Shorts, 6/20.

"Frankly, I had no idea the lives of penguins were as heart-rending as this. Did you? Holy anthropomorphic pathos!" Critics for the Los Angeles Times are blogging from the Los Angeles Film Festival; more from Leonard Klady at Movie City News and indieWIRE's blog. Through June 26.

Also: Richard Schickel reviews The Golden West: Hollywood Stories, a collection of short fiction by Daniel Fuchs, a screenwriter who actually enjoyed working for the studios back in the day, and Mark Olsen meets Miranda July.

Acquarello offers a string of excellent reviews from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Eugene Hernandez posts the winners of the Silverdocs fest at the indieWIRE Insider; evidently, he met Cynthia Rockwell there, too, who promises more coverage in retrospect soon.

Mark Gilson is sending reviews from the New York Asian Film Festival up north to Twitch. So far: Seijun Suzuki's Princess Racoon ("like nothing you've ever seen"; more from Mr Flibble at AICN) and Godzilla Final Wars. Through July 2.

At Stop Smiling, Josh Tyson reports briefly on the brief Movieside Film Festival in Chicago, hosted this year by Guy Maddin. Links from the fest site may lead to aimless wandering and lost hours.

Michael Collins is keeping a Sydney Film Festival diary for Hollywood Bitchslap: Parts 1 and 2. Through June 25.

Eshman sends a dispatch from the Moscow International Film Festival in to the Reverseblog (and I'll be reading the new Reverse Shot later on today).

Monkey Peaches lists the award winners at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

Guy Trebay in the New York Times Magazine on krumping and, of course, David LaChapelle's film:

Rize falls under the rubric of what could be termed the Romance of the Permanent Underclass. According to the genre's unvarying conventions, characters must scale rope ladders of unlikely opportunity to escape their destinies. And this LaChapelle's dancers do - out of a place where gangs and drugs and violence are not merely raw video wallpaper, artifacts of some Snoop Dogg cartoon. The film is dedicated to a dancer named Quinesha (Lil Dimples) Dunford, who was killed with a 13-year-old friend in a 2003 drive/by shooting, and not one of the dancers in it is without a story like Quinesha's to tell.

To a large extent, Rize does what Jennie Livingston did in Paris Is Burning, her 1990 documentary about the gay underground ball scene from which phenomena like vogueing first arose, and what the independent filmmaker Charlie Ahearn did when he documented the birth of hip-hop culture in the semifictional 1982 movie Wild Style. It trains its lens on an exceptional group of self-taught artists and lets their art speak for them.

And in the paper: Dave Kehr on the rediscovered and restored English language version of Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle, screening at MoMA tonight and then Wednesday through Sunday.

Newsweek's Sean Smith is pretty worked up about War of the Worlds: "[T]hink Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a far more sinister edge. There are images here - the wreckage of an airplane, an alien tripod rising to full height behind a ferryboat, a river of corpses, the clothes of the dead floating down through trees like snow - that are just breathtaking." Smith also gets to chat with Spielberg.

And then, according to David Ansen, Bewitched is not a disaster. Related: Rachel Abramowitz talks to Nicole Kidman and Nora Ephron about "girl-empowerment." For the New York Daily News, Joe Leydon traces the lineage of onscreen witches.

Anthony Lane reviews the film in the New Yorker, but the one to go for here is Alex Ross's, beginning with an appreciation of Michael Giacchino's score for Lost, arcing back through Eisenstein's ideas on film music before sweeping back up at midpoint to a good second listen to a few landmark scores by Philip Glass and a second look at the films themselves: "When I saw Koyaanisqatsi in college, I dismissed it as a trippy, slick, MTV-ish thing, to which some well-meaning soul had attached hippie messages about the mechanization of existence and the spoliation of the planet. At Lincoln Center, I understood it as something else altogether - an awesomely dispassionate vision of the human world, beautiful and awful in equal measure."

Also: Rebecca Mead on Leonard Nimoy's photo exhibition, "Maximum Beauty."

John Bleasdale at Film-Philosophy: "Hannah Patterson and many of the contributors of to The Cinema of Terrence Malick opt for a literary term: Malick's cinema is poetic and he is a poet."

Tom Giammarco:

There was a lot going on in the world of Korean film at the beginning of 2005. The controversy of The President's Last Bang was being played out in the courtrooms and in the entertainment news. The collapse of the PiFan Film Festival was a hot topic and the hype surrounding the impending release of Another Public Enemy was overwhelming. Almost missed among all that was a quiet film directed by a virtual unknown but starring the talented Jo Seung-woo. The media found it interesting as "a story of human triumph" but most people seemed certain that Kang Woo-suk's feature would dominate the box office. That all changed however, after Marathon had its press screening.

Also at Koreanfilm.org: Kyu Hyun Kim on An Byung-ki's horror film, Bunshinsaba, and Adam Hartzell on Kim Ji-hyun's indie, Popee.

Filmbrain admires how Pen-Ek Ratanaruang "took a plot that's been done to death and created something entirely unique and fresh" in 6ixtynin9.

Anthony Kaufman isn't particularly wild about this year's biggest indie: "Fiercely committed acting aside, Crash is an atrocity committed against the craft of drama, filled with forced, shorthand trickery to create hollow statements about race without a shred of humanity at its core."

"Soon, I'll hit the two-week mark of my stay in Tokyo," writes Patrick Macias. "After that is undiscovered country. I run the risk of getting comfortable now, imaging I could someday go native, feeling like I understand even a fraction of all this somehow."

Online viewing (and interacting) tip. Rhizome One, from Adrian Miles via Cinema Minima and Nick Rombes.

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2005 7:43 AM