Shorts, 12/1.

The indie world and the blogs that follow it as it spins are still snipping, pasting and passing along lists before looking them over again in some future moment of Wordsworthian tranquility. Like, maybe on the weekend. But there are already a few starting points:

• At indieWIRE, which has fired up a Park City blog, Eugene Hernandez parses the Sundance lineup while Anthony Kaufman notes the "increased international viability" the fest has won with its two new competitive sections devoted to world cinema.

• Hernandez introduces the list of nominees for the Independent Spirit Awards with a quote from IFP/LA exec director Dawn Hudson: "Six of the nominated films haven't even received theatrical distribution, and several more have had only the most-narrow distribution. We're proud to recognize the outstanding work done by independent veterans alongside the exciting new voices in film." Commentary from Aaron at Out of Focus.

• David Poland: "The Independent Spirit Awards nominations today were a pretty clear sign that the independent movement needs some independent movement." Meantime, excellent news for the blogdom: Ray Pride's blog is now Movie City Indie.

• Movie City News also has the list of 2004 awards from those early birds at the National Board of Review. Among the big winners: Finding Neverland, Jamie Foxx (Ray) and Annette Bening (Being Julia).

• Matt Dentler congratulates the Austinites among the Sundancers and Spirit nominees.

"Mike Leigh's Vera Drake swept the board at last night's British Independent Film Awards."

Also in the Guardian:

• Andrew Stilwell, manager of the London Review Bookshop, tells the story of the day the cast and crew of Enduring Love moved in for a day of filming.

• Matthew Tempest reports on another tempest of sorts, stirred up by the threatened closure of the Babylon in Berlin.

• And a Christmas quiz (5 out of 10; bah humbug).

"In 1941, when Hughes was still promising, flying and good-looking, Kane whispered that all was dust. It isn’t our great film just because of technical innovations, deep focus and overlapping dialogue - it's because of what it means." The Aviator inspires David Thomson to do more than just his job: "This is not meant simply as a film review - I'm talking about our history and our future... How do you make a Hollywood picture today about things like entropy, loss of belief and disquiet? ... When we wonder why we don't make much art any more, don't forget the countless ways in which American thinking is determined to do away with the tragic."

Also in the New York Observer:

• Jake Brooks has a marvelously entertaining time laying out the absurdities of The Aviator's being dreamt up and made in the first place. Will there be a payoff? "The Aviator is a two-hour-and-48-minute pedigree production - culled from Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Weinstein's thoroughbred stable - that speaks to every branch in the Academy and explains the man who owned R.K.O. and produced the first Scarface. It was directed by America's Greatest Director Who Never Won an Oscar..."

• Ron Rosenbaum: "The Merchant of Venice, the one starring Al Pacino as Shylock, may be the most misguided literary adaptation since the Miramax Mansfield Park.... And since I'm working on a book on Shakespeare scholarship and just published an anthology on contemporary anti-Semitism, it's something I have strong feelings about."

• Andrew Sarris on Mike Nichols's "ice-cold" Closer, Notre Musique ("I am frankly surprised that most of my colleagues haven't seen through Mr. Godard's evasive paradoxes, the banal anti-'Zionist'/anti-American prejudices that he shares with his countrymen, whether French or Swiss"; yikes!) and the "Essential Noir" series at Film Forum.

In the City Pages, Kate Sullivan finds With God on Our Side: George W Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right "so even-tempered - so BBC, really - that it's difficult to imagine any Christian fundamentalist viewer (or evangelical viewer, to be PC) taking umbrage with the film, even at its most chilling." Also: Jesse Paddock talks to Ross McElwee about Bright Leaves. And for more on that one, see Russell Lucas's at filmjourney.org.

Doug Cummings on Bresson, Tell Them Who You Are (Mark Wexler's doc about his relationship with his dad, Haskell) and on learning from Kiarostami and Tarkovsky.

Mania Akbari plays the lead character in Kiarostami's Ten and, "While she readily acknowledges the influence of Kiarostami's cinema... she seems utterly undaunted by it," observes Dorna Khazeni in an introduction to her interview with Akbari for Film-Philosophy. Khazeni opens the piece with dramatic reactions to a screening of Akbari's 20 Fingers, "poised to aggravate viewers not only because of its difficult visuals but also because of its challenge to some of the quiet conventions and self-deceptions that relationships can be built upon."

After living abroad for a decade, Jon Jost returned to the US to make Homecoming. Now, as he explains in the Al-Ahram Weekly, he's left again, and won't be returning for four years: "For among the many obscenities of this election, one of the most obscene is the fact that Bush was elected by the very people most wounded by his policies - people just like the characters in my film."

