Shorts, 9/28.

The AP reports on the reopening of the Cinémathèque Français in its new, Frank Gehry-designed building. In attendance: Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Wong Kar-wai and Sophie Renoir.

Chris Tilly interviews Thelma Schoonmaker who is, even now, as you read this, editing Scorsese's The Departed. On her late husband, Michael Powell: "I think Michael, along with many of the filmmakers of his own age, like Renoir in France or Rossellini in Italy, had this profound belief in human beings, that's a little hard to have these days." On how Scorsese's hoping to follow The Departed: "A movie called Silence, which is based on a great Japanese novel about 16th century Portuguese missionaries in Japan. It's something very close to Scorsese's heart - he's wanted to make it for many years but he's never really had the time to write the script and get it funded." Via Martha Fischer at Cinematical.

And so's this: An item based on Bob Pool's report in the Los Angeles Times on why many local homeless people are pretty upset with the production of Richard Kelly's Southland Tales. The crew created a fake encampment, populated it with actors portraying homeless people - and had the police shoo away real homeless people who were hoping to pick up whatever the cast and crew left behind once the day was done. As Martha remarks: "Nice."

It's not often that a film blog can point to a genuine scandal, but Xeni Jardin's found a good one at Boing Boing. Seems producer Joseph M Medawar took $5.5 million from over 70 investors for a TV series to be called DHS - one he claimed was backed by President Bush - and then basically went on a private spending spree. First round of reports: BBC and Greg Krikorian and Christine Hanley's for the Los Angeles Times. Then Xeni Jardin follows up with much, much more.

Lee Siegel for the New Republic: "Cinemax's The Children of Leningradsky is a public - and political - service, despite the fact that the film is yet another documentary about yet another pathology in Russian life. A decade or two from now, countless reports about some catastrophic development in Russia will provoke people into demanding to know why 'we didn't see it coming.' The seeds of what might be coming are right here, in this raw 35-minute film." HBO's site has the schedule.

Hendrik Hertzberg is rattled by Last Best Chance: "It has no sex scenes, no car chases, and no wisecracking sidekicks, and it is only forty-five minutes long, but it lays out a frighteningly plausible narrative of how terrorists might buy or steal the makings of a nuclear bomb, assemble one, smuggle it halfway around the world, and send it on its way to an American city in an SUV." A must-read. Also in the New Yorker, Eric Konigsberg watches Peter Falk return to Ossining, New York, on the occasion of the inauguration of Peter Falk Place and Anthony Lane on Oliver Twist. In short, the book was better. (Ok, that's hardly fair, but I still want to see this one, and dammit, my hopes will remain high.)

"The verdict was less entertaining than lunch." Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter tells his side of the story of the magazine's little summertime legal run-in with Polanski.

Ben Smith was in on an exclusive screening for the New York Observer: "As The War Room provided a template for future campaigns (not least in how the staff should act in front of cameras), Inside the Bubble comes as Democrats are looking to avoid repeating their mistakes... though its intentions aren't particularly political, will widen the debate over Mr Kerry's future." Cinematical's Karina Longworth's found clips.

Steven Rosen brings back a piece of his the Denver Post ran back in 1998, a talk with DA Pennebaker about his footage of Dylan's historic May 17, 1966, concert in Manchester.

The "decades-old debate about the methods of a man who has been called the father of the documentary, whose films are masterpieces, and yet whose realities were admittedly assisted" fades pretty quickly when you're watching Nanook of the North "magnificently projected in 35mm and accompanied by a live performance of a new musical score," notes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Via Movie City News.

And at MCN, Pablo Villaça examines the hurdles facing Brazilian filmmakers.

Jonathan Bing in Wired: "[T]he Kongisking journals are more than a mere tease. They have blossomed into a real-time documentary about the making of King Kong, the world's first comprehensive, downloadable study of how a $175 million movie gets made, down to the last fleck of modeling clay."

Judd Apatow's in North Carolina, shooting a movie with Will Ferrell. And keeping a diary in Slate: "Tomorrow we are shooting, so at least I get to sit in my producer's chair all day and tell everyone what they are doing wrong while I eat a vegetable burrito and read the New York Times and complain about Bush." Also: Edward Jay Epstein on the "War for the Couch Potato."

Jessica Winter meets Noah Baumbach and J Hoberman reviews his film, The Squid and the Whale: "Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth." Wrapping the package (though the reviews seem to be getting shorter and shorter, the Village Voice can still do packages), Rob Nelson sketches a brief bio of Georgia Brown, Baumbach's mother and once a Voice regular: "Among other, more ineffable things, Brown's work was about living with movies the way others live with people - or, perhaps, with addictions." Related: Corey Boutilier has video shot on opening night at independentfilm.com.

Also:

• Michael Atkinson on The War Within: "[I]t wears clichés like concrete boots, down to the cycle-of-intolerance-and-violence message that we hear every day on NPR." Also: 4 Films by Otar Iosseliani and The Flowers of St Francis.

• Ben Kenigsberg: "Duma turns out to be surprisingly flat, with little of the child's-eye imagery that gave The Black Stallion its poetic thrust and too much of the narrative gear-grinding that grounded stretches of Fly Away Home."

