Weekend shorts.

Howard Feinstein at indieWIRE: "American democracy is in serious peril - though it doesn't keep the powers-that-be from paying lip service to such useful authoritarian governments as those in Russia and China. This 16th edition of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is more relevant than ever." Through June 23.

Turns out you don't have to subscribe to the Nation to read Stuart Klawans. Pointing to Klawans's review of Kings and Queen, Ryan Wu notes of discovering Agence Global, "Worth a bookmark." Indeed.

Filmbrain not only praises this year's lineup for the New York Asian Film Festival (all in all, June 17 through July 2) as "the strongest ever," he's also got a slew of recommendations for you. If you're going, do check in.

Grady Hendrix: "What's the big craze in entertainment? Korean television dramas."

Even on a Friday in summer, Manohla Dargis manages to slip a fervent recommendation into the New York Times: "Forget the Sith, Tom and Katie, the big movie news this summer is the release on DVD on Tuesday of one of the greatest films in history: Au Hasard, Balthazar... a masterpiece that stirs the heart and soul as much as the mind." On a related note, Doug Cummings: "L'Argent showcases the filmmaker at the height of his formal ingenuity, particularly his use of narrative ellipses and fragmented space (close-ups of legs, hands, objects)."

For the Sunday edition, Ms Dargis has a timely profile of Jonas Mekas, who's currently representing Lithuania at the Venice Biennale: "Both a necessary opportunist and a national treasure, Mr. Mekas has earned a place in the pantheon of American avant-garde filmmaking for work that has chronicled the world he has made since sailing into the Hudson long ago."

Also:

• William Georgiades reviews John Wranovics's Chaplin and Agee.

• Richard Sandomir: "For nearly 70 years, biographers have ignored the former heavyweight champion James J Braddock. Suddenly, he is the subject of four books."

• John Burlingame on Henry Mancini's "Pink Panther" theme.

"It's a very different Helen Mirren. Instead of the iron-willed detective from Prime Suspect, a dame of the British theatre or the authoritative voice of a computer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it's an earthy young sex symbol, all breasts and bum, on a sunny Queensland beach." Garry Maddox looks back to Michael Powell's Age of Consent in the Sydney Morning Herald. Via Movie City News.

David LaChapelle's Rize may turn out to be one of the best films of the summer and Carina Chocano has a terrific piece on its making. As Steve Gallagher points out at Filmmaker, if you're in NYC, you can catch it on June 14, projected on an outdoor 40-ft screen at Rockefeller Center.

Back to the Los Angeles Times:

• Chris Lee on how movie marketers are using blogs.

• R Kinsey Lowe looks forward to CineVegas, through June 18.

• Chocano remembers Anne Bancroft.

Reviews from the Seattle International Film Festival are coming fast and furious now at the Siffblog.

David Lowery's found a few shots from Drawing Restraint 9, the film Matthew Barney is working on. Björk's not only writing music for it; she'll also be in it, evidently.

Peter Bradshaw thoroughly approves of John Walker's selection for the #1 spot in Halliwell's Top 1000. "After Tokyo Story, Ozu made another eight films, all of them superbly accomplished, though arguably not achieving the sublime quality of this movie." More from George Fasel.

Also in the Guardian:

• Alain de Botton, the Carl Sagan of the liberal arts, on 13 Conversations About One Thing: "The film serves to alert us to a number of different ways in which cinema has treated the subject of happiness."

• Christopher Frayling on the how and why of spaghetti westerns and what they accomplished when Hollywood no longer could.

• Sylvie Simmons discovers that just about everyone likes Dig! - except for Anton Newcombe of the Dandy Warhols Brian Jonestown Massacre.

• Zoe Williams interviews Mark Ruffalo.

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Stephen Frears's The Grifters.

• John Patterson on the sports movies of summer: "America is Jock Nation." Also: Superhero childhoods.

In Libération, an overview of the exhibition "Chaplin et les images" at the Jeu de paume from Samuel Douhaire.

