Shorts. Catching up.

A week of overlapping festival coverage has left little time (and space) for "Shorts," but they've been getting a little unwieldy lately anyway, haven't they? Drop a line or a comment if you, too, think a little honing is in order. Drop one if you don't, too. A more selective batch might look something like this, albeit much smaller, because they'll be appearing more frequently again:

"South Korea has only recently accomplished full freedom of expression, under the current regime. He [current President Roh Moo-hyun] has said that Park [Chung-hee]'s assassination is the most important event in contemporary Korean history. So, I thought, why not?" Im Sang-soo answers the many questions Filmbrain has about one of his favorite films of 2005, The President's Last Bang.

More from Grady Hendrix at Kaiju Shakedown and James Crawford at indieWIRE. Reviewing the film for the New York Times, AO Scott finds a "cynicism [that] feels like the prerogative of a democratic sensibility, which can peer into the highest sanctum of power and see the same messy, ignoble human behavior that exists everywhere else."

Firecracker unleashes another issue, featuring Erika Franklin's interview with Beautiful Boxer director Ekachai Uekrongtham and a slew of reviews of Asian films, old and new.

Steve Erickson for Gay City News: "Minoru Matsui's 2001 documentary Japanese Devils directly treats a taboo subject - Japanese war crimes preceding and during World War II.... He began making it with no financial support except his own money - no TV station or production company would invest in it."

"The gutter is liberating! The gutter is freedom! The gutter is poetry! I think it is all a matter of pushing the boundaries and showing the diversity of the image. A corroded and decomposed and grained-out image can be as beautiful as something that is sharply in focus and of 'higher' technical standards. Neither image should represent the way things have to be done." Jon Moritsugu takes on a few questions at BRAINTRUSTdv.

Filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake has also interviewed Moritsugu; in general, his site's quite an interesting browse. He's been blogging about the feature he's been working on, Date Number One and has interviewed Californian indie filmmaker Amir Motlagh.

Back at BRAINTRUSTdv, an interview with Bill Day, whose latest film is Missionary Positions, about "two young, hip, good-looking Christian ministers fighting porn."

Invisible Cinema. Via the cinetrix.

Back at indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez and James Israel talk with Loggerheads director Tim Kirkman. Stephen Holden in the NYT: "Loggerheads is the year's second movie, following Junebug, to be steeped in North Carolina atmosphere, and Mr Kirkman's knowledge and obvious love of his home state lend the film a pungent authenticity."

Stop Smiling's running an excerpt from James Hughes's interview with Robert Altman.

"We have five million people dead in Congo versus 14,000 in Iraq," Darwin's Nightmare director Hubert Sauper Anjula Razdan in the City Pages. "The very simple answer about why we don't care about Congo is a profound unconscious racism. Those are other people dying - blacks, not 'us.'"

At Movie City News, Gary Dretzka considers how movies have treated terrorism since 9/11, with special emphasis placed on Paradise Now and The War Within: "In both films, thought-provoking dramas in which suicide bombers target innocent people in big cities - New York in the former, Tel Aviv in the latter - the protagonists are revealed to be something other than soulless monsters or fire-breathing zealots." Related: NP Thompson's interview with The War Within's co-writers, star and producer and the main site.

Also at MCN: David Poland on underrated actors and actresses (parts 1 and 2).

"Everything in the film actually happened. I didn't make anything up." Caveh Zahedi talks with Hollywood Bitchslap's Jason Whyte about his latest, I Am a Sex Addict.

For Creative Screenwriting, Danny Munso interviews Rob Ryang, the editor who put Shining together. Did you know over 200,000 people a day are watching it?

Richard Satran for Reuters: "Never far from the center of a storm, self-described filmmaker 'provocateur' Spike Lee is headed to New Orleans to make a documentary examining how race and politics collided in aftermath of Hurricane Katrina." As Karina Longworth points out at Cinematical, he won't be the only filmmaker there.

This summer, David D'Arcy interviewed Ushpizin director Gidi Dar. It's a fascinating project that's set off a few ripples in Israeli society and now, with the film set to open in New York on October 19, he has an update in the Village Voice.

"I think this is the greatest film ever made about childhood," John Singleton tells Chris Sullivan. "I first saw it in 1989 and it changed the way I thought about film." He's talking about The 400 Blows. Also in the Telegraph: Nick Bradshaw interviews Carlos Reygadas.

