Shorts, 6/29.

Deepa Mehta's Water will see its world premiere when it opens the Toronto Film Festival (September 8 through 17). The BBC has a bit of background on the controversy the film kicked up when Mehta was shooting in India way back in 2000; she had to complete the film in Sri Lanka.

Eugene Hernandez sorts through the evolving Toronto lineup at indieWIRE and Darren Hughes has already started marking up his calendar.

Meanwhile, Anthony Kaufman files a detailed report for iW: "While the big studios lament the slowdown of summer business, there's another casualty at the box office this season: foreign language films."

Rob Nelson introduces a big fat summer movie cover package for the City Pages with sort of a downer of a reminder for those getting a kick out of the Slump: "You could say the small screen is getting its belated revenge on the big one, except that our money spent on DVDs and video games and cable subscriptions is still flowing to the same handful of mega-conglomerates. So it's hard to trust that our disapproval of multiplex fare is hitting Hollywood where it counts."

Also:

• Nelson has a good long talk with David Thomson, asking first where the movies have gone wrong: "The question that faces anyone who loves the medium is whether this is a cyclical thing - a passing dip, so to speak - or whether there might be something much more worrying.... There's a lot of evidence to suggest two things - which could, in fact, be working [in tandem]: that films don't mean as much to audiences anymore, and that they don't mean as much to filmmakers anymore, either."

• Terri Sutton previews the 5th annual Flaming Film Festival, today through Sunday.

• Peter Ritter profiles indie filmmaker Eric Tretbar, who "is to indie-rockers as Kurosawa is to samurai."

• Matthew Wilder sorts the white hats from the black hats in the industry, submits a list of ten summertime studio flops from 1984 (Best Defense) through 2001 (Swordfish) and another of five summer films that "bucked the trend of the brainless summer blockbuster," from 1978 (Interiors) through 1999 (Eyes Wide Shut).

• The staff recalls some of the better movies of summers past.

• And of course, Nelson on War of the Worlds. All in all, he's not exactly "W.O.W."ed.

More WotW:

• "A sci-fi masterpiece." These are the words David Edelstein works his way towards at Slate, and it's fun going, too.

• In the opposite corner, Stephanie Zacharek at Salon: "[I]t embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones... It's bad enough that Spielberg has lost faith in his own sense of decency, but it's even worse that he's lost faith in the decency of his audience."

• For Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, Spielberg "has made what is arguably one of the best 1950s science fiction films ever, and that is not a backhanded compliment." And Rachel Abramowitz and John Horn have a sort of grab-bag piece mixing 9/11 in the movies and Hollywood's hopes that WotW will bring audiences back to the theaters.

• Scott Tobias at the Onion AV Club: "In the end, Spielberg overreaches, but at least he has the long arms to do it."

• The AP's David Germain: "They made it, but the rush job they delivered shortchanges story, character, design and even execution on some of the colossal special-effects sequences."

Alison Willmore at the IFC blog on Hana & Alice: "[Shunji] Iwai's has a great ear for dialog, scripting funny, realistic, meandering conversations that nevertheless carry a great emotional weight."

Reading Grady Hendrix, you can only hope we do see Namprix some day and that Sammi Cheng holds up long enough to complete Everlasting Regret.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

• "Booted, buckled, and buxom, the formidable Satana/Varla became an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino (where else does Kill Bill's Pussy Wagon roll from?), John Waters, Divine (check the sketchy eyebrows), and countless little girls looking for a superheroine, part all-consuming id, part wrathful goddess." Kimberly Chun calls up Tura Satana.

• Cheryl Eddy: "[Dakota] Fanning's particular gift is that she already seems like an adult actor - technically speaking, she's light years ahead of her peers. Sure, she's cute, in that wholesome, Pottery Barn Kids kind of way. But she also seems much wiser than her years, a striking trait that's also occasionally spooky."

• "[Miranda] July might just be the crossover figure of the moment, and I can't say I'm surprised," writes Johnny Ray Huston, recalling the summer of '98 when he knew her pretty well and profiled her for the SFBG. "A Gallo-size backlash may await this writer-actor-director down the road, but for now, she's looking mighty fine." Susan Gerhard spoke with July the day after Me and You and Everyone We Know was accepted at Cannes. More? There's always more Miranda July: Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club.

• Gerhard on March of the Penguins, "the most beautifully filmed animal story of the year."

Chuck Stephens meets Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Dennis Lim reviews Tropical Malady. There's more from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, but don't skip Akiva Gottlieb's brief but intriguing observation, either.

Also in the Village Voice:

• Michael Musto dishes out advice to the stars - free of charge!

• Mark Peranson on A Decent Factory (again, more from Manohla Dargis).

• Lim on The World, Jia Zhang-ke's "most accessible film. But it's also his most despairing - a harsh riposte to the first three."

• Michael Atkinson on Land of the Dead and: "[Romain] Duris, capable and dull, is no [Harvey] Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no Fingers."

• "Tracking Shots": The "Premiere Brazil!" series at MoMA; This Revolution; Herbie: Fully Loaded; Modigliani; Undead; Sex, Politics & Cocktails; and Twist of Faith.

"[O]nce you start digging, you find zomflicks everywhere. Why?" asks Steven Wells in the Philadelphia Weekly. "I put it down to the popularity of the South Beach Diet. One low-carb gorefest I'm particularly eager to see is Mark 'Curse of the Queerwolf' Pirro's '91 zomcom musical Nudist Colony of the Dead."

At Movie City News, Ray Pride has a good long talk with an old friend, director Ken Kwapis (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), about movies for adults.

Brief book reviews at Kamera:

• Deryck Swan on Mark Cousins's The Story of Film.

• Marcelle Perks on Bruce Sachs and Russell Wall's Greasepaint and Gore: The Hammer Monsters of Roy Ashton.

• Deborah Allison on Tony Earnshaw's Beating the Devil: The Making of Night of the Demon.

At the San Francisco Chronicle's new Culture Blog, Peter Hartlaub introduces a series (maybe), "Movies Worth Reconsidering." Volume 1? Bad Boys.

So here's an idea for a reality show: Film your subjects filming a doc. About a film festival. SXSW producer Matt Dentler has a few details on MTV's Real World: Austin.

Kaleem Aftab interviews Stephen Chow for the Independent.

A Wired News editorial on the US Supreme Court's Grokster decision: "In the end, the business model in the entertainment industry is going to change, and these companies can either find a way to insert themselves into the new order, or risk finding themselves frozen out forever."

Meanwhile, via Slashdot, Ryan Naraine reports for PC Magazine on DVD Jon's cracking Google's video player.

Online viewing tips. The Crime in Your Coffee has plucked well over a dozen new highlights from the Internet Archive.

Posted by dwhudson at June 29, 2005 9:18 AM