Sight, Sound and Shorts.

Greg Mitchell, co-author of Hiroshima in America and advisor to the documentary Original Child Bomb, tells the full story in Editor & Publisher of how original news footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after bombings was suppressed for decades. For his report, he spoke with Lt Col (Ret) Daniel A McGovern, "who directed the US military filmmakers in 1945 - 1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades."

"I always had the sense," McGovern told me, "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force - it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. ... They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done - at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because ... we were sorry for our sins."

Via Doug Cummings.

Related: "openDemocracy presents images from a special multi-media exhibition 'After Hiroshima: nuclear imaginaries' involving artists from Japan, America, Britain and Russia. Hosted at the Brunei Gallery and curated by Siumee Keelan, the exhibition explores contemporary visions of nuclear conflict."

Scott Macaulay attended the premiere of Fernando Meirelles's "exciting and unexpectedly moving" The Constant Gardener, adapted from John Le Carré's novel (Raegan Johnson was also there for the New York Observer), and came away with quotes from Donald Rumsfeld and Slavoj Zizek, courtesy of Focus Films co-prez James Schamus, and then, this:

At the film's end, a statement by Le Carré appeared on screen: "Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world. But I can tell you this; as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard."

And: "Le Carré elaborates on this statement and spells out the point-of-view of Meirelles's uncommonly tough-minded thriller" in a 2001 piece for the Nation.

Anthony Kaufman: "Winter Soldier and The Century of the Self provide backward glances at particular points in our nation's past to reveal bracing realities about our present.... Oddly enough, some of the archival footage in The Century of the Self was actually shot by Barbara Kopple during the filming of Winter Soldier. Needless to say, she was quite unhappy to discover that [Adam] Curtis used her footage without asking permission."

Michael Pitt is on the cover of the September issue of Sight & Sound, but Amy Taubin's piece on Last Days is not online. So, a quick detour to the City Pages, where Jessica Winter writes, "Owing a debt to Abbas Kiarostami's notion of the 'half-made' film and employing the long, mobile takes of Hungarian master Béla Tarr (Werckmeister Harmonies), [Gus] Van Sant's premature-death trilogy - each installment shot by Harris Savides - locates its rhythms in the characters' perambulations," and Rob Nelson interviews Van Sant.

For the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams takes on both the review and the interview. Boston Phoenix? Peter Keough: Review. Gerald Peary: Interview. Review? Jim Ridley for the Nashville Scene.

Back to the CP: David Ng talks a bit with Arnaud Desplechin.

But wait, back to S&S:

• Ian Christie introduces another not-online feature, Michael Powell's semi-fictional memoirs.

• Geoffrey Macnab on "the third part in Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's 'Men of Power' tetralogy. After the gloom of Moloch (1999), about Hitler and Eva Braun, and the despairing, funereal tones of Taurus (2001), focused on the wheelchair-bound Lenin in his death throes, The Sun seems almost upbeat."

• Leslie Felperin on Pirjo Honkasalo's The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, "one of the finest documentaries of the past year.... A collage of stories and harrowing yet transcendently beautiful images depicts how hearts and minds are shaped to destroy bodies and souls."

Reviews:

• Philip Kemp on The Night of Truth, which universalizes the Rwandan tragedy by fictionalizing its setting: "The strength of [Fanta Régina] Nacro's film lies not so much in its plot, which occasionally errs on the side of predictability, as in the all-too-convincing texture of its portrayal of a country traumatised by a decade of hatred and slaughter."

• Ryan Gilbey on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: "Perhaps [Tim] Burton and [production designer Alex] McDowell should have worked harder to distinguish their film's most important sets from something that might crop up routinely on a cartoon series like Kim Possible or Dexter's Laboratory."

• Brad Stevens notes that Preston Sturges's work "often seems to belong to any historical period other than the one in which it was made."

Other Cinema is about to unleash The 70s Dimension on DVD, "an exercise in cultural anthropology," as Paul Matwychuk calls it in Vue Weekly, "a lesson in the evolution of mass communication and a telling glimpse at the obsessions and unconscious social and sexual assumptions of a bygone time."

