Shorts, 2/26.

The very premise of Michael Moore's landmark documentary Roger & Me, illustrated by the poster, even, rests on General Motors chairman Roger Smith refusing to talk to Moore. But an interview took place. Moore cut it. And that's just one of several disturbing revelations in Manufacturing Dissent, a doc on Moore by Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk premiering at SXSW in March. Thing is, Caine and Melnyk are anything but wingnut zealots, notes John Anderson. John Pierson, author of Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes and still "a self-proclaimed 'flag-waver' for Roger & Me," calls their doc "unbelievably fair."

Also in the New York Times:

• Anthony Tommasini on fresh recordings of two scores by Virgil Thomson: "The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937) will make die-hard liberals long for the time when the government really knew how to produce propaganda on behalf of worthy causes. For a brief while, to propagate its domestic programs, the Roosevelt administration went into the movie business."

• Karen W Arenson on the controversy kicked up by Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West: "The documentary has become the latest flashpoint in the bitter campus debate over the Middle East, not just because of its clips from Arab television rarely shown in the West, including scenes of suicide bombers being recruited and inducted, but also because of its pro-Israel distribution network."

• Arthur Lubow profiles Jeff Wall for the Magazine: "Educated as an art historian, he aspired... to make photographs that could be constructed and experienced the way paintings are." More from Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker.

• Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia "has already made a surprise backlist hit of Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers," notes William Grimes, who's hoping it might do the same for Alexander Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, "quite possibly the least-read great work of Russia's glorious 19th century." Edward Rothstein understands that Utopia can't be too tidy, but watching it, he "never felt Herzen's personal experience turn into political insight. Perhaps that would have meant violating Herzen's principles and providing a dramatic world less loose and baggy, in which there is unity, purpose, culmination." Related: Boris Kachka's "Who's Who" in New York.

• Francesco Bonami: "The word on Chinese art right now is 'Buy!' but I'm not convinced that we Westerners really understand what's going on there."

• "Hollywood studios are going into business with one of their biggest tormentors: the peer-to-peer pioneer BitTorrent." Brad Stone reports on the latest developments.

"Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans, the second volume in what will be a monumentally scaled three-volume biography, and Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, a detailed look at his later years, both set out to clear away misconceptions and wind up presenting two quite different individuals," writes Sanford Schwartz in the New York Review of Books, where he takes five more books on Welles into consideration as well.

Jean-Philippe Tessé, writing in Cahiers du cinema, finds Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Loft to be "an uneven film, certainly, and slightly beneath KK's other films, but no less fascinating and remarkable."

"Song Il-gon, the exceptional director of Spider Forest, Git and Magicians is prepping a new feature entitled Telephone Girl." Aaron has a bit more at Kung Fu Cult Cinema.

David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back: "I must confess, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is my first experience with Naruse and it was a revelation."

"I think of all my movies as home movies! It's just that some are more expensive than others," DA Pennebaker tells Time's Carolina Miranda. Good stuff on Dylan in there.

"[I]n its roundabout, elliptical way, Zodiac gets at something transcendentally icky about the fetish for serial killers (and serial-killer hunters) that has grown only more common in this era of true-crime blogs and celebrity forensic scientists," writes New York's David Edelstein. "[David] Fincher, it turns out, is not a police-procedural-type guy. He's not a people-type guy. He's a mood ghoul. A great opening can carry you a long way, though, and Zodiac has a stunner: an attack at night on a couple in a parked car that's among the most brilliantly cruel sequences I've ever seen." And Newsweek's David Ansen: "Zodiac is meticulously crafted - Harris Savides's state-of-the-art digital cinematography has a richness indistinguishable from film - and it runs almost two hours and 40 minutes. Still, the movie holds you in its grip from start to finish."

"[I]n a Barthian sense, performance can be just as much of a 'readerly text' as anything else," proposes Scott Balcerzak at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope.

Zach Campbell has been interested in "the question of resistance as it plays out through aesthetics" lately and he's got a few questions for you.

Dan Glaister has the latest in the Guardian on the revival of The Fly as an opera, a co-production of the Los Angeles Opera and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, written by Howard Shore, directed by David Cronenberg and possibly starring Plácido Domingo.

"I'm not exactly sure what I want in a documentary about a rock festival, but I'm sure that it's not in Glastonbury," grumbles Ryan Stewart. Also at Cinematical: Erik Davis attended New York Comic Con and has lots of news on what Eli Roth is up to; similarly Ryan Stewart, with news from Kevin Smith (more from Erik) and Stephen King.

Sujewa Ekanayake announces a new project: Filmmaking for the Poor, a "comedy-drama about low budget filmmaking."

"We've gone from being defunct - as the press would have it - to having two Oscar nominations, three Bafta wins, six Bifa (British Independent Film Awards) wins. The point is that Film4 is on a roll in the way it should be: supporting British talent, producing British talent, working with great writing, trying to define itself and aligning itself with Channel 4." That's Tessa Ross, head of Film4, talking to the Independent's Ian Burrell.

Online not viewing tip. "[D]o you remember Pitchfork's 100 Awesome Music Videos post from last summer?" asks Rex Sorgatz. "There was a brief moment where these types of posts opened our eyes to the potential of a new form of curatorial criticism of video, with a mashup of moving illustrations that were controlled by users. Suddenly, you could image whole new ways to conceive of writing about the history of visual culture. Now, just months later, that vision has been practically erased, as over half of the clips from the above post have been removed from YouTube - to be exact, 54 of 100 are gone... I find it hard to believe this is good for anyone - artist, label, critic, fan, and, especially, the marketplace of ideas."

Steve Bryant comments: "While I agree that those removals are no good for the artists or the consumers... I also think we've come to rely too much on YouTube. The more attention given to alternative video marketplaces (like Democracy Player), the better off we'll be."

Online viewing tip. clip from Danny Boyle's Sunshine, via Merrick at AICN.

Posted by dwhudson at February 26, 2007 12:42 PM