The New Statesman hails "10 people who will change the world." For Nicole Mowbray, Samira Makhmalbaf is one of them: "Now only 25, with four films under her belt and another on the way, she is a skilled and confident professional, a figurehead for Middle Eastern women, but also for women in the film industry the world over. Don't think of a preachy do-gooder, though.... On set, she is ruthless, energetic, even a bully. She knows what she wants and her directing is ferocious."

The BBC gets quite a string of comments going at its site with this lead: "Author Philip Pullman has attacked plans to turn The Chronicles of Narnia into a movie series, calling CS Lewis' books 'racist' and 'misogynistic.'"

Two thumbs down, one up for Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies from the Reverse Shot team (for Karina Longworth, the film "looks and feels like Douglas Sirk on crack"; Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Egoyan for SuicideGirls) at, again, indieWIRE, where Eugene Hernandez looks back on ten years of Killer Films.

Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinémathèque "makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art," writes AO Scott (more from the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris, via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?). Also: Wenders's Land of Plenty.

Also in the New York Times:

• Manohla Dargis on Domino, "a lollapalooza of delectable cheap thrills" (Blake at Cinema Strikes Back: "For those that don't get it, Domino is a film that works much better the second time"), and Where the Truth Lies.

• Stephen Holden on Innocent Voices, "a movie that has no qualms about pressing your emotional buttons," and Nine Lives.

• Nancy Ramsey reports on the insanity that remains a major hurdle for documentarians: "Clearance costs - licensing fees paid to copyright holders for permission to use material like music, archival photographs and film and news clips - can send expenses for filmmakers soaring into the hundreds of thousands of dollars."

• Matt Richtel: "Steven Spielberg, the Oscar-winning filmmaker, and Electronic Arts, the video game maker, said on Friday that they would jointly create three new original video game franchises."

• Sharon Waxman: "By the time Daniel Craig came churning up the Thames in a power boat for Friday's official announcement in London that he had been cast as Agent 007, much of the world was already in the know. The mystery in the selection of this 37-year-old actor, who had cleaned up nicely in a blue suit and red tie, was why it had taken so long." Also: How James Mangold extracted secrets from Johnny and June Carter Cash for Walk the Line.

• The paper's obtained a copy of the Bush administration's plan to react to a pandemic flu; Gardiner Harris introduces an excerpt: "No one would confuse the 381-page document with a screenplay, but pages 45 through 47, the section titled 'Pandemic Scenario - Origin and Initial Spread,' are gripping."

• Lewis Beale on how movies based on true stories can sometimes be derailed by whiplash real-life twists.

• Craig Modderno asks Shirley MacLaine a question or two her co-stars haven't.

The Washington Post's Stephen Hunter on John Wayne in Hondo: "He didn't order you to be like him, he made you want to be like him."

At Alternet, Evan Derkacz collects a few bloggers' answers to the question, "What movie scenes always make you cry?"

The Reeler agrees with Jake Dobkin: The best movies set in NYC were made in the 70s.

Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on Oliver Twist: "Polanski directs here with much less of his usual vigor and originality, simply with professional competence, as if he were too awed by the source to make the picture his own. The result is so mild, distinguished only by its visual richness, that we miss the sense, usual in a Polanski film, that he is quietly chortling all the while at the effect he is having on us." He's not impressed with A History of Violence, either.

MS Smith: "The strength of Capote is its understated tone, the way in which its blue and gray visual palette captures the coldness of the Kansas winter, the manner in which, in quiet fashion, its draws connections between Capote's own family history and the story he is writing." Related and via MCN: Roger Ebert talks with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

In Slate, Matt Feeney defends Noah Baumbach's early efforts, Kicking & Screaming and Mr Jealousy against a "gentle cut" from... Noah Baumbach. Also, David Edelstein on Elizabethtown and Domino and Edward Jay Epstein: "[R]ather than buoying Disney's profits, Miramax was hemorrhaging rivers of red ink."

Joe Leydon talks Shopgirl with Steve Martin in the New York Daily News.

In the Independent, Roger Clarke meets Timur Bekmambetov, who claims his film, Night Watch, "is shamanistic film-making," and James Mottram interviews Tilda Swinton and Paul Schrader.

