Weekend shorts.

Terry Gilliam will be directing opera for the first time in July - a production for La Scala, no less, "a staging of Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier, the tale of the poet guillotined during the French revolution," reports Tom Kington.

Also in the Guardian:

• Mark Lawson describes Salvador Dalí's Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time and quotes from Graham Greene's review of Wee Willie Winkie, which led to a lawsuit that shut down the magazine that published it, Night and Day. The point: They may have been "vindicated by time.... Certainly, cinematic history has shown that artist and writer were correct to see something monstrous and improper in the Hollywood child star." More on Dalí & Film from Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times.

• "In one of the most talked-about works of the Biennale, the Italian video installation artist Francesco Vezzoli has created two 2008 White House campaigns, Democrazy," reports Angelique Chrisafis. "Amazingly, some of Washington's top political advisers rushed to take part. [Sharon] Stone's campaign ad has been produced by Mark McKinnon, Bush's top advertising strategist in 2004, who is senior adviser to Senator John McCain's presidential campaign. Meanwhile, [Bernard-Henri] Lévy, known as 'BHL,' was managed and directed by Bill Clinton's advertising gurus from 1996."

• "An exploration of the lives of Hindu widows during the turmoil of pre-independence India and the caste hierarchy that forced some into prostitution, Water was hailed the finest Indian movie made for a generation, and went on to become the most successful Hindi-language film ever in North America." Randeep Ramesh talks with Deepa Mehta about the film's arduous journey to the screen. And Andrew Pulver reviews "the conclusion to Mehta's taboo-confronting trilogy (preceded by Fire and Earth, her takes on lesbians and partition respectively)." More from Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard.

• "Why has London been so poorly visualised by filmmakers over the years?" asks John Patterson.

• Sydney Pollack tells the story behind his first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry.

• Kevin Sampson: "On one level, Grow Your Own is a celebration of a world and a lifestyle that seemed confined to bygone times; but it also packs a real punch by opening up the lives behind all those shed doors to tell a hope-filled story of contemporary Britain. Not too many passers-by would associate these reclaimed urban plots with a major initiative to reintegrate the UK's most troubled refugees into society."

• Xan Brooks argues that many British stage actors wouldn't mind at all following the trajectory of Anthony Hopkins's career.

"The new Romania is probably happy to throw money at films that dig the Ceasescu era into a deep grave," Financial Times film critic Nigel Andrews suggests to 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days director Cristian Mingui, who replies, "But I don't think that trend will continue. The good thing that has happened already is that our vision is different from the films shot immediately after 1989. Those were full of anger and little else. They were made by people less attentive to cinema than to their political beliefs and grievances."

Sheila Johnston also talks with Mingui - for the Telegraph, where Jeremy Brock explains how his adaptation of Brideshead Revisited will differ from the 1981 mini-series. Related: Christopher Hitchens reviews Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family for the New York Times.

S Mickey Lin and Genevieve Yue interview Apichatpong Weerasethakul for Reverse Shot:

Your upcoming film, Utopia, will take place in a foreign country. As it deals with issues of memory, which suggests something personal, why wouldn't it take place in Thailand?

It's part of a project where nine international filmmakers were asked to take a look at America. Utopia developed from wanting to take all my crew on a trip to America, so we would be on the Amtrak, making a film together. The main idea is that we would live on the train and just make something up and try to talk about our memory of Thailand. But at the same time the landscape outside would be America: its changing, the snow, the desert. We would stop sometimes and look at people. At the same time, there would be some kind of connection to the memory of each crew: there would be a scientific device that is sent to the cabin somewhere in the snow landscape, and a grandmother that controls our memory. It kind of developed from there, but now it's changed to something totally different. Now it's become a prehistoric man's journey into the snow landscape.

"J-horror legends director Hideo Nakata and producer Taka Ichise, the pair responsible for bringing us the terrifying films Ringu and Dark Water, are set to start work on their new film Inhuman later this year," notes Aleida Strowger for Time Out.

"With The Fifth Empire, a drama about a young Portuguese king hoping to unite his troubled nation by embarking on a foreign adventure, the prolific 98-year-old director Manoel de Oliveira pushes his minimalist style as far as it can go," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. Also, Four Lane Highway is "affable but dull."

