Shorts, 7/5.

"The Obama press contingent was abuzz last night with the news that Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, has apparently been enlisted to direct Barack Obama's biographical convention film." Variety's Ted Johnson's got what's known so far, plus background ("Guggenheim's father, Charles, was a famous documentarian who won four Oscars, including Robert Kennedy Remembered, a tribute film that was shown at the 1968 Democratic convention and went on to win an Academy Award for short subject") and clips from the Spike Jonze Al Gore film that never made it to the 2000 convention.

"[T]here's a horror movie at the heart of every film about love and art," writes Kathleen Murphy. "Death's always abroad in these environs, a reaper whose scythe eventually edits everyone out of the picture. Our avid gaze consumes the images we love; if we take them in, perhaps we will become them. Movies are haunted houses - full of dead people who come to life again and again for our pleasure." Via Jim Emerson, who notes that while Murphy begins with Last Year at Marienbad, she "moves through those haunted corridors, into Stanley Kubrick's Overlook Hotel, passing through doors (and walls) into the worlds of Max Ophuls, Luis Buñuel, Josef von Sternberg... As you wander through the maze of this Lady from Shanghai hall of mirrors you'll catch glimpses of ghosts around every corner - not just the phantom images of particular movies, but insights into a spectral world Dave Kehr has described as 'the lost continent of cinephilia.'"

Also at Testpattern: Jay Kuehner: "The recent films of James Benning are about nature, America, ecology, industry, and finding solid ground on which to mount a movie camera. But true to their titles, and just as matter of fact, they are about nothing you haven't seen before."

At indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman reports that Lance Hammer has decided to take the self-distribution route with Ballast.

"Columbia Pictures is prepping a comedy in which Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell will play iconic characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, respectively," notes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "Already you know if you're going to see this movie or not, right?" The Independent's Arifa Akbar reports that the film will be going up against Warners' Holmes project - to be directed by Guy Ritchie. We can probably call this one right now, can't we.

Paul Harrill: "Brian Newman of the Tribeca Film Institute has the best response I've seen to Mark Gill's 'The Sky is Falling' speech, the one that has the (film-centric) internets all abuzz."

"Incarnation is the second DVD compilation put out by Montreal's avant-garde screening series Cinema Abattoir," writes Mike Everleth. "All I'll say is that the new disc is an extremely worthy follow-up to the mind-blowing L'erotisme and cements Abattoir's reputation as the modern premiere purveyor of transgressive cinema."

"The suspicion is that the best way to answer the question, What Is Cinema?, is to ask, What Is Cinema For?" Zach Campbell" "Which means: for whom is the cinema (and the true answer is complex but this doesn't mean diffuse beyond interpretation); how the cinema got to be; why; how it has developed - all of which is inseparable from the prior question of for whom."

"Though it is an invisible and largely unspoken presence, the weight of history is evident in every moment of Chantal Akerman's work," writes David Schwartz at Moving Image Source. "The many autobiographical passages in her films and videos (including letters, diaries, and phone calls) make us aware of her specific identity as a Jewish European woman born five years after the end of World War II. Yet her work is deeply ambivalent about the way that she (and others) are identified by their membership in a group - whether by race, nation, or gender."

"All over Europe filmmakers keep churning out scripts featuring stories of exuberant Roma," writes Dina Iordanova. "All over Europe unwanted Roma populations are on the move; some are struggling to get themselves to a better life while others are being deported in the context of illicitly executed law enforcement campaigns. One welcomes the images while barring the actual people. The striking failure to reconcile actual and metaphoric Gypsies persists."

Thomas Elsaesser, known particularly for his writings on German cinema, is retiring from the University of Amsterdam; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson were there to take part in three related events.

"Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) is as direct as a white man's contemptuous glare, as mysterious as a black man's serene gaze." Noel Vera.

"How does a Western artist approach a culture as elaborately and dauntingly formalized as Japan?" asks Girish Shambu in a piece on Mishima for Artforum. "[Paul] Schrader's response to the challenge of representing Japan is to seize on its very source of difficulty - forms, their ubiquity, and their resistance to meaning making - and create a hyperformalized work that, wisely, rather than 'revealing' Japan, instead makes it recede." Related: Peter Sobczynski talks with Schrader for Hollywood Bitchslap.

