Shorts, 3/12.

Quoting Keith Griffiths, Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has the latest on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's battle with Thai censors: "Twelve months after [Syndromes and a Century's] World Premiere in the Official Selection of the Venice Film Festival, the Thai audience will be able to finally see this locally produced and acclaimed masterpiece of cinema, interspersed with intermittent silent black scratched leader. The longest scene of silence will run for seven minutes."

"After months of rumors, Warner Bros... will announce Thursday that they plan to split Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, JK Rowling's seventh and final Potter novel, into two blockbuster films - one to be released in November 2010 and the second in May 2011." Geoff Boucher reports for the Los Angeles Times.

In the Voice:

• "Godard's Contempt is a once-a-century cultural constellation," writes Nathan Lee. Also, Towards Darkness. More on that one from Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

• Jim Ridley on Sputnik Mania, all about "an ungainly four-pronged basketball of an object that upended the hierarchy of superpowers, officially launched the Space Age, and triggered a panic that shook America from Washington to Wall Street." Also, Never Back Down. More on Sputnik from Robert Levin (cinemattraction) and Nick Schager (Slant).

• Aaron Hillis on the latest Iraq doc: "As a stand-alone thesis, War Made Easy may seem the least revelatory of the lot to any progressive-minded, mildly informed adult, though it should be mandatory viewing for students." More from Bill Weber in Slant.

• Michelle Orange on Sleepwalking: Charlize Theron and Woody Harrelson "provide vitality against the film's heavy load, but they aren't around long enough to keep it from collapsing under its own portentous weight." More from Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

• Ed Gonzalez on Horton Hears a Who! and Flash Point.

"Dean Budnick's Wetlands Preserved, produced by second and final owner Peter Shapiro, is a heartfelt tribute to a joyous anomaly in New York's nightlife scene that eventually surrendered to Tribeca's increasing gentrification in the days following September 11," writes Jürgen Fauth. More from Michelle Orange in the Voice; indieWIRE interviews Budnick.

"One of the fascinations of Silence, Masahiro Shinoda's adaptation of the 1966 novel by renowned Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo, is the insight it offers into the history, little known in the West, of Christianity in Japan." Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Shawn Levy revisits My Own Private Idaho: "It's a gorgeous and daring and resonant film that still feels fresh and vivid... And for someone like me, an unapologetic civic jingoist who didn't know Portland well at all in 1991, it's a revelation."

James Rocchi for the Culture Blog: "[A]fter a few weeks of flops in theaters and somber picks on DVD, Tears of the Black Tiger was, it turns out, precisely what I was looking for: Sheer, pure, giddy cinema, with romance and action and color and music and fun."

AJ Jacobs: "Five Deleted Scenes from Esquire's Cover Story on George Clooney."

"Eager to get American cinema complexes ready for a surge in 3-D movies next year, four major Hollywood studios announced on Tuesday a deal to subsidize the conversion of 10,000 theaters to digital projection systems." David M Halbfinger reports.

Also in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz on Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise.

Online listening tip. J Hoberman is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at March 12, 2008 10:54 PM