Summertime shorts.

"By investigating the art of summer moviemaking, its tone and textures, we hope you'll feel slightly better about seeing Batman Begins," writes someone at Slate, introducing a package of articles dubbed "Summer Movies Week." And with Christopher Nolan's bid to restart a franchise now opened and opened wide, that'll be the first order of business before dipping into the seasonal ruminations at Slate and the Village Voice:

• "Unexpectedly good," writes Manohla Dargis before lavishing praise on Nolan and Christian Bale. The New York Times goes all out, with an audio slide show and a "Batman Archive."

• At Movie City News, Ray Pride smartly zeroes in on the element that defines any interpretation of Batman: Gotham City. And "it's the 'realness' of Nolan's world that fascinates."

• Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "Batman has finally come home. Not just to a story that painstakingly details his origins but to an ominous style that suits it beautifully."

• For Slate's David Edelstein, it's "overlong, but in the second half there's full-throttle creepiness."

• "[I]t does not disappoint." Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where Max Goldberg assesses Benoît Jacquot's À Tout de Suite.

• Sean Burns gives the film an A- in the Philadelphia Weekly.

• Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene: "All the movie lacks is a spark of transformative vision."

• Michael Atkinson in the Voice: "In the movie's bid for solemnity, even Jung is explicitly invoked, but Nolan and his co-screenwriter David Goyer can only press the big buttons so hard - it's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos."

• Rob Nelson in the City Pages: "A pretentious Batman was probably inevitable."

• Salon's Stephanie Zacharek finds the film "leaks existential phoniness from the first frame."

• The Guardian's Andrew Pulver interviews Nolan. Plus: Andrew Gilchrist on the Batmobile.

• In German: Dietmar Kammerer in die taz (also running Denis Duclos and Valérie Jacq's mini-history of realism in cinema for Le Monde diplomatique), Tobias Kniebe in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sebastian Handke in Der Tagesspiegel and Andreas Borcholte at Spiegel Online.

Now about that "Summer Movies Week":

• David Edelstein and Joe Morgenstern have struck up a conversation on summer blockbusters via email and Slate's thrown them an opening question: "Did George Lucas and Steven Spielberg ruin the movies?"

• "Lucas vs Spielberg" is a fun rundown on the relationship, "something... like the impacted, covert, passive-aggressive version of rivalry practiced by siblings," by Tom Shone, author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.

• This summer's dirty little secret is the advent of the "indie blockbuster," argues Christopher Kelly. "Indie" filmmakers will cash in, the studios will score cred, but "some of our best and most challenging filmmakers, among them Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant and Spike Lee, are likely to be even further marginalized in the decade to come." By the way, Jackie McGlone gets off to a rough start with Spike Lee but manages well enough to write up the encounter engagingly for the Scotsman. Via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

• Bryan Curtis: "The apoplexy [Michael] Bay's movies inspire reveals something interesting about film critics: That no matter how much they insist that they've made their peace with the summer movie, and its bullying domination of the multiplex, they can still go limp at the idea of the summer movie as an artistic end in and of itself."

• Charles Taylor reemerges with an appreciation of the original Bad News Bears.

• Grady Hendrix: "If you're thinking about running a film festival: don't."

Filmbrain passes along some sage advice on dealing with the summer; and sparks one helluva conversation.

Take refuge in the art house, encourages the Voice. Dennis Lim introduces a package of alternatives, mostly in the form of profiles of their makers:

• Laura Sinagra talks Rize with David LaChapelle.

• Ed Halter traces the evolution of Miranda July. Jessica Winter reviews Me and You and Everyone We Know. The Reverse Shot team also takes on Me and You and Everyone We Know and, once again, Miranda July wins. Also at indieWIRE, btw: Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks's five questions for D.E.B.S. director Angela Robinson.

• Winter meets Pawel Pawlikowski; in the City Pages, she reviews My Summer of Love. Atkinson does the honors here. Another interview: Richard Porton for Cineaste, via the Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

• Matthew Ross talks to the people shaping the program at the IFC Center, opening on Friday.

Also in the Voice:

• Atkinson previews the New York Asian Film Festival.

• Lim on The Talent Given Us, "this year's Tarnation."

• Atkinson on Peter Watkins's "1974 masterpiece," Edvard Munch.

• Sinagra on Heights: "[T]he stakes never seem as high as the title suggests."

