&As before, and he's great!"

Speaking of fine docs, Kirby Dick's Oscar-nominated Twist of Faith will have its Los Angeles premiere on Thursday at the Amnesty International Film Festival.

That doc will be worth fighting traffic for, but Caryn James fears a glut: "Even as the genre leaps out of its niche, it is suffering from a tyranny of substance over style."

Also in the New York Times:

• Dana Stevens on, that's right, another doc, The Fearless Freaks: The Wondrously Improbable Story of the Flaming Lips. More from Dennis Lim in the Voice.

• Elaine Sciolino on French comedian Jamel Debbouze's taking on a serious role in a WWII drama.

• Yes, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith broke opening day and weekend box office records, but as Sharon Waxman explains, it "could not break a box-office slump that has kept movie attendance and ticket sales lagging behind last year's for 13 weekends, a trend that has some in Hollywood concerned about the habits of American moviegoers."

• Anthony Tommasini reminds us that we should not overlook composer John Williams's contributions to the overall impact of Sith.

• Waxman on how and why Catherine Hardwicke nabbed the director's chair vacated by David Fincher. According to Stacy Peralta, Lords of Dogtown is all the better for it.

• Edward Rothstein on the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle; what's on display is "something like a history of the future, or a history of ideas about the future."

• In the long run, though, it's David Carr who's probably covering the most important story. 2029's plans to release films in theaters and on TV and DVD simultaneously are not news, but here, Carr hears out the 'xperts as they weigh the pros and cons.

• Dave Kehr on new DVDs.

The Esoteric Rabbit / Ghostboy Letters, Series 3: Audiences, Theatres and Thoughts on Distribution.

"Filmmaker magazine's Message Board has been completely redesigned and relaunches today," wrote Steve Gallagher on Monday. "We have created a number of forums to enable filmmakers, screenwriters, d.p.s, musicians and actors to network, trade info, seek jobs, promote themselves or discover new opportunities, and to suggest new forums." And it's free, though you do need to register to post.

Chatting with Michael Madsen, FilmFocus's Joe Utichi has picked up quite a bit of info on Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards. Via Peter Sciretta at Cinematical.

"Japan is the second biggest market in the world for Hollywood movies," notes Chris Betros in Japan Today. "But why are so many movies released here so long after their US debut? How are they marketed? What about subtitles? Merchandising tie-ins? Let's find out." Ok! Via Movie City Indie.

"In my review of Star Wars: ROTS, I ventured that the mere sight of Samuel L Jackson hanging with Yoda was the biggest visual disconnect in the history of cinema," writes David Edelstein. "Reader Larry J. Rothstein countered with a fat, wattled Roger Moore bedding Grace Jones in his last Bond picture, A View to a Kill. I smelled a Slate contest." Also: Edward Jay Epstein on how insurance costs can cripple a star's career or even shut down a production.

"You'll have gathered I have my problems with [Saskia] Olde Wolbers' work," writes Adrian Searle well into his review of Trailer, currently on view at the South London Gallery. "[T]he distant nods, which some critics have identified, to Jean-Luc Godard or Chris Marker (and in particular his 1963 La Jeteé) notwithstanding. I find it hard not to take her sensitivity, scrupulousness and seriousness for preciousness and pretension. That said, how is an artist going to get anywhere without pretensions?"

Also in the Guardian:

• Peter Bradshaw approves of the Cannes jury's decisions, but, gathered from the wires, Cannes jury prez Emir Kusturica: "We had a selection where I think the average wasn't very high. I felt that most of the films were a little bit less good than I expected." Bruce Kirkland has more on the jury's deliberations - "all inside news went public" - in the Toronto Sun; via Ed Champion.

• Howard Feinstein interviews Gregg Araki. In the SFBG, B Ruby Rich talks with him as well and Johnny Ray Huston finds Mysterious Skin "easily one of this year's best, a genuine surprise."