Adult movie-goers: Put on Loudon Wainwright III's "Summer's Almost Over" and read David Poland's preview of the fall season.

Girish Shambu's mom convinces him to accept a gift.

For ReadyMade, Shoshana Berger asks Daniel Clowes all about Art School Confidential: "My guess is that parents will see the film and think, 'Thank god, now my kids won't go.' And kids will see the film and think, 'I can't wait to go!'" Via Coudal Partners.

At the AV Club Blog, Scott Tobias lets off steam: "I don't doubt that movie piracy will become a much bigger problem as time goes on and technology improves, but if the industry keeps looking at critics as the #1 suspects, it'll get what it deserves." Also: Josh Modell and Keith Phipps agree that The Chumscrubber is basically "American Beauty meets Donnie Darko but bad. Real, real bad." But Cinematical's Kim Voyner disagrees.

Joshua Gibson on the subgenre that plays on our fears of evil children:

Though far too young to be sexualized, they embody the heterosexual fear of the hedonistic, patriarchy-defying homosexual... The disturbed and alien child may be queer or may be a murderer, but in either case his presence is frightening and must be destroyed for the sake of order, sanity and heterosexual desire. Fritz Kiersch's film Children of the Corn (1984) plays this threat out in its most extreme form.

Also at PopMatters: Cynthia Fuchs interviews Werner Herzog. So does Kristine McKenna for the LA Weekly, where Ella Taylor reviews Grizzly Man. For the Philadephia City Paper, Cindy Fuchs takes on both the review and the interview (wait... oh, that was Last Days). More reviews: Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, Steve Erickson for Gay City News and Kimberly Chun in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Also in the SFBG: Dennis Harvey on Junebug: "Without meaning to dismiss the deliberate craft [director Phil Morrison and screenwriter Angus MacLachlan] bring to the table, I think this indie drama has the unexpectedness of a wonderful creative accident. It's one of the year's best releases, though the lack of any easily encapsulated story hook or obvious marketing point means you'll have to catch it fast." More from David Edelstein at Slate.

And Cheryl Eddy calls up Andrew Bujalski to talk about what he calls the "incredibly long and strange and unpredictable lifespan" of Funny Ha-Ha and gets a few words in on the 9th annual San Francisco Asian Film Festival, today through August 21. More on the fest from Jeff Yang in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Lee Siegel sets out to review Showtime's Weeds, but it's a while before he gets there. There are several paragraphs first contrasting the way movies and cities have depicted American suburbs: "For screenwriters, the caricature is sufficient... But for the best suburban novelists, echt-suburban chroniclers like Updike and Cheever, no easy irony exists between surface and depth." More from Robert Abele in the LA Weekly.

In Slate, Bryan Curtis looks back on half a century of what was once America's most popular magazine: "A more profound legacy arises, perversely, from TV Guide's mandate to 'speak well' of its medium. Perhaps more than any other magazine, TV Guide advanced the idea of television as a serious art form."

"I wanted to tell a fictive story about Charlotte Rampling, who is sixty, and myself, aged forty. When I saw the hotel for the first time, I was quite astonished by the excess, by the pompous, utterly crazy, actually idiotic but somehow also effective furnishings"; sleek asks photographer Jürgen Teller about a series he shot in the "Louis XV" room of the Hotel Crillon in Paris.

"The extraordinary variety of performance on film and video must from now on be carefully examined and the material critiqued for the treasure trove which it is." RoseLee Goldberg for Performa; she also interviews performance artist Zhang Huan.

For Tom Schouweiler, writing in Ruminator, What's New, Pussycat? "has aged remarkably well, living up to contemporaneous critics' adjectives 'zany,' 'madcap' and 'wacky.' To those, I would add 'surreal'; it's interesting to know that [Woody] Allen the screenwriter is behind such absurdist one-liners as 'You are a monster and a monster in that order!' and 'Silence when you’re shouting at me!' — dialogue that would fall with a thud were it not for the special genius of Peter Sellers."

