Shorts, 4/17.

David Remnick: "An Inconvenient Truth is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. An Inconvenient Truth is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important."

Also in the New Yorker: Anthony Lane on American Dreamz and I Am a Sex Addict, a new story by Martin Amis (up soon, I'm sure), Hilton Als on a revival by John Guare's 1977 play, Landscape of the Body, Steve Martin's "New Page Six" and Tad Friend: "Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, has written Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, starring Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford as a creative team that's called in to rescue the network’s signature live sketch-comedy show. Tina Fey, the SNL star, has written a show called - for now - The Untitled Tina Fey Project, starring Tina Fey, of all people, as the head writer at the network's live variety show. Her pilot features Alec Baldwin as the network's meddlesome new 'VP of development for NBC/GE/Universal/Kmart.'"

"So to interview Nick Broomfield in the Nick Broomfield style, I have to start my piece before the actual interview," begins Carole Cadwalladr. Also in the Observer, Lynn Barber talks with Sam Taylor-Wood about the exhibition Sam Taylor-Wood Still Lives (and its title).

Via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie comes Martin Hickman's report in the Independent on how McDonald's is preparing - with a "council of war," no less - for Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. They were evidently caught off guard by the success of Super Size Me and do not want to be again.

Bruce Schneier, author of several books, among them, Beyond Fear: hinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World, announces "the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with." Via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing.

The Gothamist's Jen Chung and Alternet's Evan Derkacz follow the buzz surrounding Giuliani Time.

Chuck Tryon actually agrees with conservative blogger Jason Apuzzo on one point: that Scott Martelle is asking the wrong question in his Los Angeles Times piece on United 93, namely, is America "ready"? Naturally, though, Chuck disagrees with Apuzzo when he plugs in an "absurdly simplistic binary between 'patriotic movies' and what he calls 'movies in which America loses.'"

Also in the LAT, Richard Verrier talks with Haskell Wexler about Who Needs Sleep?

"Every season, theatrically unseasoned American movie stars ignore the advice of agents and managers and accountants and, touchingly, expose themselves in 'legit' theater," writes David Edelstein in New York: "It's patently unfair to pass judgment publicly on an actor in a first preview—although at these prices... (Tickets were going for $100 a pop, and mine cost $250 through a broker.) But it's fair to say that Julia Roberts did not seem like a natural onstage." Also, American Dreamz.

Acquarello: "In his optical experiments with light, reflection, and refraction that transform everyday images into fluid and deformable art objects that redefine the medium of film as a traditional canvas, [Patrick] Bokanowski shares a visual affinity with Aleksandr Sokurov's murky and expressionistic in-line optical distortions in films such as Mother and Son and Oriental Elegy that, like the works of aesthetic forefathers such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Caspar David Friedrich, evoke the primal, spiritual landscapes that haunt our consciousness and give form to our waking dreams."

A few finds in the latest issue of Springerin:

• Romuald Karmakar's Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder was, for the most part, unfairly maligned when it screened at the Berlinale in 2004 and, either by choice or necessity, he hasn't tackled a project on a similar scale since. But Rainer Bellenbaum finds that Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea, "his second study of the electronic music scene, stood out among the many documentaries on musical topics shown at the last Viennale."

• Christian Höller attended the Viennale as well and focuses in his piece on the 60s, reviewing Ralph Arlyck's Following Sean, Philippe Garrel's Les amants reguliers, Richard Crawford's Captain Milkshake and Milton Moses Ginsberg's Coming Apart.

• Zeljko Blaçe finds Berlin's "the local video culture... extremely potent in innovating forms and formats as well as establishing new paradigms with regard to the production, presentation and distribution of digital video." Specifically, "the young scene of pornographers that, in typical Berlin style, is strongly connected to art and politics and plays with the role of alternatives within its genre."

• Marc Ries on the four elements of Arye Wachsmuth's Interior Memory.

Ben Davis in Artnet Magazine on Drawing Restraint 9: "The film has a deliberate, epic pace, and is full of memorable imagery. It is also massively, unintentionally funny."

Browsing BOMB: Jonathan Lethem and Noah Baumbach, Rachel Kushner and Miranda July, Jim O'Rourke and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Michael Wilson attended the magazine's 25th Anniversary Gala and files an entry in Artform's diary. Snaps of Cindy Sherman and more.

It's not that Jeff Bridges makes flops, exactly, argues David Thomson in the Independent. "No, it's rather that he prefers to make off-beat pictures, ones against the grain - difficult, doubting pictures, ones that are quietly attached to an archaic principle: that, once upon a time, movies were determined by the pain of grown men and women soaked in years of sadness and experience, and fairly sure that a similar crowd of pained people existed, to be referred to as 'the audience'."

Tom Giammarco at Koreanfilm.org: "At the time of its release, most people dismissed Yellow Hair as simple pornography due to the sensationalized menage a trois scene. That is unfortunate because there is so much more going on in this film than gratuitous sex and nudity."

Fresh reviews at Slant: Nick Schager on Sir! No Sir! and Scary Movie 4 (related: screenwriter Craig Mazin on dealing with success) and Ed Gonzalez on Repulsion and Somersault. DVDs: Jay Antani on The Chess Players, Keith Uhlich on Mother and Son, Fernando F Croce on The Second Circle and Ed Gonzalez on Unveiled.

Daniel Kasman: "The smartness of the construction of Mutual Appreciation is all the more affecting because it easily hides beneath a veneer of naturalism."

Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling previews James Marsh's The King.

"Filmed over a three year period by three directors and a cast and crew of more than 150 people, L'Inferno is a forgotten curio and one of the first movie epics," writes Ray Young at Flickhead. "More than once, L'Inferno had us thinking of the sway it may have held on Der Müde Tod and the Nibelungen films."

Nick Davis: "I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that Peter Greenaway is not the child of two humans, but the offspring of a building and a painting, born on the hottest day of the year in some very, very chilly place."

In the New York Times:

• Alessandra Stanley on The Armenian Genocide: "The powerful hourlong film will be shown on most of the 348 PBS affiliate stations. But nearly a third of those stations decided to cancel the follow-up discussion after an intense lobbying campaign by Armenian groups and some members of Congress."

• Janet Maslin reviews Lee Server's Ava Garner: Love is Nothing.

• Laura M Holson on a videogame player: "While No. 8 may seem low in an industry obsessed with No. 1, LucasArts got there selling a fraction of the games its competitors did."

Brad Stone introduces Newsweek readers to 24 Hours on Craigslist, "a rich, pointillist depiction of life on the site." In Time, Joel Stein tells the story behind "Lazy Sunday," while Lev Grossman surveys the viral video phenom.

Online viewing tip. "Manchester Passion is a contemporary retelling of the last few hours of Jesus' life using popular music from the cream of Manchester bands." That much you've heard about. Now you can watch Jesus singing "Love Will Tear Us Apart." Via Greg Allen.

Posted by dwhudson at April 17, 2006 7:07 AM