• Ricky Gervais isn't quite the star of Extras that he was in The Office, admits Joy Press, but that doesn't mean the show's not a blast.

• "Tracking Shots": Melissa Anderson on The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (more from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon); Drew Tillman on Shoujyo: An Adolescent; Ed Park on The Rodnees: We Mod Like Dat; Pete L'Official on Santo Domingo Blues; Chuck Stephens on Once Upon a Time in the West; Akiva Gottlieb on Going Shopping; Darren Reidy on 3 Days of Rain; Ed Halter on Secret History of the Dividing Line; and Mark Holcomb on Little Manhattan.

Patrick Goldstein slams Sony Pictures long and hard - and rightly so, it should be added - for backing away from Albert Brooks's Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. Fortunately, the Los Angeles Times also gives him the time and space to talk to Brooks himself about the film, too.

Also:

• Susan King on a gathering of surviving members of the First Motion Picture Unit who served the US in WWII by making films.

• Flightplan's a hit with everyone but flight attendants, reports Mary McNamara. Related: Marc Holcomb's review in the Voice and Martin Grove on the film's impressive takeoff in the Hollywood Reporter. Also: A Capote report.

• Elaine Dutka on Peerflix and Julie Tamaki on the revived DVD format wars. Related: Thimas K Arnold on direct-to-DVD franchising in the HR.

Tilda Swinton's been screening films for her kids in a modest room back at her place in Scotland. "It's so great, seeing them experience things for the first time," she tells Miles Fielder in the local Herald. "I showed them La Belle et la Bete the other day. I showed them Chaplin's The Kid, and they really found it funny. And they love Jacques Tati." Via Movie City Indie where, just next door at Pride, Unprejudiced, Ray Pride interviews Andrew Niccol.

Defamer points to a little item that reveals a little more than you might want to know about the methods David Cronenberg employs when directing sex scenes. Related: G Noel Gross's "Schlockcast" on Fox's spiffed-up re-release of The Fly and The Fly II and roundup of related links.

Bill Daniel's Who Is Bozo Texino? has Johnny Ray Huston retracing the parallel development of railroads and the cinema and recommending you catch this one if you can. Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: Cheryl Eddy matches the fears aroused by Flightplan and Keane and Dennis Harvey previews the Castro Theatre's "Dual System 3-D Series": "[T]oday nothing quite puts the way-back machine into overdrive like seeing a vintage stereoscopic title."

Grady Hendrix, who knows what's hot in Asia: "Director Lee Myung-se's latest movie, The Duelist, is a whirl of movement, a ballet of bloodshed and a candy-colored carnival of clashing characters but it is most definitely not an action movie: it's a romance."

It's certainly not too early to start thinking about lining up a home viewing program for the Halloween season, which might as well be all of October as far as I'm concerned. (Listen, if Christmas gets a whole month...) Sean Axmaker has a few suggestions at Static Multimedia.

Speaking of nightmares (weren't we?), Looker shares a few he's had in movie theaters. And they weren't on the screen.

At PopMatters, Marco Lanzagorta revisits the work of Lucio Fulci, whose "sense of aesthetics was more concerned with the raw power of the cinematic image than with the coherence of the narrative."

Ciar Byrne lists "20 notorious video nasties." Also in the Independent: Rob Sharp meets Liv Ullmann.

DVD Talk does just that with Grover Crisp, the man at Sony in charge of restoring Peckinpah's Major Dundee.

At Twitch, Canfield asks Bill Paxton about The Greatest Game Ever Played.

SuicideGirls/Daniel Robert Epstein roundup: William Hurt, Anton Corbijn and Peter Sarsgaard.

In the New York Times:

• Dana Stevens on a great idea for a program of shorts that may have been better left unrealized: "NewsFakers/Filmmakers." More from Joshua Land in the Voice.

• Dave Kehr on new DVDs.

• Doreen Carvajal on the March of the Docs.

• Bundled with the November 4 release of Disney's Chicken Little are two technological innovations, reports David M Halbfinger: Non-headache-inducing 3D glasses and a boost in the conversion to digital projection. Also: Laura M Holson on Eisner's departure.

• Digital technology is propelling the upsurge in docs, too, reports Doreen Carvajal.

• Saul Hansell on how Lloyd Braun's transforming Yahoo!: "Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's Daily Show are in the works."

Online viewing tip #1. "...thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams." DVblog: "An astonishing rendition by William Burroughs of his 'Thanksgiving Prayer' in a short video directed by Gus Van Sant, from the new multimedia section of the Reality Studio website, dedicated to all things Burroughs."

Online viewing tip #2. "How much riper could a country possibly be for pissed-off music?" asks historian Simon Schama in his scene-setting Dylan piece for the Guardian. How indeed. Chris Milk's video for Audioslave's "Doesn't Remind Me." Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #3. For Mutiny City News, trains a camera on Anton Corbijn, Jonathan Glazer, Mark Romanek and Stéphane Sednaoui.

Online viewing tip #4. CultureTV. Via at Federico Muelas at Eyebeam reBlog.

Posted by dwhudson at September 28, 2005 3:35 PM