Todd at Twitch on "a minor masterpiece," Memories of Murder: "It is richly detailed, beautifully performed and disturbing in precisely the way that people need to be disturbed in from time to time."

Via Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog, Mark Schilling in the Japan Times on Koji Wakamatsu, a leftist filmmaker in the 60s who became "king of the pinks" in the 70s, and his new film, 17-Sai no Fukei: Shonen wa Nani o Mita no ka (Scenery of Seventeen: What Did the Boy See?), which "expresses the sort of personal passion and formal boldness I seldom see in the work of directors half his age."

While Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance cleans up in Korea, Tartan Films USA is bringing Sympathy for Mr Vengeance to, yes, the USA. When the official site goes online, it'll be here.

Tom Hall on Green Street Hooligans: "[I]t is clear [director Lexi Alexander's] heart doesn't beat for the ramifications of violence; only for its thrills."

Up-n-coming:

• Diggers. Katherine Dieckmann directs Paul Rudd, Ken Marino, Josh Hamilton, Ron Eldard, Maura Tierney, Lauren Ambrose and Sarah Paulson. Details: indieWIRE Insider.

• Franka Potente has reportedly directed her first film; the story appears in the Süddeutsche Zeitung but not online.

• THINKfilm picks up The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. More from The Reeler.

"THOUGHT THIEVE$ is a short film showcase about corporate appropriation of knowledge, culture, and creativity. It is a grassroots response to the Micro$oft propaganda competition of the same name." Deadline: September 16.

"Imagine a kid playing Star Wars in his basement. Now take away his toys and fast-forward to double time and you get a sense of what [Charles] Ross is up to," writes Jason Zinoman. See for yourself in Ross's clips: five and a half minutes of One Man Star Wars and, for good measure, nearly five minutes of his One Man Lord of the Rings.

Also in the NYT:

• With grace, Stephen Holden pans John Singleton's Four Brothers.

• Dargis has the less envious task of panning Asylum.

• Dana Stevens on A State of Mind, "a rare and often chilling glimpse into the culture of North Korea."

  Laura Kern on Chaos, an "unabashed rip-off" of Last House on the Left.

• Gwyneth Paltrow is making a movie. Directing one, that is, as Felicia R Lee reports. The Reeler spells out everything you're likely to be thinking about that right now.

• Movies are rated; should the billboards for them be as well? David M Halbfinger looks into it.

• Jeff Leeds and James Ulmer report on the troubles facing Jeff Kwatinetz's talent agency, the Firm.

Brian: "Saturday is Home Movie Day!"

More from Jim Knipfel in the New York Press. Also: "These 24 short films make you think about the movie experience even while enjoying it." Armond White's review of the Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s collection is... actually about something else: "With the idea of the avant-garde now relegated to the effete and obscure, it is impossible for some people to recognize the ingenuity in cinema like Spielberg's." And: Matt Zoller Seitz explains the many ways in which The Dukes of Hazzard stinks, but Stealth, on the other hand, "is a rare summmer blockbuster that knows how to abstract and heighten action without making it incoherent... it's one of the year's best studio movies — a series of casual astonishments, and an antidote to the August blues."

Wrinkling a brow, Jette ponders the calendar: "A bunch of film festivals are overlapping in Austin in late September/early October: the Quentin Tarantino Film Festival (September 9 - 17), aGLIFF (September 30 - October 8), Fantastic Fest (October 6 - 9), and the Austin Film Festival (October 20 - 27)."

To this list, Shawn Badgley adds Cinematexas (September 14 through 18).

Also in the Austin Chronicle:

• Badgley's brief profiles of the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund 2005 panelists - Dominic Angerame, Jocelyn Glatzer and Rose Troche - whose films will be screening for free at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar on Sunday and Monday. More on one panelist from Matt Dentler and on the Alamo from Badgley.
• Again, Badgley, this time on Cop au Vin and Inspecteur Lavardin: "Intricate, sophisticated, risky, sexy, and smart, they're not TV. They're Claude Chabrol."

