Shorts, 8/17.

Have You Heard? stars Toby Jones and Sandra Bullock as Truman Capote and his childhood friend, Harper Lee; Capote features, in the same roles, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener. Which would you rather see? Lining up the supporting casts: Heard has Daniel Craig, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sigourney Weaver, Jeff Daniels, Isabella Rossellini and Hope Davis. Capote has Clifton Collins Jr, Mark Pellegrino, Bruce Greenwood, Chris Cooper, Amy Ryan and Bob Balaban. Directors? Douglas McGrath vs Bennett Miller.

Not since the duelling "Presidential-offspring flicks, First Daughter and Chasing Liberty, has a pair of movies been so potentially symbiotic or had such possibility for mutually assured destruction," notes Leon Neyfakh, who has seen Heard: "As the edit stands now, many months before completion, it's all very messy, with about a million unnecessary characters doing a million unnecessary things."

On the same page in the New York Observer, Sara Vilkomerson reports on a visit to the set of Diggers: "'It's kind of like Breaking Away... but with clams,' laughed Paul Rudd."

Also: Andrew Sarris on 2046, "quite simply an incomparably sublime work of art, a triumph of lyricism over narrative in the cinema, and the most exquisite homage to the beauty of women it has ever been my privilege to witness on the screen," and that wondrous new boxset: "From my own vantage point as a collector, connoisseur, and teacher in the genre, my favorite Astaire-Rogers movie would be a composite: the first half of Top Hat - with Irving Berlin's 'Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,' 'Isn't This a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain,' 'Cheek to Cheek' - and the second half of Swing Time with Jerome Kern's 'The Way You Look Tonight,' 'A Fine Romance,' and 'Never Gonna Dance.' This is to say that whereas Top Hat starts enchantingly and ends conventionally, Swing Time starts lethargically and ends ecstatically." More on the set Aaron at Out of Focus.

James Verini tells one helluva story in Salon, the story behind Red Scorpion: "The film was to be a manifesto for [DC lobbyist and one-shot producer Jack] Abramoff; a Rambo-like morality tale and a grand indictment of communism - his Reagan Doctrine parable in action-packed Technicolor. And in the process of conceiving of and making it, Abramoff helped groom an African despot, rose to high levels in the K Street food chain, and got to play international spy."

"'You'll be ruined in a few years,' one executive tells me matter-of-factly. If I'm lucky, I think. If being 'ruined' means being able to pay off my car, start a college fund for children real and hypothetical, and get central air in the warped sweat lodge I call home, then let me be thoroughly and elegantly ruined." Diablo Cody, blogger and author from the Midwest, heads out to LA to, first, discover that all the clichés are true, and second, to score a two-script deal with Warner Brothers "for an amount of money that surprises even my barracuda lawyer."

Also in the City Pages: Terri Sutton on Grizzly Man (and, on the side, The White Diamond).

Chuck Stephens to New Yorkers: "The pitter-patter of barefoot blade runners is coming your way, with a fistful of 60s and 70s slice operas by idiom savants like [Kihachi] Okamoto and Hideo Gosha, a week-long run of Masaki Kobayashi's austerely anti-authoritarian Samurai Rebellion, and inevitable reiterations of Seven Samurai and four other Kurosawa/Mifune chambara ('swordplay') chestnuts unfurling in Film Forum's 'Summer Samurai' series."

Also in the Village Voice:

• Joshua Land on The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, a "triumph of documentary activism nine years in the making.... [Keith] Beauchamp hopes to complete a follow-up documentary once the case is resolved. Stay tuned." For Josh Tyson, writing in Stop Smiling, the film is "a stirring testament to Till's suffering, his family's immense courage, and our continuing struggle with this country's racist origins." More from Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "[I]t is impossible not to be stirred by sadness and outrage."

• Jessica Winter talks to Ralph Fiennes, "has one of his best roles to date in Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener." Also, The 40 Year-Old Virgin: "[Y]ou come for the testoteriffic ambience and you stay for the chick flick." More from Cheryl Eddy who, in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, reports on "more laughs and way more insta-classic moments" than Wedding Crashers had to offer.

• Ed Halter previews Howl! Festival of East Village Arts, focusing on No Picnic ("provides a decidedly uncelebratory vision of old bohemia") and Robert Downey Sr's Pound. Also: The "thin, overlong" Reel Paradise. Anthony Kaufman asks John Pierson what he thinks of the film. In the NYT, Holden is glad to be "reminded of the movies' primal appeal."

• Dennis Lim on Wes Craven's Red Eye, "a close-quarters psych-out, with as much nervy duplicity and outright violence as a cramped cabin and fastened seat belts will allow." More from Eddy in the SFBG: "Craven makes expert use of the plane's confines, using extreme close-ups and swooping glides and revealing just enough about the surrounding passengers to keep things interesting." For Melissa Maerz, writing in the City Pages, it "may be the first post-'post 9/11' movie of the year."

• Michael Atkinson on Four Brothers, "half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death."

