Weekend shorts.

Peter Bowles not only had a crucial role in Blow-Up, he had a crucial speech as well. But Michelangelo Antonioni cut it.

Bowles recalls protesting the cut:

He listened, and listened, until finally I ran out of words. There was silence. So I said, "Erm, sir, are you going to put the speech back in now?" He replied, "No. Because, Peter, you have explained to me exactly why I should cut it. If I leave the speech in, everyone will know what the film is about, but if I take the speech out, everyone will say it is about this, it is about that, it is about the other. It will be controversial." So it was cut. But there is a speech, which I have, which explains exactly what the film is about. It is all there in the film, if you know where to look, but I can't disclose specifically what it is. Antonioni is still alive, so if anybody's going to say anything it's up to him.

Also in the Guardian:

• JG Ballard on CSI, "a very unusual series, and a mystery in its own right. I suspect that it taps deeply into the collective unconscious of the TV audience, as did Sex and the City and Big Brother, but in a far more sinister way."

• Chris Roberts meets Dig! director Ondi Timoner.

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Planet of the Apes.

"Anders Klarlund’s Strings is an absolute wonder to behold," writes Todd at Twitch, "Completely unique, absolutely beautiful, well-written stuff."

Also, Takashi Miike's MPD Psycho turns out to be "a surprisingly thoughtful psychological treatise on the nature of evil... Go another level down and you have a biting satire of both our media saturated society and that segment of society that would rather blame evil on the media rather than on our own nature."

Also: The Gomorrahizer reports on the upcoming release of "Dark Tales of Japan, a collection of six short horrors from the cream of Japanese terror directors, including Hideo Nakata (Ring), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure) and Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge)."

At the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore finds Fruit Chan's segment of Three... Extremes "by far the best," Miike's "ultimately an empty exercise in style" and Park Chan-wook's somewhere in between.

David Austin on Princess Racoon: "Seijun Suzuki has directed one of his all-time greats here.... From the traditional samurai rapping, to the chorus of adorable tanuki girls with tails, to the romantic tap-dancing, to the tanukis who play their stomachs like drums, everything just works." Plus: Production Notes.

And via Cinema Strikes Back:

• Dong-Yong Min's talk with Kim Seung-woo for Donga.

• Yong Shu Chiang's brief take on Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Initial D for Today.

• Kong Rithdee profiles Thailand's leading stunt performer (Batman Begins, etc), Kawee Sirikhanaerat.

• For not actually having met Terrence Malick, Chris Garcia turns in a pretty readable update for the Austin American-Statesman.

• Eli Roth tells About.com's Rebecca Murray a little about the projects he's working on.

• A slew of Land of the Dead reviews.

Matt Clayfield, who'll be covering the 14th Brisbane International Film Festival for Senses of Cinema (July 27 through August 8), comments on Richard Wolstencroft's "1st MUFF Manifesto." In short, it "succinctly sums up the general consensus of an increasingly large number of Australian filmmakers and practitioners." Whether the manifesto matters is a more complex question.

Documentaries figure prominently in Sunday's edition of the New York Times. James Ulmer checks in with a slew of right-wingers striving to get a handle on - and make political hay out of - the genre and AO Scott considers why narrative clichés that fall flat in features often actually work pretty well in docs.

Also: Manohla Dargis: "It's a measure of how conservative even professional filmgoers have become that Tropical Malady was greeted not only with puzzlement at Cannes but also with outright hostility."

In the magazine, photographer Jeff Riedel shoots various DPs in various poses and outfits and Matt Bai explains what Mike Easley, Democratic governor of North Carolina, knows his party could learn from King of the Hill.

Nora FitzGerald reports on the remarkable turnaround in the Russian film industry for the International Herald Tribune. Via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.

At Nerve, Lily Oei asks Shelby Knox to look back on The Education of Shelby Knox. And now: "More women need to be inside in the formal political arena. I think I'm up to that challenge, and I want to make it my life's work."

John Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock, Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle and Fritz Lang's Fury comprise the "meaty section" of Warner Home Video's "Controversial Classics" collection, writes Travis Miles for Stop Smiling. Fury "proves, unsurprisingly, to be the most powerful of the three, packing a universe of anguish into its streamlined 90 minutes."

"On an island where it is pretty much impossible to get a hamburger for less than $10, I have to admit there were moments when I had a crisis of faith as a film programmer, and they always came at the strangest of moments." But Tom Hall's worked through them and realized this year's edition Nantucket Film Festival came off pretty well in the end after all.

"[W]hat do we call this new crop of books about the tedious lives of low-level assistants who yearn to succeed in the entertainment industry?" wonders Amy Wallace in the Los Angeles Times. "Tinsel lit? Mailroom lit? Striver lit? Glick lit?" Up for review: Rachel Pine's The Twins of Tribeca, Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare's The Second Assistant: A Tale From the Bottom of the Hollywood Ladder and so on.

Wallace concludes, naturally enough, that while these people are sufficiently connected to get their grievances published, most people just plain don't care. But as Kevin Fanning discovers and reports in the Morning News, most people do care about their employers and they are, in fact, "Worried About Celebrities."

In the Independent, Robert Hanks profiles Richard Curtis, a filmmaker he's got decidedly mixed feelings about.

Newsweek's Sean Smith turns in a piece on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and interviews Johnny Depp.

Vince Keenan picks up the film meme.

Coudal Parners are making a movie.

Greg Allen collects a few items related to Francesco Vezzoli's faux Caligula trailer.

Online viewing tips. Trailers via Movie-List: Tony Takitani (site); The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things; The Skeleton Key (better than the trailer that greets you at the site).

Posted by dwhudson at June 26, 2005 7:50 AM