• Ken Lieck talks with Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi.

"Whither the North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival?" ask David Fellerath and Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly. "Even as the popularity and acclaim of the NCGLFF continues to grow... the burgeoning number of screenings exacerbates another, more unfortunate trend - a steady decline in the overall quality of the selected films over the past several years." Today through August 14.

"I'm just trying to pick up on an idea here and there, and we're not going to be here forever, and it's nice to leave something behind." Michael Madsen waves off The Complete Poetic Works of Michael Madsen, Vol I 1995 - 2005. Peter Gilstrap listens for the LA Weekly, then notices: "At the bar stands the great Harry Dean Stanton, just turned 79, looking like a man who just might know everything important and funny and wise there is to know."

The way John Horn sees it, test screenings of The 40 Year-Old Virgin resulted in less sex, more laughs and, all in all, a better movie. What's more, "The costs of research screenings — about $10,000 per test — are negligible given the stakes."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Brian Triplett profiles Evan Rachel Wood. "[James Woods] keeps calling me the Meryl Streep of my generation... And I'm like, 'Dude, that's intense.'" Related: Defamer passes along word from a survivor of the Pretty Persuasion premiere. But surely it was worth the trouble; Stephen Holden for the NYT: "An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, Pretty Persuasion is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing. Much of it is also extremely funny."

• Kevin Thomas on the current highlights of the 6th annual Festival of Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction.

• Cinespia's screenings at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery seem to make for a pleasant night out, at least to hear Jeff Miller tell it.

• "[T]here is little precedent for what [Jordan] Roberts and composer Alex Wurman did. Which is take a finished film and change it. A lot." Mary McNamara on how Marche de l'Empereur became March of the Penguins.

• Lorenza Muñoz on the evolution of the video business. Related: At Movie City News, Gary Dretzka hears conflicting predictions for the future of home viewing and, in the Guardian, Sean Hargrave reports that, come November, video-on-demand will become a serious proposition in the UK.

Daniel Robert Epstein talks with Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme director Kevin Fitzgerald for SuicideGirls.

James Mottram interviews Campbell Scott for the Independent.

The University of Southern California has acquired the Ernst Jäger Collection which includes recordings, photos, letters from Leni Riefenstahl. Daniel Knapp elaborates.

Canfield at Twitch: "This entry is deeply personal. Matt McGrory, star of Big Fish, The Devil's Rejects and Carnivàle among others has passed away at the too early age of 32."

Online browsing tip #1. Patti Smith is in Bayreuth, taking in the operas. And shooting Polaroids. You can see them in Die Zeit, which is also running her Bayreuth diary (she really should write more often) and, online only and also in German, an interview.

Online browsing tip #2. Italian Soundtracks. And American, English, French, German and Japanese as well. Via Rashomon.

Online browsing tip #3. Schaukasten, a "blog dedicated to the aesthetic values of movie art beyond the screen." Via Wiley Wiggins.

Online listening tip #1. Peter Pan, featuring Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff. Via filmtagebuch.

Online listening tip #2. Your Call, 8.9.05. Mary Ambrose talks with Kenneth Turan and Jeffrey Anderson about why people aren't going to movies anymore.

Online viewing tip. Mutiny City News riffs on The Aristocrats. Related: Amelie Gillette interviews Gilbert Gottfried for the AV Club, reviews from Johnny Ray Huston in the SFBG and Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly, and: Tell the joke, win a prize. Your version might even be included on the DVD. The rules.

Online viewing tips, round #1. The "Lost Screen Tests" for Entourage. Also via Screenhead: Eugene Mirman's videos.

Online viewing tips, round #2. At Twitch, where Todd has Toronto's doc lineup, trailers: Jackie Chan's The Myth; Aeon Flux, with Charlize Theron; a new one for Domino; and Marc Forster's Stay. More from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Posted by dwhudson at August 11, 2005 5:40 PM