Long weekend shorts.

Andy Klein opens the Los Angeles CityBeat's "Summer Film 2005" special issue logically enough - with a calendar of the season's releases. Then:

• Klein gets the back story on Batman Begins from Christopher Nolan.

• Steve Appleford traces the history of the Caped Crusader.

• "Imagine School of Rock, except with Joe Pesci (in Goodfellas mode) instead of Jack Black." Steven Rosen asks Rock School co-producer Sheena Joyce what she thinks about Paul Green. More from Nancy Ramsey in the Los Angeles Times.

• Klein has an amusing conversation with Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette about The Aristocrats - and for some reason, George Lucas.

• Luke Y Thompson interviews Gregg Araki.

• Don Waller asks Eric Bogosian about his new novel, Wasted Beauty. Review: Kai Maristed in the LAT.

• Klein - very busy this week! - reviews Madagascar. But wait, there's more: "What distinguishes the Hanzo the Razor trilogy is the extent to which the ultraviolence is sexual."

Laura M Holson's headline says it all: "With Popcorn, DVDs and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home." And if you don't believe the moviegoers and 'xperts she quotes, it's hard to argue with the accompanying graphic.

Also in the New York Times:

• "Before, we used to read; now, we have images to create social conscience and leave a historical testimony." That's Andrés Manuel López Obrador, mayor of Mexico City, quoted in Perla Ciuk's piece on a doc Luis Mandoki is currently shooting about him, a film that will take the dramatic story of his run for the presidency on through the July 2006 election.

• Ed Leibowitz: "The story behind Alice Wu's Saving Face [review: Stephen Holden] - which is squeezing into theaters between commercial giants Madagascar [review: AO Scott] and The Longest Yard [review: Manohla Dargis] this weekend - is almost as improbable as the film's plot."

• Terrence Rafferty on James Dean, "who has for five decades been popular culture's patron saint of troubled adolescence, and looks likely to keep that distinction a while longer."

• Randy Kennedy's piece on DIY podcast audio guides, such as Art Mobs' MoMA "remixes" has me thinking we could use more commentary tracks for other real-time 3D experiences. Think Lawrence French might do one for his San Francisco Vertigo tour? How about Roger Ebert reminiscing as you stroll through Cannes. Or, for that matter, actual commentary tracks - for the home or theater. The possibilities are endless.

• More reviews: Holden on Bomb the System, Scott on The Ninth Day, Dargis on Sequins, Laura Kern on Bunty aur Babli and Ned Martel on A League of Ordinary Gentlemen.

Director Mike Hodges: "There are two moments in Patrick Keiller's London I'll always remember. One made me explode with laughter, the other with pain.... Keiller's ability to be in the right place at the right moment is comparable to that of Cartier-Bresson. His eye is impeccable - and witty." Also in the Independent: James Mottram interviews Benicio Del Toro.

"They say providence favours a trier, especially one who, when slapped in the face, not only turns the other cheek, but is prone to do it again and again in the vain hope that a sore face might evoke pity in the Lord." Yes, making a truly independent movie can be hell. Just listen to Mark Norfolk's story in the New Statesman.

If you've heard of the West Memphis Three but have never gotten around to digging in and sorting out the back story, Duncan Campbell's piece in the Guardian on Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations is an excellent and compact primer. It's also a testament to the power of good documentary filmmaking, and what's more, the story is still far from over.

Also:

• In 1982, Jonathan Coe "was in no mood to have the political and moral ugliness of those days reflected back at me so unforgivingly." He's writing about Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital. But watching it just a few weeks ago in Bordeaux, he - and the French audience - realized what a "triumph" it was.

• Chris Sullivan has another true story: "It was not Tarantino," says one of its protagonists. The bank robbers who went on a spree that captivated South Africa for a few months twenty years ago and their disparate fates are the subject of Stander.

• Steve Rose talks with Frank Miller about Sin City.

• David Thomson muses at length about onscreen chemistry.

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Jan Svankmajer's Alice.

• Brad Pitt, architect? Why, yes, actually. Richard Jinman explains.

• Natasha Walter reviews Jane Fonda's My Life So Far.

• John Patterson wonders about the role of the British in US media and society: "Are we playing America's bad guys and plain-speakers the way Indian graduates now play its software-support engineers, the way near-slaves in Indonesia now play its factory workers and child-labour?" Also, Patty Hearst and Orson Welles: dream team?

