Weekend shorts.

"My love for Christoffer Boe's Reconstruction has been well documented [at Twitch]," writes Todd who, well, called him up and chatted with Boe about "Danish film, genre, the fusion of Tarkovsky and Lerner and Loewe musicals, and details on each of his coming projects."

Todd also runs a long talk from way back, a conversation that "stands as one of the best I have ever had," with Jim White, the singing Virgil to Andrew Douglas's Dante in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Which brings us to an early online viewing tip. Besides the film's trailer, goes without saying. But don't miss Zach Passero's video for White's "If Jesus Drove a Motorhome," either.

Also at Twitch, a report from the World Wide Short Film Festival and, as always, a zillion trailers you'd never have run across anywhere else.

A film meme makes the rounds: Doug Cummings, Darren Hughes, Megan McMillan, Micah Newman, Girish Shambu and MS Smith.

Via Movie City Indie, Nick Sylvester's "Untold Story of Mondo Kim's Raid" in the Village Voice, a piece in which Mr Kim gets to tell his side: "We are serving the poor, young, very experimental artists nationwide - I should say the world wide."

"I've just seen the great You're Gonna Miss Me and am off in a few minutes to catch Abel Raises Cain." Cynthia Rockwell is blogging from the AFI Silverdocs fest (through Sunday), posting pix; more of those from Amy King. Meanwhile, at Filmmaker, Gabriel Paletz looks back at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Wrapping up Slate's "Summer Movies Week":

• What was the appeal of Steve McQueen back in the day? Matt Feeney in Slate: "McQueen defined a fleeting moment in Hollywood's depiction of manhood, standing between the '50s kitsch of Sinatra, John Wayne, and Elvis and the post-Vietnam second-guessing of the pathological Eastwood, the sensitive New Age Redford, and Burt Reynolds. He was the first and maybe the last action hero to be neither absurd nor ironic."

• Michael Agger has an interesting piece on the science behind deciding which movies to make and how to market them. Hardly a romantic science, but it's got a deeper history than you might think. And here's where it gets really interesting: "[Chrysanthos] Dellarocas also imagines a future where a Hollywood executive could monitor, in real time, a numerical analysis of the word-of-mouth of a movie on its opening weekend and adjust the marketing accordingly."

• For Bidisha Banerjee, Howl's Moving Castle is "a letdown... insipid and conventional. The good news, however - even if critics missed it - is that Jones' book is amazing. Her plucky heroine, dazzling disguises, and cheeky interrogation of clichés out-Miyazaki Miyazaki himself."

• Rebecca Onion asks, "Why has no shark movie since Jaws managed to hold a bloody, severed leg to the original?"

• David Edelstein caps a one-sided conversation.

LA Weekly critics select and write up their highlights for the Los Angeles Film Festival - so, too, does Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat and indieWIRE has a blog fired up and running - and one of them, David LaChapelle's Rize, gets the full feature treatment from Ernest Hardy, while another, Sally Potter's Yes, is the focus of one of the most unusual set-ups for an interview in quite a while (which makes it a refreshing departure from the standard three-act press junket script ["Where'd the idea come from?" / "What was it like working with X?" / "What are you working on now?"]).

Scott Foundas, see, panned the film in one of the very first reviews to appear. In Variety. In a sense, Potter is given a chance to make a rebuttal here, and she makes the most of it.

Also, Ella Taylor: "My Summer of Love is not just about the multitudes we all contain, but about the loving, murderous powers we bring out in each other, for better and worse." More from AO Scott in the New York Times.

Eugene Hernandez has five questions for The Talent Given Us director Andrew Wagner. Manohla Dargis reviews the film in the NYT (it "shouldn't work but does rather remarkably").

Also at indieWIRE: Gary M Kramer interviews Miranda July; so does Karen Durbin in the NYT, while AO Scott reviews Me and You and Everyone We Know. What's more, Scott Macaulay's Filmmaker cover feature is now online. And the cinetrix? "At the end of Me and You, I felt the way I did after seeing Trust for the first time, or The Dreamlife of Angels: I had been somewhere new and strange and was reluctant to come back to the "real" world; I had fallen in love."

And Armond White? Well, let ClarenceCarter over at Reverseblog answer that one. Also in the New York Press: Matt Zoller Seitz is not too impressed with either Batman Begins or The Talent Given Us; and Josh Cohen recommends This Land is Your Land.

Back to the NYT:

• "Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic." Neal Stephenson has a rather dark prophecy for one big rich country.

• "In today's skittish atmosphere, it takes a certain courage - or foolhardiness- to make a film that might be seen as endorsing terrorism, or at the very least, bomb-fueled anarchy." Sarah Lyall turns in a behind-the-scenes report on the making of V for Vendetta.

• "What [Louis] Malle's films, individually and as a whole, are about is receptivity to experience - how we perceive the world, and how much of it any one of us is able, finally, to take in." Terrence Rafferty previews the "Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle" series, June 24 through July 19 at the Walter Reade.

• Dargis recommends Peter Watkins's Edvard Munch. Related: Walter Gibbs on the reopening of the Munch Museum in Oslo in the wake of the theft of The Scream and Madonna.

• Alright, forget "loser chic." What we're actually going through, pop culture-wise, is another round of dark Manichaeism, suggests Caryn James.

