Artist and experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at the age of 75. He’s maybe best known for his first film, the 1958 assemblage A Movie; his most recent film, Easter Morning, a pure cinema short shot in the 60s and recently released to celebrate Conner’s 50th anniversary, screened in competition last month at CineVegas. Ray Pride has much, much more at Movie City Indie. I’ve embedded one of Conner’s more surprising works, a short set to Devo’s “Mongoloid,” above.

• The headline of Variety’s “Get Smart made a decent amount of money and Love Guru got what it deserved” story: “Audiences make the ‘Smart’ choice.” Is this qualitative analysis, right in the headline? I love it!
• Scott Sternberg, producer of Peter Bart and Peter Gruber’s “stating an opinion as if it is fact is more legitimate on television than on a web site updated in reverse chronological order” chat show Sunday Morning Shootout, is setting up a division of his production company to make feature-length non-fiction films. His first topic? Hasidic jews, of course!
• In what looks to me like a sign that somebody’s finally admitting to themselves that they can only bleed money on untested auteur experiments for so long, The Weinsteins are planning to take advantage of “all these properties that lend themselves to musicals.” They’ll make Broadway shows out of a bunch of crap that they own, including Finding Neverland and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
• She Unfolds By Day took the top prize at the CineVegas film festival, which announced its awards on Saturday. I was on the shorts jury at the fest, but Variety didn’t name the shorts winners in their writeup, so no disclosure needed, right?

• Lists: 5 Unsexy Movies About Sex, 15 Films That Offended Religious Groups; Ethnic Cinematic Atrocities and the Fake Beards That Enabled Them; 10 Movies That Beat Get Smart To The Punch;
• CineVegas: Britney Spears, Finally Lillian and Dan, Memorial Day; pictures
• SilverDocs: Spike Lee and refugees
• RIP, Cyd Charisse.
• Proof that the I Dream of Jeannie movie could be just like Armageddon.
• On the Podcast, Kevin and Paul talk Spielberg, Hitchcock and Shyamalan.
• More crappy viral marketing for The Dark Knight.
• Impersonating Christopher Walken.
• Laughing at Bangkok Dangerous
• Steven Boone returns to the halfway house to sample Susan Sontag and Terrence Malick.

In order to get to CineVegas after landing at McCarren Airport, you must first ride an escalator under Bette Midler’s legs. More images from the festival after the jump.

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FINALLY, LILLIAN AND DAN Trailer

Finally, Lillian and Dan comes to CineVegas almost a full year after its first and only significant public screening, as part of the M-word heavy Summer 2007 Independents Week series at Harvard Film Archives. It’s a find, a definite cousin of the work being made in the Bronstein household––as with Frownland, the mumbling here is so stylized and disturbed that it’s like a precision bomb against the twee subtelties explored by other contemporary filmmakers––it’s more like Tourettescore. But there’s also a tenderness here, and lofty aesthetic ambitions underpinned with authentic melancholy. It’s a heartbreaker.

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After the de rigeur delay at JFK (during which I learned of Tim Russert’s death via a single muted TV in an airport bar otherwise given over to Holland vs. France madness), I arrived in Vegas around 9:30 and went straight to The Palms, homebase of CineVegas and the hotel at which, as a member of the Shorts jury, I have been graciously sequestered

This is only my second trip to the city, but it seems like The Palms is a bit of an anomaly. Of course, a casino is a casino is a casino––there’s no getting around the frosty air-conditioned air, the sense of time having stopped at permanent midnight, the carefully calibrated spectacle apparently meant to foster the illusion that all spending and gambling losses are imaginary (or, at least, less than earth-shatteringly consequential). But at The Palms there are no grandmother types pumping coins into slots, no middle American families crowded around a buffet, no foreign tourists spending obscene amounts of money on luxury kitsch. A spacious, multi-tower complex set several blocks off The Strip, it attracts an almost uniquely young crowd, more or less demographically synonymous with the Real World season that would seem to inspire their tourism. Here the film festival is hidden in plain site, planted in part of the casino’s multiplex and injected into the hotel’s culture; the average Palms guest, if not oblivious, then certainly at least blinded somewhat by the MTV-approved moral suicide mission for which they took the long weekend.

The idea that such an environment could play host to serious films playing to serious cineastes who take it all very seriously might seem incongruous, but so far––and I write this having not seen a single film other than the shorts I’m jurying, though I plan to hit two screenings tonight––this contradiction just seems really exciting. Last night, at the CineVegas 10th Anniversary party, I had conversations about Carlos Reygadas, the degree of wink to the horror element of Baghead, Los Angeles’ newish Silent Movie Theater, and Ronnie Bronstein. Variety’s Robert Koehler valiantly argued the case that CineVegas is the preeminent discovery festival for “semi-narrative and non-narrative” film in North America. Janet Pierson convinced me that I have to see a SXSW 2008 selection that I missed called The Wild Horse Redemption, which she described as “cowboy porn about these felons who become horse whisperers” (hot, right?)

And all of this took place about five paces away from a heavily-bodyguarded Britney Spears.

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• For all the Sex and the City promotional madness and media hype, says Diane Garrett at Variety, “there’s no escaping the fact that the movie is a chick flick with strong appeal among an older femme demo but questionable interest among others. All the magazine coverage in the world — 63 pages in the May 23 edition of Entertainment Weekly alone — and Sex and the City TV marathons haven’t really moved the needle among men, many of whom suggest they’d rather be shot than sit through the movie.”
• Seemingly determined to try to recreate the relationship of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda whether or not the Barbarella remake works out, Robert Rodriguez is apparently “shopping around Women in Chains!, a violent drama set at a woman’s prison starring his fiancee, Rose McGowan.” Oh, right––it’s camp, so it’s neither misogynist nor creepy
• IFC continues their Cannes buying spree days after the end of the festival, picking up Grand Prix winner Gomorrah. The Italian mafia flick has done solid business in its homeland since opening last week.
• The CineVegas film festival will honor Anjelica Huston. Don Cheadle, Rosario Dawson, Viggo Mortensen and Sam Rockwell with their Half Life award, while James Caan will be declared a Vegas Icon.
  

Above: 41 seconds of psychedelic casino nightmare by the Zellner Brothers, masquerading as a promo for the CineVegas Film Festival. The Zellners’ latest feature, Goliath, will be screening at the fest in June. Several other filmmakers have made promos for the fest, including Cam Archer and Kevin Everson; see them all here.

Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake (Trailer)

Another day, another line-up for a festival that I’ll be attending in June. This time it’s CineVegas, and in addition to some of the familiar fest circuit favorites (Momma’s Man, Gonzo, Goliath), there are some exciting surprises. The Circuit has the full lineup. Here’s a sampling of what I hope to check out over the course of my three or four days in town:

• Two films by Abel Ferrara, including Go-Go Tales (screening in the Diamond Discoveries section for films without distribution––thus squashing last fall’s rampant rumors that IFC had picked the film up around the time of the New York Film Festival?) and the US premiere of Ferrara’s doc about the Hotel Chelsea, Chelsea on the Rocks.
• Finally, Lillian and Dan: A no-fi indie which I’ve been looking forward to seeing ever since The Cinetrix described it as “like a Sebadoh cassette stuck in a hatchback’s tape deck.” There’s a hypnotic trailer on MySpace.
• Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake: A concert doc, shot on digital video by seven Reno teenagers in the crowd and backstage at the band’s July 4, 2006 show. See a trailer above.
• Dark Streets: Starring Bijou Phillips and Gabriel Mann, Variety’s Mike Jones describes it as a “noir musical.” That’s a combination of words to which I can’t say no.