• Britain's digital ramp-up.

Hollywood does love to go shopping for acting talent in Britain and, in the London Times, Patricia Dobson highlights a slew of young actors most likely to breakthrough.

Morpheus is dead, reports Patrick Klepek at 1up.com: "The principle character responsible for triggering the chain of events chronicled across The Matrix trilogy, Morpheus, has been eliminated during a Live Event in the series massively multiplayer online game, The Matrix Online." Via Peter Sciretta at Cinematical.

"We have a Disconnect Champion." David Edelstein's readers have spoken. Of all the odd couplings of cinema (e.g., Roger Moore and Grace Jones in A View to Kill), Woody Allen and just about every woman he's paired himself off with in the past thirty years or so is the clear frontrunner.

In the Stranger, Andrew Wright and Andy Spletzer pick out the highlights of the current week of the month-long Seattle International Film Festival.

Grady Hendrix: "Tony Jaa and the Ong Bak crew have teamed up for movie number three: Sword." Also, a review of Sha Po Lang, "my favorite Hong Kong movie of 2005 so far."

Marriage is a Crazy Thing is a Korean "RomCom without the Com," writes Filmbrain.

Not only will New Yorkers be treated to the NY Asian Film Festival next month (June 17 through July 2), they'll also have the Asian American International Film Festival to look forward to just two weeks later (July 15 through 31); right now, though, there's an "Unofficial Weblog" for that one.

To hear Shim Sun-ah tell in the Korea Herald, Hong Sang-soo's A Tale of Cinema actually sounds pretty intriguing.

At or via Twitch:

• Reviews: Henrik Ruben Genz's Kinamand (Chinaman), Steve Suissa's Cavalcade and Michael Dowse's It's All Gone Pete Tong

• Trailers: Malaysian epic Puteri Gunung Ledang, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (Ooof!; Ouch!), Kei Nakata's Muhito: The Matchless Man, Eiji Ôtsuki's Jitsuroku Kantô yakuza kôsô-shi: Matsuda-gumi, Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

• Sites: Joyeux Noël and Saimir.

• DVDs: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Charisma and Séance.

Jeffrey Wells talks with Stuart Samuels about his doc, Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream. As Brian Brooks reports at indieWIRE, it'll open the Silverdocs festival, which opens in Silver Springs, MD, on June 14 and runs through June 19.

The UN's World Environment Day is actually six days long - June 1 through 5 - with all sorts of events going on in San Francisco, including a Green Screen film festival - no affiliation, but we're there in spirit.

Mark Bould at Film-Philosophy on Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, the catalogue for the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media's exhibition "Future Cinema," edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel: "It is not so much exhaustive as exhausting. It puts the 'volume' back into volume. It fundamentally defies review. But here goes."

Nick Rombes: "I wonder if our fascination with the real in digital media - even as we experience that real through more complex interfaces - is in some ways an acknowledgement that we still yearn to be surpised."

At Flickhead, Ray Young isn't buying into the whole Olive Thomas mythology.

Ray Pride at Movie City News: "In a long catch-up column, some Sith afterthoughts, conversations with Hal Hartley and Todd Solondz and reviews of Arnaud Desplechin's mad masterpiece, Kings and Queen, Layer Cake, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and It's All Gone Pete Tong (and not a word about Cannes)."

NP Thompson on Lords of Dogtown: "Catherine Hardwicke is no ordinary storyteller - she's a creator of mythology. She takes [Stacy] Peralta's hazy half-remembrances and charges them with epic poetry."

Doug Liman is one odd cookie, reports Kim Masters. Also in the LAT: Carina Chocano: "[C]ontemporary romantic comedy heroines are pure corporate product, a desperately pandering and clueless assemblage of received notions, sexual anxiety and recycled focus-group-think handed down over the years like Grandma's cheesecake recipe."

Wilfred Lobo: "Mumbai city came to a standstill with the sudden death of Sunil Dutt."

The AP's Ryan Pearson reports on the passing of Eddie Albert, 1908 - 2005.

Online listening tip. M Valdemar explains how you can listen to Bela Lugosi read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Online browsing tip. Eugene Kuo's snapshots from Cannes. Click "Index" or "Next" to get started. Via Lossless.

Online viewing tip. Miranda July's videos from her second whirlwind trip to Cannes - that is, when she rushed back to pick up that Camera d'Or.

Posted by dwhudson at May 28, 2005 12:23 PM