Shorts, 6/6.

Since the last batch of "Shorts," the greatest concentration of gotta-reads has suddenly clustered at Filmmaker's blog:

• Scott Macaulay rounds up the latest speculation on Apple's switch to Intel's chips. It's about movies. Seriously.

• After citing the Anne Thompson piece in the Hollywood Reporter on the rapidly closing window between theatrical and DVD releases mentioned here earlier, Scott points to something of a followup, only Mark Cuban goes much, much further. And a zillion readers pick it up from there.

• Scott, like anyone with ears and a bit of substance between them, is intrigued by next week's release of Another Day on Earth: "Eno has been, alternately, a provocative pioneer and a watchful, influential observer to many of the key artistic moments of the late 20th century."

• Besides pointing to Katie Dean's piece in Wired News, which shall pass by here without further comment, Steve Gallagher's found a really nifty camera.

You know it's summer when Steven Spielberg follows George Lucas on the cover of Wired. Frank Rose anchors his report from the War of the Worlds set in two corners of the magazine's mission: He elaborates on producer Kathleen Kennedy's declaration, "Technology has been our friend," by spelling out what all previsualization ("computer-animated, scene-by-scene sketches of the movie that incorporate both actors and effects") can do in preproduction (Spielberg: "Once all the info goes into the hard drive, I'm able to take a mouse and fly the set... I can do a 3-D cyberspace location hunt and nail my angles"), what all ILM's Zeno software can do in post and - nice touch - we get a snapshot of the supergeek Wired knows its readers look up to, aspire to become or already are: "'This backpack is my office,' [pre-viz specialist Dan Gregoire] says, sitting in a tent near Spielberg's and holding up a black nylon bag stuffed with gear: a Titanium PowerBook G4, a bright red Opteron-equipped Acer Ferrari laptop, 60- and 250-gigabyte FireWire drives, and a Sony PD100 digital camcorder."

The second anchor is firmly snagged in the big picture, a beat the magazine has actually felt freer to explore since the Net became ubiquitous and the dotcom boom went bust:

This apocalyptic idea - that in a flash, some weapon we have no defense against could upend our existence - is as resonant a theme in the post-9/11 world as it was in HG Wells's day. In 1898... Britannia ruled a quarter of the Earth; its military prowess was as unchallenged as the United States' is today. Yet Wells had the audacity to imagine its people as defenseless as the natives they were subjugating.

While we're on summer blockbusters, we can turn right away to another Condé Nast publication, the New Yorker, where David Denby turns in early reviews of Batman Begins (BadAssMovieNews rounds up more reviews) and Mr and Mrs Smith. As it turns out, for Denby, they fit well on the same page. He reminds us first of the promise of the early indie careers of Christopher Nolan and Doug Liman in the 90s and then notes, either with melancholy or relish, it's hard to tell: "[B]oth directors have now attempted blockbusters, and neither shows much of what was lively and fresh in their previous work. I don't underestimate the skill and tenacity required to pull a big movie together, but, from the outside, it looks as if Nolan and Liman have capitulated to the marketing demands of a system that is squeezing the art out of large-scale moviemaking."

New York's Ken Tucker has seen both flicks, too: "Mr & Mrs Smith works on almost every level and against all odds.... But Begins, at two-hours-plus, is a nonstarter." Also, quick! A Werner Herzog timeline: Logan Hill. Related: Steven Rosen on Grizzly Man.

"At 91, [Budd] Schulberg is one of the few living links to the early days of Hollywood - who else is still around who can say he wrote a screenplay with F Scott Fitzgerald, yakked about movies with Sergei Eisenstein and is still owed $100 by Harry Cohn?" Patrick Goldstein listens to story after story and then asks around about the Sammy Glicks of today.

Also in the Los Angeles Times: Jake Forbes on what drew Hayao Miyazaki to Diana Wynne Jones's 1986 novel, Howl's Moving Castle, and Lisa Rosen on the complex origins of the penguins of Madagascar.

From July 30 through January 22, 2006, the Autry National Center's Museum of the American West in Los Angeles will be hosting an exhibition entitled "Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone." So you can imagine that Dennis Cozzalio, who has, after all, dubbed his blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, is pretty worked up about this. Besides a bio of the director, Dennis also has info on seemingly countless related events slated for this "Summer of Sergio."

Rebecca Jamison's new piece at Flickhead has me jotting down film titles next to a note that reads, "See something with Grayson Hall. ASAP."

Most theories as to why box office numbers have been down this year point to the greater number of distractions an arm's length away that are keeping people at home. DVDs, games, the Net. But for AO Scott, the problem is the movies: "The commitment to meticulously engineered mediocrity suggests that the American movie industry, in its timid, defensive attempts not to alienate the audience, is doing just that." Thoughts from George Fasel: "The doggedly sunny Scott insists that he is hopeful of a turnaround, although for my part it is hard to find any grounds for such hope in a culture so reality-denying, self-referential, and - to borrow a term recently applied to us by British novelist Hilary Mantel - 'God-besotted.'"

Back to the New York Times:

• Adam Cohen: "Watching Nashville three decades later, there is an unsettling shock of recognition, because the government's current policies seem to be hurtling us to another time of deep national disillusionment."

• Joe Rhodes previews Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days. In the first episode, he and his fiancée try to live that long on the minimum wage. Like Barbara Ehrenreich, they find it pretty tough going. Related: Spurlock's commencement address for Woodrow Wilson High School in his hometown of Beckley, West Virginia.

• Sylviane Gold talks to director Chris Terrio and screenwriter Amy Fox about Heights (see also NP Thompson's preview at the Siffblog, where, on an unrelated note, Kathy Fennessy grabs a few words with Gregg Araki).