Megan K Stack in the Los Angeles Times: "The kingdom of Morocco has become a magnet for all manner of films, a sandy, evocative darling for the productions that are leaving Hollywood en masse. Pictures have been shot here ever since the days of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. But in these times of globalization and outsourcing, the influx of big-name films has turned Morocco into one of the most popular backdrops for American films, with Black Hawk Down, Sahara, Kingdom of Heaven, Alexander and Gladiator all shot here."

For the SF Weekly, Ryan Blitstein profiles Wild Brain, "the company that has been touted as animation's next big thing for more than a decade."

Marina Warner notes that the gothic aesthetic is now mainstream children's entertainment: "[Terry] Gilliam, [Tim] Burton and the Quays display such beguiling skill with visuals and animation that they have metamorphosed evil and shrunk the scope of our fears." On a neighboring page, Burton himself: "I know people will describe [Corpse Bride] as gothic, as they always do of my movies, but I'm not really sure what that means."

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• For John Patterson, "it's about time" Winter Soldier arrives in "American cinemas and living rooms."

• In Harold Pinter's Nobel and Nick Park's Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Mark Lawson sees "a striking redefinition and renaissance of English culture."

• Interviews: Sean O'Hagan with Rachel Weisz and Kate Kellaway with Emma Thompson.

The Stranger has revealed the winners of its annual "Genius Awards," and one of them is Michael Seiwerath, executive director of the Northwest Film Forum, whose 10th anniversary Sean Axmaker celebrated right here a couple of weeks ago. Bradley Steinbacher adds that the organization "has blossomed into the leading film organization in the city, offering not just screenings of underappreciated and little-seen films, but also hands-on training, equipment rentals, and outright film production." Then five Seattle-area filmmakers are briefly profiled as "Ones to Watch."

Brian: "Los Angeles Plays Itself will be a great inspiration to filmmakers, critics, scholars and curators with an eye toward geographical readings of films. I can't wait to see a Frisco filmmaker with strong opinions about Vertigo, The Graduate, the transformation of Union Square in light of Coppola's The Conversation, the disappearance of the eerie locations from The Lady From Shanghai (most recently the now-demolished aquarium), etc., make a film of this type."

Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: "Forty Shades of Blue was - along with Hustle and Flow and Junebug - part of a trifecta of Southern films at Sundance this year, and to these eyes, it's the hard-edged prize gem." Related: Keith Uhlich interviews Ira Sachs for Slant.

90ways, a few of them satisfyingly merciless: Sara Schieron and Judson Merrill.

In the Boston Phoenix, Gerald Peary has a shudder-inducing anecdote to tell about Nicholas Ray before briefly reviewing the clearly quite juicy Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause.

For Kirkus Reviews, Chris Barsanti recommends four books that could well make for great films.

In January, Anthony Rainone reviews Terrill Lee Lankford's Blonde Lightning, which "takes the reader further inside the insidious process of moviemaking, with a side plot that spirals into a series of violent episodes worthy of the best hard-boiled moments of the genre."

Blook? Evidently it's a blog that - hopefully with some editorial help along the way - has migrated to the printed page. There's even a Lulu Blooker Prize. The jury: Cory Doctorow, Robin Miller and Paul Jones. The next wave, they say: "Flooks," films based on blooks. Example: Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl, already a book, soon heading to a theater near you.

Video iPod. Apple. Disney. Pixar. Jobs. Iger. Coverage: Xeni at Boing Boing (more), Nick Rombes, John Rogers, Lev Grossman in Time, Richard Siklos in the NYT, Jesse Hiestand in the Hollywood Reporter and Benny Evangelista in the San Francisco Chronicle.

And at indieWIRE - again - Eugene Hernandez reports on how the couple behind Four-Eyed Monsters are utilizing Apple tech and MySpace.com to get their film seen. Watch their vlog.

MTV takes iFilm.

Online viewing tip #1. Jared Hess's Winner Take Steve. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #2. James Seo posts video of a Haruki Murakami reading and Q&A.

Online viewing tip #3. The English-speaking folks at Spiegel have found UNICEF's Smurf spot.

Online viewing tip #4. The trailer for The Passenger. Via MCN.

Online viewing tip #5. A clip from Jan Svankmejer's Ossuary. Via Wiley Wiggins, who's also pointing to DVD Beaver's collection of Buñuel posters. Of course, the entire collection is dangerously diverting.

More posters? Matt Langdon's found some Japanese posters for African-American films.

Posted by dwhudson at October 16, 2005 4:08 PM