Screening Gotham: Scorsese Rounds Up World Cinema All-Stars

Some of today's movie news of note from around New York:

--Martin Scorsese traveled to Cannes Tuesday to announce the founding of the World Cinema Foundation, dedicated to the director's pet cause of film preservation. As if he wasn't persuasive enough, look at the board he put together, according to Variety: "Fatih Akin, Souleymane Cisse, Guillermo Del Toro, Stephen Frears, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Abbas Kiarostami, Ermanno Olmi, Cristi Puiu, Walter Salles, Abderrahmane Sissako, Elia Suleiman, Bertrand Tavernier, Wim Wenders and Wong Kar Wai." OK, now I'm impressed.

--J. Hoberman filed from Cannes with high praise for this year's American crop, with the Chinese a distant second. As for My Blueberry Nights, a shrugging ambivalence: "All of the filmmaker's themes -- memory, regret, loss, insomnia -- are present, along with the misfortune of an American-style happy ending."

--In his review of Shrek the Third ("pastiche for the potty-trained"), David Denby does everything but review Shrek the Third.

--Jeffrey Trachtenberg has the latest on that Focus Features/Random House deal that has the distributor splitting the cost on adaptations of the publisher's properties. Most notably, the piece reveals the staggering value of books' movie tie-ins: "Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette, which had been selling fewer than 10,000 copies annually, has sold more than 150,000 copies following last year's release of Marie Antoinette." (Via Movie City News)

Posted at May 23, 2007 9:13 AM