• Stephen Farber contemplates the many and giant shoes Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt will be stepping into when their romantic comedy opens. Mr and Mrs Smith works, by the way, for Newsweek's David Ansen, but Jeffrey Wells writes at Hollywood Elsewhere: "It's Charlie's Angels 2 bad, Xanadu bad, Hook bad, Howard the Duck bad."

• Some film soundtracks really cannot - and should not - stand on their own, argues Bernard Holland.

• Thomas Vinciguerra gets Hal Holbrook's opinion on the revelation of Deep Throat's identity. Related: Sasha Issenberg in Slate: "Unlike the movie that made Woodward and Bernstein into matinee idols, the 1999 comedy Dick stripped Watergate of its cloak-and-dagger and left it in pigtails."

• Joel Topcik on how the Dukes of Hazzard team sent a 1969 Dodge Charger flying 170 feet.

• Marc Weingarten on the screenplay James Agee wrote for Chaplin, now published as part of Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer and the Lost Screenplay.

"The question of whether I consider myself more German or Turkish is similar to the question Turks ask themselves. Is Turkey Western, or isn't it? My answer is that it's both." Der Spiegel's Anke Dürr and Marianne Wellershoff talk to Fatih Akin about Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul.

The All-Time 100 was evidently quite a hit, racking up a "record-busting 7.8 million page views in its first week, including 3.5 million on May 23rd, its opening day," reports Richard Corliss in a column that probes countless readers' complaints as well as his own misgivings about what did and did not make the list. At length. Halfway in, Corliss reveals the scraps snipped from the final draft - and Richard Schickel's, too.

Of course, everybody loves lists, even the renegades at Hollywood Bitchslap. Erik Childress introduces their "Top 100 Director's Power List" (it's the apostrophe that makes you look twice, isn't it?), counting backwards, building up from 100 to 51 and then from 50 to 1. Of course, HBS wouldn't be HBS if there weren't also a "Bottom 100 Director's List (Or, Who We Don't Want Directing X-Men 3)."

The Guardian runs another transcript of a long and engaging onstage interview. Alan Rusbridger talks with Ronan Bennett about the docudrama he wrote, The Hamburg Cell: "I think the thing that helped me take them and their belief seriously was that exposure at an early age to strong political beliefs, particularly the kind that left people feeling that they had no alternative but to take militant action."

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• Edward Helmore on Tom Cruise's recent creepiness. But wait! According to Rachel Ambramowitz and Chris Lee in today's LAT, he's "calm and collected" again. For New York's Ken Tucker, that would be a loss, particularly after defending Cruise's "current peculiar genius as a squawking, leaping piece of performance art."

• "There are two things about James M Cain. He writes like a great police report, and he knows those moments where greed and lust go click in a dumb human head and fate takes over. Cain knows temptation." David Thomson on why The Postman Always Rings Twice endures.

• Phil Hoad profiles Christian Bale.

• Jason Solomons meets Melvin and Mario Van Peebles.

• John Patterson: "Sin City wants to be hard-boiled film noir, but it's too soft in the head to pull it off." And: Fathers and sons.

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Jack Clayton's The Innocents.

"More than painting, music, or literature, film has an astonishing ability to record ordinary people in ordinary settings with an aural and visual clarity that can be mesmerizing," writes Doug Cummings. "Andrew Bujalski's independent 16mm film, Funny Ha Ha (2003), released theatrically in Los Angeles this past weekend, exemplifies this tradition and is one of the most captivating movies I've seen all year."

Nick Rombes: "Medium Cool is both a movie and a theory of movies.... It is the product of the very tools that it damns. And its accusatory ending hits a note that is rarely struck in American film."

"One of the few films to already grace Filmbrain's 'Best of 2005' list, The President's Last Bang is a triumph of acting and directing that allows Im Sang-soo to rub shoulders with the likes of Kubrick, Mamet and Altman, and a cutting satire that works even if one is limited to a rudimentary understanding of the events portrayed."

James Hughes: "In celebration of the release of The Stanley Kubrick Archives from TASCHEN Books, Stop Smiling spoke with the editor of the project, Alison Castle, and a contributing writer, Anthony Frewin, about their experiences working on the book, considered to be the most comprehensive study of the filmmaker to date."

Aren't blogs grand. Alison Veneto runs the bits - lots - that didn't make her interview with editor John Ottman for MovieMaker.

The tax incentive wars between US states like New Mexico and Louisiana on the one hand and Canadian provinces like British Columbia on the other, that is, the battle to lure in film productions, may not sound like fodder for a fun read, but Vancouver journalist Ken Hegan pulls it off in the Georgia Straight. Also: Ken Eisner on the summer's movies.

Liam Gallagher may be steering his career towards film, reports Ian Herbert in the Independent. Don't la... nah, go ahead. Laugh.

The AP's Ryan Pearson lists the winners and relates a few anecdotes from the weekend's MTV Movie Awards ceremony.

The SFist has been haunting (Yet) Another Hole in the Head all weekend.

Yesterday, the Austin Film Society hosted a benefit preview of Robert Rodriguez's The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D, followed by a kids' carnival. Matt Dentler snapped some photos.

Online browsing tip (and desktop wallpaper construction kit). Fred Camper's Brakhage stills. Via Wiley Wiggins.

Online listening tip #1. Terry Gross interviews Thelma Schoonmaker. Via Greg Allen.

Online listening tip #2. Cyndi Greening: "Director Paul DeNigris talks at length about the process of making and distributing his independent film The Falls. One of the earliest totally digital films, DeNigris' film is often described as the 'Best Looking Film Noir' without the film."

Online viewing tip. Live From Iraq, the 4th25's album trailer. Warns Newsweek: "Contains graphic language and violent images."

Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2005 11:04 AM