And also in the NYT: "Set in New Jersey in 1978 and based on events in [Elisabeth] Shue's life, Gracie connects the adversity-drama dots - the beat-down, the bounce-back, the last-minute support from an unexpected quarter - with a subtle awareness of the shock waves of bereavement," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "Balancing the emotional complexity is Chris Manley's refreshingly unaffected cinematography; the drama of a free kick, like that of a good movie, is best viewed through a steady lens." (Related: Ellen McCarthy talks with Elisabeth and Andrew Shue for the Washington Post.) Also: "Sweetness and whimsy fill the screen to capacity in I'm Reed Fish a rural coming-of-age tale that's so laid-back that its cast is almost horizontal."

"Lunacy owes rather more to Michel Foucault than it does to Frankenstein, more to the Marquis de Sade than to Dracula," writes Christopher Bray. "A lifelong surrealist, [Jan] Svankmajer is obsessed with the idea of absolute freedom... My own view is that a society that repressed nothing wouldn't be a society."

"It always seems surprising today that in his own day Ernst Lubitsch's reputation as a silent filmmaker was based as much on his big historical epics - works like Madame Dubarry and Anna Boleyn - as on comedies of the likes of The Oyster Princess," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Certainly modern taste favours the effervescence and frivolities of Lubitsch's comic touch rather than the heavier hand at work in these epics. There are nice touches, and Anna Boleyn is relatively successful, but it is hard to escape a certain turgidity inherent in the genre."

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell listens in as James Gray and Robert Duvall, director and one of the stars of We Own the Night, butt heads over Bonnie and Clyde:

Gray: "You don't like Bonnie and Clyde? You're wrong."

Duvall: "No, you're wrong. The acting was so overstated. C'mon. The acting sucked, Jimmy! You know that!"

Gray: "I don't know. I loved that movie. I'm sorry."

Duvall: "Arthur Penn. A guy from New York doing something rural!"

Gray: "The movie doesn't play like a realistic thing. It's a whole other thing."

Duvall: "See if it holds up, Jimmy! See if it holds up!"

Via Movie City News.

"A city with such majestic memories, both naughty and nice, can only evoke magic on the silver screen. At the movies, New York City is shorthand. When she popped up, the director didn't need to explain further. It was a big, naked city with 8 million stories and, depending on the background music, you knew whether they'd be happy or sad." At the House Next Door, Odienator is forced to limit his list of New York movies to just five; but the lists and extensions come fast and furious in the comments.

"As the husband of a high school social studies teacher, Chalk - a mockumentary about educators that's shot in the style of The Office - strikes me as the definition of a missed opportunity," writes Nick Schager. Also at Slant, Ed Gonzalez on Unborn in the USA: "Filmmakers Stephen Fell and Will Thompson, having gained unprecedented access to the inner workings of pro-life groups across the country, have created an ungainly, distracted, but nonetheless fair-minded look at people who actively work to chip away at Roe v Wade. And: "Beyond Hatred arrives at essential truths about suffering and loss through abstract means."

A "great Movie Moment is one that illustrates the greatness of the movie around it, and occasionally, it will transform an otherwise good movie into a pretty great one." And this week, Paul Clark finds that moment for his ScreenGrab column in William Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA.

In the LA CityBeat, Andy Klein celebrates the fresh release of Rio Bravo, "one of the very greatest westerns."

Kaleem Aftab meets (again) Philip Seymour Hoffman who "keeps grounded" these days by returning regularly to theater. Also in the Independent, Bob Flynn talks with John Boorman: "The Tiger's Tail, his latest film, is a parable about his adopted homeland, centred around a soured prince-and-the-pauper tale of doppelgangers exchanging lives in the midst of the Irish Republic's raging 'Celtic tiger' economic boom."

Michael Guillén talks with John Carney, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova about Once for SFF360.

Adam Ross's latest interviewee: Johanna Custer.

"Advertisers have long linked up with Hollywood by placing their products within films or trotting out stars as their official sponsors," writes Lorenza Muñoz. "But some companies are now going a step further, investing directly in movie productions in the hopes of striking even deeper connections with film audiences." Also in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Ordoña reviews The Devil Came on Horseback; and Congresswoman Diane Watson (Democrat, Los Angeles) "wants to ship DVDs of classic Hollywood movies overseas, hoping they will reshape an image she believes has been tarnished by the Iraq war." Jim Puzzanghera reports.

Artkrush 59: "Time-Based Art."

Online scrolling and gazing tip. Stills from the work of cinematographer Owen Roizman at the Art of Memory.

Online listening tip. Bruce Dern on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at June 2, 2007 2:15 PM