• Reviews: Dargis on Heights and Stephen Holden on The Perfect Man and The Deal.

For the Washington Post, appropriately enough, Bob Thompson reports on W Mark Felt's book and movie deal. Looks like Tom Hanks may end up playing Deep Throat. Commentary: Mark Lawson in the Guardian.

Via Peter Sciretta at Cinematical, a book-by-book update from Quint at Ain't It Cool News on upcoming adaptations of Chuck Palahniuk's novels.

Jeffrey Wells has read William Monahan's screenplay for The Departed, Martin Scorsese's remake of Infernal Affairs: "[I]t appears as if all the elements for a genuine Scorsese comeback are in place."

"More than one commentator has mentioned that science fiction as a form is where theological narrative went after Paradise Lost, and this is undoubtedly true," writes Margaret Atwood in a piece on why we give possible worlds trial runs in fictional spaces. "Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we'll be able to do it."

Also in the Guardian:

• DJ Taylor has a piece rather like Peter Conrad's in the Observer last Sunday on how various generations have interpreted HG Wells's The War of the Worlds. Along the same lines: Philip Horne in the Telegraph.

• Paul Cronin, author of Alexander Mackendrick: On Film-Making, recently participated in an eight-day digital filmmaking workshop led by Abbas Kiarostami and outlines four basic ideas he came away with.

• Back in Cannes, Geoffrey Macnab got to speak with Hou Hsiao-hsien; Hou doesn't actually say much, but the piece is a fine, quick overview of HHH's work if you're just now catching up.

• Steve Rose interviews Stephen Chow.

• "Recent research has shown that, last year, BitTorrent was responsible for one third of all traffic on the internet. That's one third." Simon Waldman quickly runs down the arguments on all sides of the issues this little phenomenon has kicked up. Related: Steve Lohr in the NYT.

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O.

• Jonathan Watts on a video with potentially far-reaching repercussions for transparency in China.

At Koreanfilm.org, Darcy Paquet reviews Lee Jeong-cheol's melodrama, Family.

A romantic comedy about the G8 Summit? Turns out, as James Rampton reports in the Independent, The Girl in the Café airing on both the BBC and HBO next Saturday, is the film of which Richard Curtis is "most proud." You'll find related interviews at the site and Kristin Hohenadel's with Kelly Macdonald in the Los Angeles Times.

Also in the Independent, fresh interviews: Tiffany Rose with Michael Caine and Roger Clarke with Jill Sprecher.

"'Snoop just looked at me,' continues [director Marc] Klasfeld, 'and said, "Cool. I'm in."'" Baz Dreisinger gets the background on The LA Riot Spectacular, "a satire on an event that - literally and metaphorically - scarred Los Angeles." Also in the LAT: Another rapper, another movie. Geoff Boucher has a longish piece on the making of Get Rich or Die Tryin', a 50 Cent biopic starring 50 Cent. But with Jim Sheridan directing, it'll most likely turn out better than that sounds.

In the Los Angeles Daily News, Valerie Kuklenski reports on a new survey and her headline says it all: "3 of 4 Americans prefer movies at home."

Big congrats to Nick Davis.

Aaron Dobbs and Lily Oei interview John Vanco, VP and General Manager of the new IFC Center in NYC, for the Gothamist. Related: Lewis Beale in the NYT on what constitutes a midnight movie these days. Nostalgia for the 80s is big, he discovers.

For the inside track on Clint Eastwood, one turns to the Carmel Pine Cone. There, Paul Miller talks to the director about his next film, his biggest yet, Flags of Our Fathers.

Winners of the AltWeekly Awards were announced on Friday; quite a few film reviewers among them, too.

Previewing "Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd," Steve Vineberg considers "the breeziest of the silent comedians, the most effortlessly upbeat, the most cheerily reckless." Also in the Boston Phoenix: Gerald Peary reads Scott Eyman's Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B Mayer.

Gary M Kramer interviews Bruce Campbell for the Philadelphia City Paper.

Austin has the Alamo Drafthouse and Portland has The Mission. Now, Seattle has Central Cinema. Andrew Wright tells its story in the Stranger.

Marc Savlov profiles PJ Raval, director of photography, in the Austin Chronicle.

Nick Rombes: "Now, this is a very unscientific theory, but I've noticed over the years - especially in preparation for teaching film classes - that there is surprisingly little discussion of the technical achievements of African American cinema."

Andrew Billen interviews Spike Lee for the London Times.

In the Telegraph, Mark Monahan meets Dan Harris (Imaginary Heroes) and David Gritten celebrates Robert Mitchum.

Festival notes in the Chicago Reader: Africa Diaspora Film Festival (through June 23) and the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival (through Sunday).

Steve Erickson picks a few highlights of the New York Asian Film Festival for the Gay City News.

How many movies has John Woo announced yet hasn't actually, you know, made? Grady Hendrix counts thirteen.

Online viewing tip #1. Skin, directed by Vincent O'Connell and written by Sarah Kane. Via Steve Gallagher at Filmmaker.

Online viewing tip #2. The BBC Motion Gallery. Background: Bija Gutoff for Apple.

Posted by dwhudson at June 18, 2005 4:59 PM