One more in a foreign language if you don't mind: Rainer Werner Fassbinder died on June 10, 1982, and just a few hours before he did, actor Dieter Schidor interviewed him. Yesterday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung ran the interview. Via signandsight, which translates one passage, so I'll choose another, the last question and last answer:

Schidor: You've made more than forty films in thirteen years, not counting your work in theater or other media. How would you explain this extraordinary activity?

RWF: I can't imagine doing anything other than making films. If I weren't making films, I'd paint or write novels.

In an interview with the Athens newspaper, Ta Nea, Theo Angelopoulos has said he'd like to cast Michelle Pfeiffer and Harvey Keitel in his next film, To Trito Ftero.

"[T]he real story of Batman’s beginning, much of it unearthed only after painstaking research for my forthcoming book, Men of Tomorrow, is probably even more dramatic [than Batman Begins]," claims Gerard Jones in the London Times.

Allen Barra sings praises of Angelina Jolie in Salon, and the opening chorus comes from Pauline Kael: "'My God,' she exclaimed, 'this girl could play both the Brando and Maria Schneider roles in Last Tango! Where in the world did she come from?'"

Which leads us to the most recent round of Mr and Mrs Smith reviews: A click away, right there in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek ("How can we cast even a glance Pitt's way when she's anywhere near? That's not to say Jolie is a selfish performer: She's the opposite of a succubus - she breathes life into Pitt instead of sucking it out"); Manohla Dargis in the NYT; Kenneth Turan in the LAT; Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian; Robert Hanks in the Independent; Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph; Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger; and Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

Which is where Dean Kuipers asks Gary Indiana why felt compelled to write The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt:

When I saw him at the Republican National Convention, it just hit me. The way he delivered his speech was better than Hitler. It surpassed Mussolini, because it had charm as well. It had every gimmick and cliché - these fabulous stories about Soviet tanks rolling in Styria, where there never were any. That entire convention just told me something about the country that I guess I had known all along but that I just saw in a new way.

Also: Andy Klein polls three very different thumbs and they're all up for Batman Begins.

Scottish accents, Ulster accents... Ellin Stein on the pros and cons of providing subtitles in English for some English-language films. And the Independent's interviews: Chris Sullivan with Mario Van Peebles and James Mottram with Nick Nolte.

Here's what might seem at first glance to be an unlikely friendship: Ousmane Sembène and Leni Riefenstahl. And yet, as he tells Sheila Johnston, so it was. And he still admires Olympia.

Also in the Telegraph:

• Johnston interviews David Gordon Green. The Advocate, by the way, passes along news from Variety that Green's next project will be an adaptation of Brad Land's Goat.

• Marc Lee cheers Christopher Nolan for steering clear of CGI wherever possible in Batman Begins.

• David Gritten remembers Memento.

Ron Howard is a strange case, but if anyone knows what to make of him, it's Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Chuck Tryon's caught two films recently that've made him stop and think: September Tapes and The Agronomist.

At Wired News, Kim Zetter talks to Jason Scott about his "five-and-a-half-hour paean to the era when computers were named Stacy and Lisa, and tech loyalists fought bitter battles over the superiority of Ataris to Amigas," BBS: The Documentary. The site goes deep. Via Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Blog addicts will have noticed that a story came and went unremarked on here, but I was always hoping it turn out the way Chuck Olsen says it has: "The saga is at an end, so it's time to pass the peace pipe and get butt-ass nekkid." Isn't it always time? No, seriously, good news.

Online browsing tip. Raster. Via Filmmaker's Steve Gallagher.

Online viewing tip #1. Wiley Wiggins's first submission to the Slo Mo Video Festival.

Online viewing tip #2. Demo for Data Tiles. As Jim Coudal says, "Whoah."

More online viewing tips. Dozens and dozens of them, actually. You have to hear this question in your mind with the proper accent: "You are looking for a French director to shoot a commercial?" All About French Directors. Once again, via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2005 4:19 PM