Shorts, 8/24.

"What are your favorite sacred-ish cows to slaughter?" asked ourgirlinchicago at About Last Night just a week ago. Following the preliminary results, she's now posted a few readers' comments. Example: "Eisenstein's October has been known to induce epileptic seizures in small children. They're the lucky ones."

But hold on, this rubs both ways. The team at the AV Club present "10 Notorious Bombs Worth Seeing."

A Satyajit Ray double via Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: Andrew Robinson, author of two books on the director, draws up a portrait in the London Times and, for rediff, Raja Sen looks back to Shatranj Ke Khilari. This is the beginning of a trio of revisits to Hindi historicals occasioned by the walloping success in India of The Rising.

"1962 is one amazing year for movies," marvels Ryan Wu. "I mean, check out this lineup..."

"I directed the English world premiere of this great play exactly 50 years ago and I was there on that tumultuous first night," writes Peter Hall. "Waiting for Godot hasn't dated at all. It remains a masterpiece transcending all barriers and all nationalities. And it could have been written today: there is nothing of the 50s about it. It is the start of modern drama and it gave the theatre back its metaphorical power."

Also in the Guardian:

• Sam Jones: "The truth is that no one but Mike Leigh and his actors know what his first stage play for 12 years is about." But A New Play, premiering at the National Theatre on September 15, has already sold 16,000 tickets in advance.

• Stephen Bates talks with Laurence Rees, "the producer of two of the most memorable - and award-laden - documentary series of the past 10 years, The Nazis: A Warning from History and, earlier this year, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution, [who] has almost certainly interviewed more former Nazis than any other Briton alive."

• Ronald Bergen on Voices of Iraq: "According to a US government poll, only two percent of Iraqis see the US as 'liberating' their country. This film manages to portray that two percent as if it were the majority."

Nathan Kosub at Stop Smiling on Whit Stillman's debut, Metropolitan: "The movie is fifteen years old this August, and more and more looks like one of the great movies about growing up."

Josh Neuhouser on recent work from Mamoru Oshii: "[N]o longer enslaved to the sci-fi trappings of his anime films, he finds himself free to create purely atmospheric imagery tied to abstract themes and concerns."

"Japan's oldest anime uncovered in Kyoto," reads the headline over the Mainichi Daily News story, but as Muken notes at Cinema.3Yen.com, Midnight Eye's Jaspar Sharp isn't buying it.

Up-n-coming:

• Christopher Guest is rounding up the usual suspects for his next one, For Your Consideration, a mockumentary that follows an indie film to the Oscars. Euguene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, etc. But also Ricky Gervais. The Guardian reports.

• "It's six stories from different countries in six languages: Portuguese, English, Chinese, Tagalog, Swahili and Arabic.... It's about happiness - what do we need to be happy? It's more philosophical. We Westerners assume that this is the way, all the countries have to achieve what we do." Fernando Meirelles tells the Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson about his next film, Intolerance. Via Movie City Indie.

• Goya's Ghosts "tells the story of the last years of the Spanish Inquisition, when the Church tortured and executed suspected Jews, as told by the painter, played by Stellan Skarsgard," reports Reuters. Milos Forman will direct the script he's co-written with Buñuel collaborator Jean Claude Carrière; co-starring Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman.

Going to Toronto but overwhelmed by the offerings? Grady Hendrix picks out over a dozen Asian highlights; Doug Cummings spots three docs he'll want to catch; and at indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez not only breaks down the lineup but also highlights the most anticipated premieres.

Richard Brunton lists the audience's top ten at Edinburgh.

Signandsight gathers varying reactions in the German press to Wim Wenders's Don't Come Knocking. Go ahead and scroll down; s&s is in English.

Deutsche Welle reports (also in English) on the TV debut, 60 years on, of Martin Roumagnac, the only film to feature both Marlene Dietrich and her lover at the time, Jean Gabin.

At the World Socialist Web Site, Panini Wijesiriwardane: Boodee Keerthisena's Mille Soya "is an intelligent and at times poignant exploration of the social difficulties confronting a group of youth from a poor village on Sri Lanka's west coast and their determined and at times tragic struggle for a better life."

"At last. A summer movie I can call my own," writes Vince Keenan of Red Eye. And he's glad it's getting good reviews, too, but why are the critics so preemptively defensive about their raves? "[H]as film criticism fallen to such a lowly state that anything that delivers on its promise of old-fashioned thrills can only be seen as guilty pleasure?"

Otherwise, that was the summer that wasn't. In the New York Times, Sharon Waxman sorts through the wreckage: "Multiples theories for the decline abound: a failure of studio marketing, the rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough."

Mary McNamara tells a good Hollywood story in the Los Angeles Times. David Ellison, son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, stars in - and pours his own money into - Flyboys, a project producer Dean Devlin and Tony Bill had been trying to get off the ground for nearly ten years before Ellison came along.

For Wired, Thomas Goetz talks to Jon Stewart about nothing less that "Reinventing Television." Also: Josh McHugh on Yahoo!'s video plans, but also much more:

A household with 300 cable or satellite channels has access to 7,000 hours of programming a day, almost 3 million per year. That's a lot, but it's only a fraction of the 31 million hours of total annual programming. Every major cable company is making investments to allow TV to be distributed over the Internet, giving you access to each one of those 31 million hours. And then there's this year's 36-fold explosion in consumer-generated video on the Internet.

Slashdotters discuss the breakdown in negotiations between Sony and Toshiba aimed at ending the next-generation DVD format war.

Online browsing tip. Starlets in chadors. Via the cinetrix.

Online viewing tip. At independentfilm.com, Corey Boutilier talks to Lionel Baier, director of Garçon Stupide, about the differences between US and European audiences and the national pecking order on the continent.

Posted by dwhudson at August 24, 2005 7:58 AM