• John Sutherland sniggers at the right-wingnuts boycotting Sith.

Kamera's Antonio Pasolini meets Teresa de Pelegri and Dominic Harari, a married couple and directors of the Spanish comedy Only Human.

Patrick Goldstein meets Joe Roth, head of Revolution Studios, as he makes "a movie no one was willing to make - a harrowing drama about a lost child, set against a minefield of racial animosity - hoping for something between renewal and redemption."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• The protest was daring; filming it has made it lasting. Barbara Demick reports in the Los Angeles Times on the widely circulating record of a North Korean's denunciation of Kim Jong Il.

• Elaine Dutka on the unconventional roll-out of Tim Robbins's Embedded Live DVD.

• Kevin Crust: "Film Independent - formerly IFP/Los Angeles - continues to expand the [Los Angeles Film Festival (June 16 - 26)] both geographically and cinematically with screenings and events stretching from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica." More from Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE.

Ryan Wu: "It occurred to me over the weekend that many of my favorite films that had moved me with their indelible portraits of romantic yearning are actually case studies on helper guy pathology of one type or another."

With Billy Bob Thornton (in Richard Linklater's Bad News Bears; Posterwire.com compares the poster with the original), Martin Lawrence, Burt Reynolds and Will Ferrell all coaching teams this summer, Joe Leydon's decided to measure them against onscreen coaches of the past in the New York Daily News.

Will the summer be all that bad? The Philadelphia Weekly's Sean Burns is actually looking forward to seven movies.

Just two reviewers from the Reverse Shot team chime in this week at indieWIRE, and both are disappointed in Alice Wu's Saving Face.

SXSW attendees were treated to trailers for a most unusual - and downright cool - event: The Alamo Drafthouse's Rolling Roadshow Tour. 6000 miles, 21 days in August, twelve films, screened where they were shot. Examples: It Came From Outer Space in 3D and in Roswell; Close Encounters of the Third Kind at Devil's Tower. And, via the SXSW News Reel, more fun ideas for possible screenings in the future from Slashdotters.

It's Dracula month over at The Groovy Age of Horror. Via Bitter Cinema.

Brian Flemming is pleased - very pleased - with the how the premiere of The God Who Wasn't There went in San Francisco.

Nick Rombes: Some of the similarities between the birth of cinema and the birth of digital cinema - especially web cinema - are remarkable."

Thomas K Arnold in USA Today: "Though the handheld [PlayStation Portable], launched in March, is considered primarily a gaming device, Hollywood studios are aggressively releasing movies on the PSP's proprietary Universal Media Disc (UMD), a 21/4-inch disc encased in a protective plastic shell." Meanwhile, at AppleInsider, Kasper Jade rounds up rumors on the next iPod generation: Evidently some video capabilities are in the works.

CNET's Stefanie Olsen reports on the high-tech animation of Madagascar: "Every hair on every animal represented a line of computer code, for a countless number of algorithms that had to be compressed and rendered overnight to create the images in just one scene." As for the film itself, Cheryl Eddy writes in the SFBG, "The animation is colorful and realistically furry, but without a winning, memorable story, Madagascar fails to reach anything resembling Finding Nemo-style heights." More from Michael Atkinson in the Voice.

That swooshing sound you hear over at The Artful Writer is the screenwriting community switching all but en masse from Final Draft to Movie Magic Screenwriter.

Online viewing tip #1. The True Strangeness of the Universe, an aborted project by Errol Morris: "I was hired by IBM to make a film for the year 2000. It was for an 'in house' conference of IBM employees. Regrettably, the conference was cancelled, and the film was never finished." Via Movie City News.

Online viewing tip #2. Basement Jaxx's "U Don't Know Me" video, directed by Matt Kirkby. Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tips #3 and #4. The Blood of Jesus (1941) and Go Down, Death! (1944), both directed by Spencer Williams and both via filmtagebuch.

Posted by dwhudson at May 25, 2005 3:09 AM