"[Wednesday] night an eclectic crowd of thousands gathered for a bizarre spectacle: the world premiere of David Cronenberg's operatic remake of The Fly," reports Lizzy Davies from Paris, where the opera's on at the Théâtre du Châtelet until July 13 before it sees its US premiere in September in Los Angeles. "With a score written by Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore, an orchestra conducted by tenor Plácido Domingo, and Cronenberg himself directing, La Mouche is the brainchild of three creative greats." Ray Pride has lots more.

Also in the Guardian:

• "[P]erhaps there's something about the horror genre with its primal invocations of fear and loss that particularly lends itself to opera," suggests Danny Leigh. "Certainly there's a minor tradition of horror filmmakers becoming smitten with the form, ranging from slasher icon Dario Argento's typically baroque 1987 project Opera to the latter-day moonlighting of Exorcist director William Friedkin on international productions of Bartok, Puccini and Strauss."

• Guy Maddin recalls "miraculously" coaxing Ann Savage out of retirement to play his mother in My Winnipeg: "This feat I likened to tricking Garbo herself out in front of a movie camera after her decades in hiding - for when you think of it, Savage is indeed the Garbo of the modern American independent film world." Peter Bradshaw finds the film "composed of memories that have been inventively transformed and this is entertaining, although occasionally frustrating in that they hint at a more powerful, simpler story that Maddin is unwilling or unable to tell. (Terence Davies's forthcoming movie, Of Time and the City, about his hometown Liverpool, is an interesting comparison.)" Meanwhile, for the Philadelphia Weekly, Matt Prigge talks with Maddin. Also related: Billy Stevenson on Detour.

• Noel Clarke on what he wants to get across in Kidulthood and Adulthood: "[T]hat there are consequences to every action." More in the Independent.

  A robot uprising, a serial killer, an alien invasion, or even just your run-of-the-mill car chase: what are your chances of survival? John Marrs asks a few experts."

"It has been more than 20 years since [The Wire co-creator Ed] Burns, then a detective, met David Simon, then a young police reporter for the Baltimore Sun, sharing a handshake that neither man could have imagined would lead to a book and three television shows - and counting - for HBO," writes . "Their latest project, and their first set outside of Baltimore, is Generation Kill, a seven-part mini-series that will have its premiere next Sunday. Based on the 2004 book of the same name by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine battalion, the series follows a group of marines as they race, crawl, shoot and wisecrack their way north through Iraq."

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer for Artforum on Lawrence Weiner's Water in Milk Exists: "Scenes alternate between often-thrilling hardcore porn and contrived and tedious philosophical musings about 'personal definitions of reality' and 'string theory.' Like a switch flicked too soon, stimulation teasingly turns on and off."

The latest phase in DK Holm's "Directors Project": Clint Eastwood.

Nick Davis hosts the third installment of Best Pictures from the Outside In, featuring himself, Goatdog and Nathaniel discussing, this time around, All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash.

"Kunal Kohli's latest movie, Thoda Pyaar, Thoda Magic, seems to suggest a shift in the Bollywood aesthetic," writes Ruth McCann. "Yes, the film is glossy and colorful, and yes it features a dancing velociraptor, but Kohli's film stands out from the glittering Bollywood oeuvre for its refusal to capitalize on America's caste-fascination and its conspicuous paucity of glitzy song-and-dance numbers. Instead, the bulk of the movie consists of inscrutable character psychology in (dis)service of a messy plot, all layered with a less-than-subtle comic critique of American cultural dominance."

Also in the Voice, Ella Taylor on We Are Together: "What's not to weep over in the latest documentary about the virulent spread of AIDS through the African continent?... Still, I'm a little queasy about an emergent strain of poor-Africa documentaries that double up as consciousness- and fundraising tools, if only because they tend to focus on pathos and sentimental uplift rather than the wholesale abandonment of these children by governments at home and abroad." Nathan Lee offers a cold but honest take in the NYT. More from Matt Noller in Slant.

