Shorts, 6/11.

Via Brendon Connelly comes news that Gus Van Sant will direct Lance Black's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Michael Fleming has more at Variety. Also: Lionsgate will be releasing Luis Buñuel's Gran Casino and The Young One on R1 DVD in August.

The Boston Globe's Ty Burr spots a DVD release date for David Lynch's Inland Empire: August 14. "You get 75 minutes of additional scenes titled Other Things That Happened, pushing the film as a whole over the four-hour mark. You also get footage of Lynch at home cooking quinoa."

"Getting back into the swing of things, [Bill] Murray has signed on to star in City of Ember, the latest Walden Media cinematic adaptation," notes Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical. "He will be joined by Dobby-voice Toby Jones and the girl who outs Keira Knightley in the upcoming Atonement, Saoirse Ronan. This will be the sophomore helming effort for Monster House director Gil Kenan, and the adaptation is coming from an old-pro and quirky stories - Caroline Thompson. Her pen has previously whipped up worlds like Edward Scissorhands, The Secret Garden and Corpse Bride."

"Though conservatives regularly accuse Hollywood of being overly liberal on social issues, abortion rarely comes up in film," writes Mireya Navarro. "Real-life women struggling with unwanted pregnancies might consider an abortion, have intense discussions with partners and friends about it and, in most cases, go through with it. But historically and to this day in television and film - historians, writers and those in the movie industry say - a character in such straits usually conveniently miscarries or decides to keep the baby."

Also in the New York Times:

• "I recently indulged in an orgy of watching horror DVDs, including several over Memorial Day weekend while my family was at the beach," confesses Charles McGrath. At least he got something out of it, which he passes along to us: "[C]ertain themes, devices and principles stand out, and may serve as a guide, or a warning, to viewers contemplating a similar splurge."

• Hasbro, the company that makes Transformers, has just switched talent agencies, leaping from Creative Artists to William Morris, which represents Transformers director Michael Bay. Again, Michael Cieply: "So it goes in the new Hollywood. Loyalty stops at the bottom line, and even the most powerful of agencies is finding it can be tougher to meet the needs of a corporate customer than to baby-sit for a temperamental star."

• Patricia Cohen: "Richard Rorty, whose inventive work on philosophy, politics, literary theory and more made him one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers, died Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 75." More from Waggish.

The DPA reports that media theorist and perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim died at the age of 102 on Saturday.

The Literary Saloon: "As widely noted, translator-from-the-German Michael Hamburger passed away last week. See now obituaries in the Telegraph and the Times."

Brian Darr has been watching movies, anticipating movies, and is now once again writing about movies.

Girish creates a "Pedro Costa One-Stop."

While the Observer presents a guide to British acting talent on the boards, Liz Hoggard looks ahead in the Independent to a new generation of British film actors "who may just be the saviours of the Hollywood film industry." Oh, good! "They include actors well on the way to becoming household names, such as James McAvoy and Emily Blunt, and up-and-coming performers such as Sacha Dhawan and Hayley Atwell."

For Vanessa Thorpe, reviewing Donald Spoto's latest biography for the Observer, Otherwise Engaged: The Life of Alan Bates "makes it clear that the point about Bates, both as a man and actor, is how completely he embodied the vital cultural revolution of the 1960s, with its emphasis on truth, complexity and the 'real' world. He was a sophisticated matinee idol, sure, but of a gritty, emotional kind."

Flickhead's holding onto his VHS copy of Psych-Out; it's seven minutes longer than the version you'll see on DVD. "From the coffee houses and galleries to crash pads and be-ins, we encounter the giggling burn-out (Max Julien, one toke over the line when proclaiming 'Owsley is a saint!'), the beads-and-sandals realist (underrated b-movie player Adam Roarke), a capitalist-in-denial with control issues (pony-tailed Jack Nicholson as 'Stoney'), a jittery poster artist (Henry Jaglom, taking a circular saw to his wrist during a lysergic meltdown), and the cosmic intellectual (an absolutely mesmerizing Dean Stockwell, one step ahead of 'the plastic hassle'). Even the police, er, uh, pigs are represented, headed by a young Garry Marshall who sighs, 'I can't wait until this costume party is over!'"

So what's up with The Hobbit? Kristin Thompson rounds up the latest.

In Venice, on his way back to the main Biennale, Time's Richard Lacayo comes across a video installation by Bill Viola in a church on the Campo San Gallo. "I have mixed feelings about his work, big, portentous, slow motion videos in which we're approached by figures who feel out our need for transcendence the way Christmas cards feel out our need for seasonal warmth.... [I]t's devotional art, and of an indiscriminate kind. But to see it in a church, in this world poised between the fanatically religious and the radically desanctified, is something that will stay with me for a while."

"In The Treatment, an adaptation of Daniel Menaker's 1998 novel about an emotionally crippled New York English teacher in psychoanalysis, a self-described 'last great Freudian' sums up the malaise of his patient Jake Singer, played by beloved indie regular Chris Eigeman, thusly: 'You make from the world a banal comedy, and you are a spectator.'" Adam Baer profiles Eigeman. Related: NYT Book Review senior editor Dwight Garner explains why Menaker may have more time now to write another novel.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Dawn C Chmielewski and Michelle Quinn: "Some movie fans hope Apple TV will do for Internet video what the iPod did for digital music. That's precisely what some Hollywood executives are afraid of."

Filmmaker's running Braden King's Sundance Lab diary.

Charles Rector's been reviewing film blogs. Here's one in full: "GreenCine Daily is a vulgar, left wing anti-American blog that covers movies and movie news. Special interest is in so-called 'independent' movies."

Online viewing tip #1. Orson Whales. "One of the Daily Reel's favorite avant-garde filmmakers, Alex Itin, is at it again with this dizzying mashed-up tribute to famed director Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) and Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick."

Online viewing tip #2. Joe Leydon asks, "Who is this guy?"

Online viewing tip #3. The trailer for Control, via Coudal Partners, also pointing to the Daily Swarm's story on the Joy Division sneakers.

Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2007 1:57 PM