Shorts, 6/30.

They've already had to re-shoot the ending once. They may have to do it again - not to mention reconsider such cod-profound, Hollywood-judgment lines as "There's only one conclusion to every story. We all fall down." On Monday night the makers of Domino, a new film starring Keira Knightley scheduled for release in the autumn, must have been somewhat discomfited to find that the 35-year-old inspiration for their $30m action flick - about a beautiful, public school-educated English girl turned gun-toting LA bounty hunter - had provided one last plot twist: she was found dead in her bath in West Hollywood, suspected drowned after a drug overdose.

Edemariam tells two troubled stories: Harvey's and Domino's. The Guardian reports that the film will be released on schedule, that is, New Line has actually moved the film back to August after postponing the release to November. More from Jeffrey Wells.

Also: Jason Deans and Owen Gibson report on The Road to Guantánamo, a docu-drama Michael Winterbottom will be making about three British Muslims incarcerated in "the gulag of our time."

"The films by Cassavetes, Toback, Scorsese, Coppola, they had an energy, a rage, a vitality and a dynamic quality to them, and something exotic as well. They were discovering the subcultures of America. One of the themes of this film is inheritance, and what I inherited from Toback's film is this sort of cinematic territory." Jacques Audiard, director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped talks to Robert Abele. Also in the Los Angeles Times: Kevin Thomas on I Vitelloni and the American Cinematheque's "Mods & Rockers: The Return of Groovy Movies of the Shagadelic Sixties" series.

James Toback himself interviews Audiard in the LA Weekly: "When you proposed the idea of remaking Fingers, I knew what a terrific director you were and there was no question that you would come up with an interesting film. But I thought: Where are you going to find an actor with the nuances and complexity of Harvey Keitel? Alain Delon, at that age, would have been great. But I didn’t realize that there was someone who was actually, on many levels, a kind of reincarnation of Delon at his peak." That someone, of course, is the great Romain Duris.

Also, Scott Foundas: "[A]s with many institutions, one crucial detail risks getting lost amid the celebratory hoo-ha: Roger Ebert is very, very good at what he does." But Elbert Ventura presents the case for the prosecution at the New Republic site: "Instead of seeking to broaden his reader's experience of movies, he presumes to approximate it, in the process lowering the culture's standards for what makes a good movie."

And the LA Weekly runs a memo from Francis Ford Coppola to UA's Herb Jaffe dated December 16, 1968: "Here is both the short film and the feature length first draft screenplay of THX 1138." The second page seems to be a now-anonymous and then-unimpressed reader's analysis.

George Lucas says the days of the blockbuster may be numbered. Xeni Jardin reports on a recent talk in which he also urged distributors to figure out a way to "deliver content in fee-based systems online."

Mark Gilson at Twitch on Marebito: "General J-Horror fans may not find this their cup of tea, but [Takeshi] Shimizu fans willing to scratch the surface will find a lot to uncover." Also: Todd looks ahead to several highlights of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (loads o' links, too).

Kirby Dick's Twist of Faith opens this weekend in New York and San Francisco - but not in Toledo, Ohio, where much of its story unfolds. As Ryan E Smith reports for the Toledo Blade, both Dick and local firefighter Tony Comes, the focus of the film, aren't buying the theater's decision not to show the film is a merely "financial" one. More on the run-in from the indieWIRE Insider and more on the film from Francine Taylor.

Philippa Hawker talks to Babette Mangolte about her documentary, The Models of Pickpocket, in which she tracks down who performed in Bresson's 1959 film.

Also via Movie City Indie: Saibal Chatterjee in the Hindustan Times on thoughts in Bollywood about how to break further out into the international circuit and: Greetings from Ashbury Park. It's not just a postcard anymore. Or an album. It's also a doc in the making. Kathy Hall reports on Christina Eliopoulos labor of love in the Tri-Town News.

For Christianity Today, Jeffrey Overstreet gathers thoughts from religious press reviewers on Bewitched, Land of the Dead, Herbie: Fully Loaded, Batman Begins and, of course, War of the Worlds.

Speaking of which:

• Three reviews at Movie City News: Ray Pride ("Spielberg goes where dreams live and nightmares breed, whistling darkly over many graveyards, in images, explicit images drawn from the tenderest spots of collective consciousness"), Leonard Klady ("What's on view is the cinematic equivalent of ADD") and David Poland ("It didn't suck. But it wasn't very good either.").

