Shorts, 8/3.

Doug Cummings: "Okay, summer break is over and the blogging shall resume." And now. What's more, I've only just now seen that Cinemarati, the "professional guild for film writers whose work appears primarily online," has launched a blog. An excellent blog, too, though that's hardly a surprise.

At Stop Smiling, Jared Rapfogel reviews No Shame Films's "highest-brow" release: "At once surprisingly atypical in its strong, noir-influenced plot, and yet unmistakably Antonioni-esque in its mise-en-scene and its mood of disconnection and despair, Story of a Love Affair is a tremendously confident debut, despite Antonioni's inexperience, his low budget, and a production imperiled by the suicide of its primary funder." By the way, there doesn't seem to be a trailer for Affair up as yet, but you'll find many others at No Shame's site.

"Quietly outraged and actively upsetting, Darwin's Nightmare spirals out from a case study of one cannibalistic killer to a far bigger and more rapacious fish," writes Dennis Lim. "The ruthless supremacy of the Nile perch and its devastating effect on the lake's ecosystem constitute a gruesomely resonant metaphor for the impact of global capitalism on local industry." And Joshua Land has three quick questions for director Hubert Sauper: "There isn't anything new in my movie. It's all known. I just give it a face."

For AO Scott, the "harrowing, indispensable" film "is clearly aimed at the political conscience of Western audiences, and its implicit critique of some of our assumptions about the shape and direction of the global economy deserves to be taken seriously," he writes in the New York Times. "But its reach extends far beyond questions of policy and political economy, and it turns the fugitive, mundane facts that are any documentary's raw materials into the stuff of tragedy and prophecy."

Back in the Village Voice:

• Laura Sinagra on Junebug, "an exhilaratingly decentered tale." For the NYT's Stephen Holden, it's a "a wise, bittersweet, beautifully acted comedy." In the Los Angeles Times, Carina Chocano calls it "a deceptively simple, deeply resonant story" and Brian Triplett profiles Ben McKenzie.

• Jessica Winter on Broken Flowers, "a Jarmuschian bouquet of episodic structure, desultory road-tripping, and droll dislocation, each comic setup as simple and plywood-dry a contraption as ever." More from Amy Taubin in the City Pages, Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press, Melissa Anderson in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

• Michael Atkinson on 2046: "Can we get away with calling it poetic abstraction?" For the NYP's Armond White, it's "all sublimnity."

• Pete L'Official on The Dukes of Hazzard, which "s insults not 'family values'... just general intelligence."

• Ed Halter on Stealth: "Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot."

• Land on Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro's The Every Boy.

• "Tracking Shots": Ed Park on Saint Ralph (and on seven-year-old author Lee Tandy Schwartzman), Atkinson on Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision, Renoir's The River and Rivette's The Story of Marie and Julien, Robert Christgau on Young Rebels (more from Dana Stevens in the NYT), Leslie Camhi on the Lonely Heart: Philippe Garrel series (and the exhibition "Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes"), Nona Willis-Aronowitz on Secuestro Express (more from Jennifer Merin in the NYP), Matt Singer on Sky High, and Ben Kenigsberg on My Date With Drew.

"Why the glut of interesting movies all of a sudden?" asks Eugene Hernandez.

At indieWIRE, Jason Guerrasio checks in on five indies currently in production.

Stephen Moss profiles Robert Baer: "His devastating critique of his former employer, See No Evil: the True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, appeared in 2002 and was leapt on by those seeking to explain why the September 11 attacks had evaded the radar of US intelligence. A film of the book called Syriana, in which George Clooney plays the baggy-jacketed Baer, will be released in the autumn. Baer, his stock rising fast, can afford to be insouciant."

Also in the Guardian, Geoffrey Macnab in Locarno: "Audiences here in this rain-sodden mountain resort will have a rare chance to see Welles's masterful Shakespeare adaptation, Chimes at Midnight." And: "The city of New Orleans is known as the supernatural capital of the United States," writes Iain Softley, explaining how he came to direct The Skeleton Key. "But it's also a city known for its music, and it was this potent combination of music and the supernatural which drew me to the script, and for the first time in my life, to New Orleans, Louisiana and the Deep South."

The Harvard Lampoon parodies Premiere. Only a few pages are available online as a PDF file, but still. Via Bob Sassone at Cinematical.

David Lowery on Simon Pummell's Bodysong: "In retrospect, it represents not the epitome of multimedia's potential but the epitome of the possibilities of that potential."

For Beth Gilligan at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Unfaithfully Yours, the "Preston Sturges film that doesn't quite feel like a Preston Sturges film," is "richer than it's often given credit for."

Flickhead: "Today I've hardly an ounce of objectivity when it comes to Bedazzled."

Charlie Price at Cinema Strikes Back on Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit: "Okay, so the film was shocking then, but is it interesting today? Only somewhat. The black and white cinematography is gorgeous and the editing is fast-cutting and does a lot to keep things exciting. But it's not saying much when you realize the 86-minute film has started to drag in the second act."

Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org: "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, if anything, will add more dry wood to the fierce bonfire of controversy surrounding Park's status as an artist as well as the real worth of his undeniably spellbinding films."

Welcome to Dongmakgol "offers a utopian place in which soldiers from the two Koreas and the United States are intertwined in a happy-go-lucky fashion during the Korean War," writes Yang Sung-jin of the Korea Herald. "The $8 million movie may not offer a satisfactory alterative to the six-party talks, but it can be a sure-fire place to cool down the heat wave that is currently hitting the peninsula."

Memoirs of a Geisha. Grady Hendrix has found new photos and an extra's diary, and sighs, "Ah, there's nothing better than an American movie, about Japanese people, cast with Chinese actors, who all speak English." Also: As Li Peichun reports, Tsui Hark's Seven Swords is not exactly a runaway hit in China or Hong Kong.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Johnny Ray Huston sorts through Justin Kelly's music video work with the director himself and reviews Occupation: Dreamland, "filmed in early 2004, over a period – a good five and a half weeks longer than the usual three-day, hit-and-run style of embedded journalism – that captures the mounting frustrations in Fallujah."

The Reeler is impressed with the "extremely good teen comedy" Pretty Persuasion.

Andy Battaglia at the Onion AV Club's new blog: "One of the many things I liked about Gus Van Sant's Last Days was the sound design... You can hear the sounds most of us hardly even notice gradually turn to unbearable noise in the mind of the film's 'Kurt Cobain,' whose ears wrap like parentheses around the feedback in his head."

Joe Robinson interviews Werner Herzog in the LAT.

In the NYT, Sharon Waxman pokes at the "scrim of secrecy" Sony's dropped over the production of The Da Vinci Code. The problem: How do you offend neither Christians nor fans of the book?

Mix-n-match:

• Tatiana Siegel in the Hollywood Reporter: "Samuel L Jackson has signed on to star in and co-produce Afrosamurai, a live-action feature film adaptation of Takashi Okazaki's manga property." Related: John at AnimeNation on whether Gonzo is overstretching; via Opus.

• Paddy Considine, Gary Oldman and Koldo Serra (Twitch).

• Richard Gere and Andrew Lau (Moviehole).

• Cold news, but still: Nicole Kidman and Oliver Hirschbiegel (Box Office Prophets).

At PopMatters, Bill Gibron describes his long journey from hate to love for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"Now you have movies that are nothing but special effects, overwhelming sound, which is a great sensation, but character acting and script development, social realism — these things are actually declining," Camille Paglia tells Robert Birnbaum in the Morning News. "So I am very concerned about the cultural future of the United States in this kind of environment."

At Out of Focus, Aaron has a quick and smart word or two for each day of TCM's month-long "Summer Under the Stars" series.

Lee Siegel in the New Republic: "Over There wants be a great a war movie, but it has the soul and the reflexes of cheap commercial television."

Salon's Heather Havrilesky on Current TV: "As each pod progresses, an indicator (like the one you see in QuickTime or iTunes) demonstrates how much time is left in the segment. If you've never seen your TV imitate your laptop before, that's just the beginning." More from James Wolcott: "It's as if all the marketing 'cool hunters' got together in a conference room, sent out for Red Bull and Listerine mint strips, and brainstormed into the night to create a channel appealing to MTV viewers looking for a little extra somethin'-somethin'."

For the Mercury News, Dawn C Chmielewski reports on a possible commercial future for BitTorrent: "They've forged a partnership with paid-search provider Ask Jeeves, and recently the duo flew to Burbank for high-level talks with the Motion Picture Association of America." Via Zonk at Slashdot, who asks, "You have to wonder about a crucial part of the equation: why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?"

Fans who saw films praised by Sony's fake critic will get a refund. Five bucks per fan. For a grand total of $1.5 mil. The BBC reports.

Online browsing tip. Egyptian movie posters. Via Rashomon.

Online viewing tip #1. Steve Sullivan's A Heap of Trouble, among other fine works at his site. Via Todd at Twitch.

Online viewing tip #2. Glen Fogel's video for "Hope There's Someone" by Antony and the Johnsons. Via Steve Gallagher at Filmmaker.

Online viewing tips #3 and #4, both rather silly, but it is August, after all. Lucky Stalin. Also via Screenhead: Tintorera Joe's "Friday the 13th Part III vs The Beverly Hillbillies" at CampBlood.org.

Online viewing tips #5 - #8. The winners of 2005 SXSWclick Online Media Festival have been announced, and they're all viewable from a single page. Arturo Cabanas's Man Up is the jury award winner. Nick Miller's Robot-Ussin is the winner of the People's Choice Award. Runners-up include Lorenzo Llanillo's Finding the Unknown God and Matt Ogens's 101.

Open question: What ever happened to the projected adaptation of George Saunders's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline?

Posted by dwhudson at August 3, 2005 2:00 PM