• "Tracking Shots": James Crawford on Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Jorge Morales on The Perfect Crime (more), R Emmett Sweeney on Lustre (more from Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT: "[I]ts love for New York shines in every frame"), Ben Kenigsberg on This Divided State, Akiva Gottlieb on Valiant and King of the Corner (more) and Atkinson on the "I Love to Singa: Cartoon Musicals" series at the Walter Reade and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

Ray Pride sums up this one best at Movie City Indie: "The London Times's Dalya Alberge reports on what happens when you have a swell script." Also in the Times: Shaun Considine, author of Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud, retells the story "with fresh details."

Robert Rodriguez has quite a lot to say about collaborating with Quentin Tarantino on Grind House in IGN FilmForce's interview with him. Via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.

"It's a big pain in our asses,' says Bob Myerson, exec VP at Tartan Films USA, which holds the rights to Park Chan-wook's Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. There's no question about it." The "it," as Anthony Kaufman reports at indieWIRE, is the lack of any window at all between the release of many Asian films on DVD in Asia itself and in theaters in the US.

"A collapse in local audiences brought the industry to its knees six years ago, but an injection of funds and fresh talent has since seen it rise from the ashes." That's Israeli cinema Julie Szego's writing about in the Age.

Tasha Robinson has a good long talk with Liev Schreiber at the AV Club.

Marxy: "As reported in the news media, the 'Akiba-kei' magazine Elfics is holding the first "otaku" certification exam, OTAK.... Apparently, the exam authors are incensed by the recent media attempts to make otaku 'cool' for the masses, which ultimately takes away the central taste-making authority from the subcultural leaders."

Looker: "I strolled over to Grand Central Terminal yesterday for the Transit Museum Gallery Annex show "On Location: New York Transportation in Film."

"Just who is Ken Annakin?" Simon Jones asked himself before he set out to review Annakin's autobiography, So You Wanna Be a Director?. "True, I was more than a little impressed by the fact that his book has forewords by both Sir Richard Attenborough and Mike Leigh and yes, I was surprised to hear that George Lucas had been so enamoured with the Yorkshire-born filmmaker that he named Anakin Skywalker after him as a tribute." Only after finishing the book does Jones realize, "I had in fact seen quite a few of Annakin's films and, what's more, I found myself wanting to see a few more."

Also in Kamera: Darren Arnold on Damien Odoul's En attendant le déluge and Marcelle Perks's report from the Fantasia Festival.

For Mike D'Angelo, Pretty Persuasion "joins such highly touted efforts as Murderball, The Squid and the Whale, Last Days, Millions, Good Night. And, Good Luck and The World among a long list of Really Intriguing Films That Didn't Altogether Work for Me."

Bertrand Tavernier tells Christiane Peitz about becoming fast friends with Volker Schlöndorff when they were teens and about his politics back in the day: "We were against the war, the church, the police, and of course, against the genocide of the American Indians. But John Ford's cavalry, we loved that, too." In the Tagesspiegel and in German, via signandsight.

Congrats to David Lowery and all the recipients of 2005 Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund.

Wiley Wiggins: "Nothing soothes a tormented soul better than slow-stepping tone poems about ennui-racked middle-aged men and suicidal rock stars."

"Michael Bay" in the Onion: "What Has Our Society Come To When March Of The Penguins Is The Blockbuster Hit Of The Summer?" Via James Israel.

Reverse Shot declares war on filmcritic.com.

"Know your 9/11 movies," advises Karina Longworth at Cinematical.

Joanna Neuman and her boyfriend get to be extras in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers: "Also on hand was Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld, to watch how Hollywood does war. Maybe he picked up a tip or two." Also in the Los Angeles Times, John Horn: "Thanks to an array of tax incentives offered from Rhode Island to New Mexico, screenwriters are recasting their plots to accommodate new locales, producers are learning new math to stretch budgets and Hollywood has settled into a multiple-time-zone way of life."

Bruce Weber reports on the fine food and wine, valet parking and plush seating some smaller movie theater companies are offering to lure audiences back in. Also in the NYT, Ken Belson notes that Blu-ray has scored a supporter in its battle with HD-DVD: Lion's Gate. Bruce Gain, by the way, presents a sort of Blu-ray FAQ at Wired News.

PosterWire.com: "If 'eyes are the window into the soul' then two recent and similar one-sheets are out there doing some soul searching."

Online listening tip #1. Elizabeth Blair kicks off a NPR series on flops.

Online listening tip #2. Terry Gross interviews Jim Jarmusch on Fresh Air.

Online viewing tip #1. The trailer for Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home.

Online viewing tip #2. "Mutiny City News Presents: An Amy Adams Film." This is best edition yet. Bravo.

Online viewing tip #3. Fiat Lux. Via Screenhead.

Online viewing tip #4. Austin filmmaker Kyle Henry goes to Crawford. Via Matt Dentler.

Posted by dwhudson at August 17, 2005 3:32 PM