Weekend shorts.

Roger Ebert sends an email from the hospital. It sounds like it's been a tough series of weeks, but it also sounds like he's in great spirits. And that's what we want to hear.

"The original score, featuring John Cage and Paul Bowles, is quite good, but it is obvious that Richter was more interested in the visual image than the music." Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld explains how their alternative score to Hans Richter's Dreams That Money Can Buy came to be.

Also in the Guardian: Mark Lawson races through a history of docs and concludes: "More than 60 years after the Ministry of Information began the genre, Oscar-hunting documentaries remain a branch of propaganda."

"Since arriving in Los Angeles, I'd discovered that the place was crawling with Brits hoping to become screenwriters." Toby Young relates his adventures once he'd joined their ranks in an extract from The Sound of No Hands Clapping, running at the Telegraph.

The Queen, you know, will be opening the New York Film Festival. Gerard Gilbert talks with Helen Mirren about becoming Elizabeth II. Also in the Independent, Liz Hoggard meets Patricia Arquette.

Up-n-coming news from Martha Fischer at Cinematical: The White Hotel; Susan Sarandon and Helena Bonham Carter in Eleanor and Colette; an update on Be Kind Rewind (that's the Michel Gondry with Jack Black).

James Urbaniak: "The audition for the Michel Gondry film was smooth as silk. Your move, monsieur."

Now Playing's Brent Simon talks with Justin Theroux about David Lynch's Inland Empire. Or at least what he knows about it, having only seen the pages of the screenplay for the scenes he's in. Via Brendon Connelly. Related: An early PSA from Lynch. Via Screengrab.

"What single movie image or moment do you think of more often than any other?" asks Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. His own: "Terry Malloy's bloodied walk to the warehouse at the end of On the Waterfront. Pretty much any moment from when he first stands up to when he stops in front of the foreman and drops his hook." Dozens of others chime in with theirs.

"I'm fortunate to have made it in other industries, like the resort industry and the wine industry, so I could finance a small film myself every couple of years and have my dream come true. And that's what I aspire to do," Francis Ford Coppola tells Rebecca Winters Keegan in Time. Via Movie City News. Coppola recently appeared on stage in Los Angeles for a Q&A; notes from David Poland and, at AICN, Marty McSkywalker.

"This is the Howard Dean School of Film Funding, very Net-rooty, very social-networky, very now.... You have an idea. You have an affinity group. You have e-mail addresses. You ask for money. And, as William Booth reports in the Washington Post, it's working for Jim Gilliam and Robert Greenwald as they prepare Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers. Via Chuck Tryon.

Nick Schager finds OutKast's Idlewild to be "a mess afflicted with serious schizophrenia, a condition due not just to its leads' apparent refusal to appear together except when absolutely necessary, but also to its awkward hybridization of '30s fashion and music with contempo hip-hop flash."

Also in Slant, Ed Gonzalez: "Jeffrey M Togman's Home, like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, is about renovation, only this is a richer work because its focus is more on the reconstruction of family than the rebuilding of an actual house." And DVDs: Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, Lonesome Jim and American Gun.

Acquarello reviews Aleksandr Sokurov's Days of Eclipse, "an exploration of creation and search for enlightenment in an age of pervasive darkness - at the figurative twilight of humanity."

In Stop Smiling, Nathan Kosub reflects on the men and the women in Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.

At Lucid Screening, Rufus considers Shiri's image of the two Koreas.

"I think the reason why a Mary Pickford film (as with a Bogart film) still plays well with a modern audience, is precisely because of her personality." Anne M Hockens on Sparrows at the Siffblog. Earlier: David Jeffers.

Joe Leydon: "Lee Marvin was born to just give everyone, himself included, a damn good time at the movies."

Vince Keenan: "I watched Sea of Love again recently, and it's still razor sharp. But [Richard] Price's original script - with an ending that's subtler and more logical - is even better."

At the Stranger Song, Paul Schrodt and Rob Humanick defend Lady in the Water.

In the New York Times:

• Charles Solomon previews Fullmetal Alchemist: The Movie: The Conqueror of Shambala: "The original manga and the television and movie adaptations provide audiences with the kind of adventures earlier generations found in The Hardy Boys and Tintin."

• Kristopher Tapley revisits the mysterious death of George Reeves and talks with Allen Coulter, who, while directing Hollywoodland, was "fascinated less with Reeves than with the transition he represented."

• Studios are tightening their belts and, while "Hollywood has undergone periodic shifts like this before," writes Laura M Holson, "many people here agree that there is something different this time, a permanence to Hollywood's new austerity plan."

• Manohla Dargis on King Leopold's Ghosts: "[Director Pippa] Scott's outrage is palpable, but she has bitten off enough here for a 10-hour television series." Also, the "trained, flatulent relationship comedy," Trust the Man. More on that one from Carina Chocano in the LAT.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Surreal and occasionally disturbing, Moonlight resembles nothing so much as a fevered fairy tale." Also: "A polemic masquerading as a movie, Poster Boy unspools like a humorless lecture on right-wing homophobia." More on Moonlight from Christopher Campbell at Cinematical.

• For Stephen Holden, 10th & Wolf tries to "matter" as much as Crash, but evidently doesn't even measure up that far.

• For Nathan Lee, Accepted is "a disappointing debut for the director Steve Pink." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

The Energizer Bunny may be gone, but, as Michael Bodey and Michelle Wiese Bockmann report in the Australian, the controversy surrounding Murali Thalluri and his 2:37 most certainly is not.

Best of 2006 so far? Nick Davis breaks it down.

How are the docs doing at the box office? AJ Schnack's been watching.

Vern's "Badass 100." Via Screengrab.

"Gong Li has picked her five favorite movie heroines for The Wall Street Journal." Tom Tapp's got 'em at Hollywood Wiretap; via Anne Thompson.

Gizmodo takes a first look at Amazon's VOD service. Via Andy Beach at Zoom In Online.

New launch: "The Filmlot was developed to support new and independent filmmakers."

Online viewing tip #1. "UbuWeb announces a relaunch of its film and video section. Greatly expanded with liner notes and links, we're now hosting over 300 avant-garde films and videos."

Online viewing tip #2. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay finds Rian Johnson's video for the Mountain Goats' "Woke Up New."

Online viewing tips. 13 of them. "TurnHere's Director of Content, Kelly Duane (the artist behind indie-music-inflected Monumental: David Brower's Fight to Save Wild America) says the site is designed 'to help the traveler get an inside look into all that is local around the world'," writes Susan Gerhard. "SF360 asked Duane for some of her favorite travelogue shorts, Bay Area and beyond, in the growing TurnHere collection."

Posted by dwhudson at August 19, 2006 9:48 AM