And then there's the Voice piece that got everyone taking a peek last week: Tony Ortega rummages through Harvey Weinstein's trash. "Topping Harvey's June 9 'need to call' agenda was Gwyneth Paltrow, 're: PROMISES, PROMISES.' Has Paltrow heard that another update to the 1968 Broadway smash (in turn based on the Billy Wilder film The Apartment) is in the works and wants in? Does Anne Hathaway know that Paltrow may be interested in the lead role she's reportedly already landed?" Related: The Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein: "As if Weinstein didn't have enough problems already... he has now has to deal with a presumably disgruntled ex-staffer promising to reveal a new host of dirty laundry about Weinstein's days inside the Disney empire."

"Pure, unadulterated mediocrity is achieved by Diminished Capacity, whose contrivances and corniness indicate its own limited intellectual faculties," writes Nick Schager. Adds Nick Pinkerton in the Voice: "It's the kind of lite movie you go and see with your mom, and she'll say she liked it - but then a year later, you're both trying to remember what it was even about. Two and a half shrugs." Henry Stewart in the L Magazine: "The filmmakers kindly distill the major themes into single lines of dialogue—something about those who don't know what they got don't deserve to have it. Also: live for today!" Manohla Dargis in the NYT: "The actors look as if they're having a reasonably fine time, but there's no sense of commitment here, no sense that this was a movie that absolutely, passionately had to be made." More from Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE and Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But is it fair that we most associate [Matthew] Broderick with Ferris, thereby continuing our disappointment in seeing him play one nebbish nobody after another?" asks Christopher Campbell at Cinematical.

For Michelle Orange, writing in the Voice, Very Young Girls is a "heartbreaking look at the trafficking of underage girls in New York City," but for Slant's Ed Gonzalez, it "suggests a squandered opportunity." Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT: "Ignoring underlying issues of upbringing, class or race (only one of the film's victims is white), Very Young Girls is still an effective scratch on the surface of a serious social problem. However hard it is out there for a pimp, it's not nearly hard enough."

Again, Ed Gonzalez: Holding Trevor "evolves entirely around the trite, self-cocooning ramblings of a do-nothing LA gay boy." Julia Wallace in the Voice: "Such an anomie-filled nothing of a movie that it wouldn't even be a pleasure to savage it."

What to watch at home over the July 4 weekend? James Rocchi's got a recommendation: "Idiocracy's cold sneering mockery may be tough to take, but it's still got plenty of laughs; if you need something to half-watch as you lay dazed in a post-barbeque torpor this holiday weekend, you'll find Idiocracy has a light-yet-bitter flavor that'll freshen even the most overloaded palate."

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Wild Things.

Evan Derrick at MovieZeal: "10 Ways to Become a Better Film Critic," parts 1 and 2.

"Is it possible (or even desirable) for film criticism to be free from personal bias?" asks Ronald Bergan.

Guy Flatley's looking ahead to 25 movies yet to come in 2008.

At PopMatters, Bill Gibron presents the "2008 Summer Movie Scorecard (So Far...)."

Screengrab lists "15 Movies That Show What's Right With US." And Michelle Orange (IFC) lists "Ten Bittersweet Patriotic Films."

"Hands down the best film I've seen so far this year has been Paranoid Park and the unfortunate thing is that nothing else has really come close." Noah Forrest at Movie City News.

"Widely portrayed as kung fu's loveable goofy hero, Jackie Chan's wide-ranging business empire attests to a very different persona; a driven, ambitious man whose financial acumen is more fearsome than his fist." Gill Pringle in the Independent.

New blog on the block: Shock Room: A Horror-Movie Blog.

Online listening tip #1. James Rocchi talks with David Poland about this summer's movies.

Online listening tip #@. "TS Eliot, Portishead; Portishead, TS Eliot." Brainiac Christopher Shea.

Online viewing tip #1. "Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining, complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director's films." And the Guardian's got it. Ambrose Heron has more on the season.

Online viewing tip #2. Notorious producer Wayne Barrow is keeping a video diary.

Online viewing tip #3. You've probably seen it, but: Where the Hell is Matt? is, as Cory Doctorow describes it at Boing Boing, "a silly dance in 42 countries that will make you grin like a fool."

Online viewing tip #4. The Guardian asks stars, critics and so forth about the possibility of an actors' strike next week.

Online viewing tips. Eliza rounds up "Great New Videos" for the Creative Review.

Posted by dwhudson at July 5, 2008 2:09 PM