• "Tracking Shots": The Perfect Man, The Honeymooners, The Great Water, Ethan Mao, The Deal and The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

The next big summer movie, of course, is War of the Worlds, and Emanuel Levy's got your primers on Orson Welles's 1938 radio event and the 1953 George Pal/Byron Haskin film.

Premiere's Glenn Kenny may have only had a few minutes with Hayao Miyazaki, but the resulting interview is meatier than many others. As for the animator's view of the current scene, "There's only one word I can say about Japanese anime and that is it's unfortunate, or too bad, what a shame." Doug Cummings (who has also posted a wonderful appreciation of Bresson's Au hasard, Balthazar) is delighted by Howl's Moving Castle.

Back at the NYT:

• Stephen Holden on Werner Herzog's Wheel of Time: "The movie might as well have been called 'An Immersion in Tibetan Buddhism.' With minimal explanation, it puts you right in the center." More from Ed Park in the Voice.

• AO Scott on Park Chan-wook's Joint Security Area, "neither as convoluted nor as violent as Oldboy." More from Michael Atkinson in the Voice.

• Caryn James on how movies and the PR for movies now meld into "one huge performance piece... now more than at any time since the star-making business began." It's the stars, too, that have changed, argues George Fasel. "The changes in movies were, as usual, traceable to changes in our society."

• Universal's wondering why audiences have stayed away from Cinderella Man in droves. Sharon Waxman reports.

• Dave Kehr on new DVDs.

For the Huffington Post, Noah Helpern interviews Errol Morris, who's evidently busy as hell making new films, even as his landmark earlier works are finally headed to DVD. Still, there's always time to talk politics. Via Fimoculous.

There's a lot more to Kill Bill than a flurry of allusions, argues Michael K Crowley in 24LiesASecond: "I confess my notions about Kill Bill are strange. But the film itself is strange. Kill Bill has been described - not only by critics but by co-creator Uma Thurman - as a story of revenge and redemption.... What about this vital question of redemption?"

Police Beat is the pride of Seattle at the moment; for Cinematical, Kim Voynar talks to screenwriter Charles Mudede, director Robinson Devor and producer Jeffrey Brown.

In Stop Smiling, Nathan Kosub has some unusual and refreshingly unsensational thoughts on a film not currently vying for your attention, David Gordon Green's Undertow.

Sudha G Tilak for Outlook India: "Prosenjit Chatterjee, 40, all acknowledge, is the man responsible for rejuvenating Bengal's mainstream cinema today." Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

At Cannes, Paolo Bertolin got to talk with Im Sang-soo about The President's Last Bang; that interview is now up at Koreanfilm.org, where you'll also find:

• Darcy Paquet on Kim Ki-duk's The Bow: "After three straight 'hits,' I think Kim has to file this in the 'miss' category."

• Adam Hartzell on Kim So-young's Women's History Trilogy: "The highlight... for me is definitely 'I'll Be Seeing Her: Women in Korean Cinema' (2002), a collage of images from films past and present."

• Hartzell on Byun Young-joo's Ardor, which "provides enough of an engaging story for me to recommend it, at least for those who don't have problems watching people get freaky."

• Tom Giammarco on Oh Yo-seop's Hyeong-Rae And The Hulk, a Korean live-action children's film, a rarity these days, though, as Giammarco explains, this was not always the case.

Where did some of those obit headlines for Anne Bancroft come from? At CJR Daily, Brian Montopoli has a few ideas. Via Coudal Partners.

Rename Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart doc. Via Alternet's Peek.

In the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris previews the "Paramount Before the Code" series, June 24 through July 21. Yes, four weeks.

Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky's Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database is now available on DVD. An undoubtedly handsome booklet comes with.

The BBC has a creepy story on the auctioning off of photos snapped during the shooting of Leni Riefenstahl's Tiefland (Who's selling? Where's that money going?): "The 33 original photos... include shots of young gypsy children who were allegedly taken from Nazi internment camps." Via the Alternative Film Guide.

BlackBook has a fun if somewhat dated interview Amy Sedaris has conducted with Sam Rockwell; just as fun at least is Glenn O'Brien's "Art is a Joke!" Via Bob Sassone at Cinematical.

David Lowery's found more, in fact, "pretty much everything you might want to know about" Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9, including details on Björk's soundtrack.

Online browsing tip. Italian movie posters. Via Rashomon.

Posted by dwhudson at June 15, 2005 5:03 PM