Weekend shorts.

Errol Morris reflects on the videotape of the marine shooting an unarmed, wounded prisoner in Falluja: "We can imagine, in the privacy of our thoughts, that war is heroic and honorable - even noble. Photography can make it difficult for us to maintain these illusions."

Also in the New York Times:

• As it appears online, something odd is going on with the way Manohla Dargis's interview with Jean-Luc Godard has been formatted. Even given Godard's occasional penchant for objectifying JLG, at some point in the last third, Dargis herself seems to take over to bridge two sections... hard to tell. Update: See comments. The film at hand is Notre Musique, but...

• For his Moments choisis des Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard also receives honorable mention in Dargis's piece on MoMA's two series, "112 Years of Cinema" and "Premieres," though the point is that "in not organizing its first big series around an aesthetic, historical or intellectual argument, the film department has made something of a statement anyway.... [I]t is being true to the populist promise of cinema - that movies are for everyone - and true to its own history."

• Terrence Rafferty on A Very Long Engagement, "which takes on the challenge of putting across a sweeping, uplifting love-conquers-all saga while at the same time letting viewers know that it's hip to the horror of war. This is a bold and weird endeavor."

• Sharon Waxman on how Oliver Stone's Alexander will be breaking new ground: "[T]he film industry has never risked quite so much on a blockbuster film that depicts a leading man as gay or bisexual."

• How Beyond the Sea got rolling: Dennis McDougal tells the story.

As if he hadn't accumulated enough good karma by running a free screenplay site for nine years, Drew is adding to the humanitarian goodness by flagging quality new additions to the collection from his blog.

For Movie City News, Gary Dretzka interviews Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana, the filmmakers behind Overnight, the sad tale of Troy Duffy, who "went from Hollywood’s flavor-of-the-month to someone who’s calls and emails need never be returned."

And via MCN: The Big Red One is now one of Roger Ebert's "Great Movies," and he's running his 1980 profile of Sam Fuller and a 1970 piece he did on Lee Marvin for Esquire.

Meanwhile, David Poland is quite rightly outraged at PBS affiliate WNET's self-censorship. If you haven't heard, they won't be airing spots for Kinsey because the station's CFO "is not comfortable with the content of this movie."

Radio On director Chris Petit picks up three books - The Story of Film by Mark Cousins, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer by Tom Shone and Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film - and, eventually, finds an argument: "While Tom Shone and Peter Biskind find themselves caught in the trap of a golden age, Cousins remains optimistic about the future when it is not intellectually fashionable to do so, with everyone from David Thomson to Susan Sontag bemoaning the death of cinema, rather than seeing it as a phase in a wider technological revolution."

Also in the Guardian:

• Zoë Green reviews Alexander Mackendrick's On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director: "To the meat of the matter: this is an eminently readable volume, but it is something of a challenge too, which is exhilarating. It requires focus. It's like the textbook you wish you'd had earlier; but as Mackendrick says, 'Work is the only real training'."

• Six months after Stanley Kubrick died, a "world exclusive," the last interview, appeared in TV Times. But to Anthony Frewin, who'd worked for Kubrick for years, there was something fishy about it. Naturally, he'd discover it's a fake, but that wasn't enough; assuming he finally has stopped, for quite some time, Frewin couldn't seem to stop investigating that "schmuck" Adrian Rigelsford.

• Peter Hall tells the remarkable story of the making of Akenfield and notes, "Such an enterprise would be unthinkable today. No television company would dare to put money into such a dangerous improvisation."

• Sam Delaney takes a fresh approach to the currently ubiquitous interview with Peter Bogdanovich: ask about specific actors and stack the paragraph-length answers in a column broken by their names in bold. Nifty.

• Philip Kerr eventually gets around to reviewing Mark Winegardner's The Godfather: The Lost Years, but not before measuring the pop cultural impact of the original novel and film.

• Suzie Mackenzie: "It is sometimes said that to be a star of real magnitude is to be able to do one very difficult thing supremely well - and [Maggie] Smith has been a star of international repute since her Oscar-winning performance in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969. What she does, and uniquely well, is empathy."

• Helena Smith: "Troy may have bombed at the box office but, in Turkey, the film has put Homer's 'well-walled city' back on the tourist map."

  Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: FW Murnau's Nosferatu.

• John Patterson's mini-profile of the week: Samantha Morton, "the most fascinating English actress of our time."

• Patrick O'Conner remembers film composer Michel Colombier, 1939 - 2004.

There they are: Frederick Wiseman, Robert Drew, Albert Mayles and Richard Leacock, all lined up in a single photo snapped by Brian Brooks.

Craig Phillips lists ten great movie titles.

The Grey Automobile. It'll be at the Queens Theatre in NYC on Sunday evening and hopefully in other cities on down the line. Let Greg Allen tell you about it.

Online weekend reading tip. Well, maybe a couple of weekends, actually. Robert Philip Kolker's 1983 book, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema. Full text with graphics and the occasional clip.

Posted by dwhudson at November 20, 2004 2:23 PM