Weekend shorts.

"Rumors that 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment was planning a John Ford set have been rumbling through the community for months," writes Dave Kehr. "I've just received confirmation from a Fox publicist that the rumors are not only true, but the project sounds bigger and better than I'd dared to hope."

Related: The Self-Styled Siren. I'm not going to clip a quote from this entry. You'll simply have to go and read it, is all.

And related to that. Fire up your feed reader. Dennis Cozzalio writes up five blogs that make him think.

"Ball of Fire is back in print on DVD; it's a movie for paupers, authors, kings, and you," writes Nathan Kosub at Stop Smiling. "Hollywood, very possibly, never made a gentler film."

Most of the parts of Roger Corman's Tales of Terror are top notch, argues Tim Lucas. "So why doesn't Tales of Terror hang together better?"

"[S]cale is too easy an answer to the problem of filming Tolstoy," writes Catherine Bray in the Liberal. "Long films can be triumphs - see the 282 minute version of Das Boot for proof - and lengthy books may be adapted successfully for the silver screen, as with Peter Jackson's popular Lord of the Rings epics. Although size undoubtedly matters, it is on a more elusive level of style and structure that Tolstoy challenges us."

"I asked Vincent more questions, and his answers became longer and longer until they hit a kind of cruising altitude and I didn't have to ask, he just orated. It was unexpected, like suddenly finding oneself at work on a weekend." The Guardian runs a story by Miranda July, "The Shared Patio."

Also: Michael Coveney on Donald Spoto's Otherwise Engaged: The Life of Alan Bates and Neil Bartlett on Armistead Maupin's Michael Tolliver Lives.

Related: Josh Getlin in the Los Angeles Times: "This fall, the Barbary Lane Communities for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender seniors will open on Lake Merritt in Oakland. The fully renovated Art Deco building, taking its name from Maupin's fictional community set in San Francisco's Russian Hill, will offer 46 units renting for $3,295 to $4,295 per month. It is one of the first urban retirement communities catering to such a middle-income clientele [!!!] - and the only one known to draw its name from a series of bestselling books."

Glenn Kenny: "In the prose, the consistency of the mode of humor - which involves, among other things, [Woody] Allen treating the entire universe as if it's a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, as we'll see in a minute - is its strength, whereas that very same consistency tends to weaken the movies. This is an interesting formal concern that bears further addressing." He doesn't, but Aaron Aradillas more than makes up for it in a comment that follows: "Allen's work in the 90s is his most consistent and revealing of his film career. From 1992's Husbands and Wives to 2000's Small Time Crooks it would be very hard to find a dud during that time period."

Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times on DOA: Dead or Alive: "Notwithstanding the success of Paul Verhoeven, [Corey] Yuen has yet to learn that all that jiggles is not cinematic gold." But for Joe Leydon, "if you show up with sufficiently lowered expectations, you can enjoy the flick as an exuberantly trashy trifle, the sort of nonstop, wire-worked kung-foolishness in which increasingly elaborate set pieces are interrupted only sporadically by something resembling a storyline."

Also in the NYT, Rachel Saltz on Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, "a giddy romantic comedy with star power (the father-son team of Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan; Preity Zinta; Bobby Deol; Lara Dutta), wanderlust (I see London, I see France, and, yes, isn't that India?) and a charming can-do, why-not-the-kitchen-sink spirit." More from Abhishek Bandekar at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Mark Olsen meets Parker Posey: "'There's no precious preciousness to it,' she said of her willingness to get things done. 'I like getting involved. "I'll take care of it." It comes from independent film, I got used to it - there's tape on the floor, pick it up. It's just an awareness you have, like peripheral vision when you're rollerblading in traffic. It comes from being on a lot of sets.'"

Also in the Los Angeles Times, John Horn and Sheigh Crabtree reports on the pirated copies of Sicko floating around out there: "Some have found a certain irony in any protest from [Michael] Moore's camp. The filmmaker has been vocal in his support of downloading pirated movies as long as pirates do not profit."

IndieWIRE interviews Unborn in the USA directors Stephen Fell and Will Thompson.

Via Movie City News, two where-are-they-now pieces: The Scotsman on Dana Carvey and Mick Brown in the Telegraph with Sylvia Kristel.

Also in the Telegraph, Marc Lee talks with John Curran about one of his favorites, Catch-22: "It's ridiculously funny, but that's the horror of it."

Online viewing tip #1. Ted Z finds a trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.

Online viewing tip #2. At Twitch, Kurt points to a trailer for James Mangold's remake on 3:10 to Yuma.

Online viewing tip. Matt Bradshaw rounds up more trailers for Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at June 16, 2007 12:52 PM