• In the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas sees "a reverse inventory of 20th- and 21st-century atrocities, beginning with 9/11 (blinding clouds of debris filling the streets of New York and airplanes falling from the sky) and winding its way back through the LA riots (a truly terrifying scene in which Cruise is pulled from his car and beaten by an enraged mob), the corpse-strewn rivers of Rwanda, the battlefields and deportation trains of WWII, and even (in a perilous drawbridge scene) the sinking of the Titanic, with its eternal reminder of man’s hubristic folly. And so it is that the movie’s aliens - whose origin is never identified and who rarely appear apart from their giant, stalking tripod vehicles - are presented not as a specific threat but as the abstract manifestation of all that shatters our notion of ourselves as all-powerful beings."

• Kevin Maher in the London Times: "[T]here is something fundamentally paradoxical, and frankly odd, about Spielberg employing the very genre that he helped to establish and that supposedly contributed to 9/11 in an attempt to explain the meaning of 9/11 itself." Also, James Christopher: "[Q]uite simply the greatest B-movie ever made."

• Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper: "Spielberg runs away from the dark heart of his material.... [George A] Romero's action sequences pale beside Spielberg's expertly directed tours de force. But like the lumbering zombies who always catch their prey, Land [of the Dead] sneaks up on the zeitgeist and takes a chunk out of its neck."

• Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly: "Frankly, Spielberg has an 80-minute movie, tops, that he is forced to elongate into almost two hours by stuffing it with a succession of hollow vignettes and extraneous material."

• Gary Susman in the Boston Phoenix: "Even on summer popcorn terms, it's a tepid finish to a movie that, for its first hour or so, taps so expertly into our fears."

• Maybe it's a parody, suggests Eugene Hernandez.

For Film-Philosophy, Ed Keller reviews Aleksandar Dundjerovic's The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory, "an excellent overview of Lepage's cinema and theatrical work, process, and thinking, and also of the political context in Canada that he reveals was instrumental in the formation of Lepage as a director."

BRAINTRUSTdv interviews video artist Andres Tapia-Urzua: "Any media artist who is working to reveal a broader understanding of the world, while using the same technologies of power, to offer original and independent cultural points of view, is generating a relevant discourse in our narrow media culture."

"Nothing gives credence to a film festival like the discovery of a translucent new movie," writes Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix. "I'd never heard of Ralph Arlyck’s feature documentary Following Sean - thank you, P-Town. This is the finest film I’ve seen in 2005. And so far, it has no distributor!" Plus: an anecdote about Game 6.

Screenwriter Keir Pearson and writer-director Terry George have won the Humanitas Prize for Hotel Rwanda. The BBC reports.

For the Pitt News, Dan Richey profiles local filmmaker George A Romero, collecting quotes from the man himself and from a fan, Quentin Tarantino. Via Cinema Strikes Back.

Marc Savlov: "For better or worse, Phantasm will likely be the film that Michael Baldwin is remembered for - you can almost see his epitaph reading along the lines of 'Kicked the Tall Man's Ass' - but it's by no means an albatross around his neck in the way that so many golden-age horror stars and character actors - Bela Lugosi - being the most obvious example - viewed their own fame." Also in the Austin Chronicle, Steve Uhler: "Fifty years ago, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were the biggest phenomena in show business - hotter than Elvis."

The Reeler talks to Spencer Drate, co-author of The Independent Movie Poster Book; quite a nice piece that might have run up at the front at indieWIRE.

Watch your favorite vlogs on TV. Akimbo makes it happen. James Fee passes along word at Digital Media Thoughts. Via Cinema Minima. And, as Chuck Olsen exclaims, you can also watch them in iTunes 4.9.

The Caligari Awards. Via M Valdemar.

At indieWIRE, Vanessa Romo ticks off the winners of the Frameline29 fest and Jonny Leahan looks back on the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Girish remembers Torontos past.

The Economist: "The Supreme Court has somewhat reluctantly clipped the wings of copyright pirates; it is time for Congress to do the same to the copyright incumbents."

Online listening tip. "Theme From an Imaginary John Hughes Movie." A playlist by Ben Donnelly. 'Swunnerful.

Online browsing tip. Blow-Up photos at HQ. Via Flickhead.

Online viewing tips #1 through #7. Trailers: Initial D (site; via Todd at Twitch); Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (via AICN; see also a few general updates at Cinema Strikes Back); and Twitch's Gomorrahizer has five more.

Online viewing tip #8. Classic 1970 spot for Levi's. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #9. Silly, but if you've got kids, they'll probably like it: "What is Life?" Via Newstoday.

Online viewing tip #10, and the best of the bunch: "Punchline." Wiley Wiggins, Fritz Hoepfner and Christian Panic. (Don't try to Google that last name; the results are terribly depressing.)

Posted by dwhudson at June 30, 2005 2:38 PM