Also via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau": Namrata Joshi in Outlook India looks to Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara as a measure of current Indian sentiment regarding the nation's relationship with Pakistan: "There's nothing like crying together - it helps exorcise your demons and cleanse your soul. Is that what Bollywood is trying?"

In the New York Times, Howard W French visits an animation studio on the campus of Shenzhen University and comes away with a story packed with intriguing angles: the city itself, currently "one of China's biggest, richest and most modern cities, the hottest hot spot of Chinese capitalism"; Jean Giraud, who's written the story for Thru the Moebius Strip, an animated feature representing China's intentions to make inroads into territory dominated by Disney and PIxar, and a reminder: "China is not so much coming from way behind in the animation business as it is reviving a long vibrant tradition."

"At best," writes Johnny Ray Huston in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Closer "motors along like a cold, mechanized update of the director's past fearsome foursomes," but even so, it "often feels even colder and more calculating than the characters it contains." Also: Cheryl Eddy on Overnight, "a must-see for anyone who's ever entertained their own klieg-light dreams," and on Who Killed Bambi?.

"Although Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky is best known for his psychedelic, violent movies (El Topo, The Holy Mountain), he has also been, at one time or another during his 75 years on Earth, the mime protégé of Marcel Marceau, a surrealist performance artist, an esoteric comic-book author, and a tarot card reader." In the SF Weekly, John Mecklin thoroughly enjoys reporting on traces of all these characters visible in a recent local appearance.

Ed Halter: "The 70s has ample amounts of gritty chic and ironic glamour to 00s pop culture: Witness the big-screen resurrections of Charlie's Angels and Starsky & Hutch, hairstyles largely intact. But independent filmmakers are digging past gags to investigate the politics of a bygone America that looks increasingly like our own, complete with Middle East conflicts, massive protests, political terrorism, and the re-election of a Republican president during a messy, morally questionable war."

Also in the Village Voice:

• Dennis Lim on Vikram Jayanti's "gripping documentary," Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, the second week of the "Premieres" series at MoMA and, of Closer, notes that the play "is a relic of the mid-90s nasty-chic epidemic (emblematized stateside by LaBute) and the haute yuppie 'Cool Britannia' wave that swept Britpop and Tony Blair to power."

• A House of Flying Daggers package: Michael Atkinson's review (cynical, as usual, but he does find redeeming moments) and David Ng's brief talk with Zhang Yimou.

• A holiday shopping guide: The five best DVD box sets of the year, plus ten more.

• Halter again, on Ulrich Seidl's Jesus, You Know and the "canned melodrama" Conspiracy of Silence.

• "Tracking Shots": Leslie Camhi on Deserted Station and After Midnight; Ed Park on AmnesiA; Melissa Anderson on The Aryan Couple; and Benjamin Strong on The Green Butchers.

"Never before has movie culture been so reduced to brazen capitalist reflex," writes Armond White in his introduction to his own "Film 101: A Syllabus for Life, complete with recommended readings," advertised on the cover of the New York Press as "Cinema Armondiso." Sounds inviting, but... where is it? In this issue? The next? It doesn't seem to be online.

Anyway, what is viewable at the NYP site:

• I have to say, though Matt Taibbi has rubbed me the wrong way in the past, this week's column measuring the DLC against Michael Moore is spot on.

• White on Closer, Visconti's White Nights, Deserted Station and The Iron Giant.

• Matt Zoller Seitz: "I suspect that decades hence, after more prosaic awards-baiting pictures like Closer, Kinsey and Sideways have become pop-culture footnotes, Hero and Flying Daggers will still be watched, discussed and treasured, and considered among the great works of popular art released to American theaters in 2004 - and that if critics fail to recognize this fact today, future generations will wonder what the hell was wrong with us."

• The preview for Straight-Jacket simply cannot be viewed out from under the shadow of November 2, argues Mark Ames.

• DVDs: Steven Psyllos on the Wu-Tang Clan's Disciples of the 36 Chambers; Saul Austerlitz on Crimson Gold and Jim Knipfel on Dracula vs Frankenstein.

JD Conner in the Boston Globe: "America's current empire - enduring, threatened, temporary, semi-accidental, take your pick - seems to call for a cinema to think through its contradictions." Via Cinemocracy.

Filmbrain offers "some quick picks for the final days" of the "The Newest Tiger: 60 Years of South Korean Cinema" series in NYC.

What's up at Twitch: John Woo is dreamcasting, behind-the-scenes pix from Terry Gilliam's Tideland and... some Belgians are pretty scared of the new Luc Besson-produced Banlieu 13.

"At any given time, 80 percent of SAG members are out of work. And not just for a week or two." In the Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara describes what life's actually like, day to day, for tens of thousands. Via Vince Keenan.

Greg Allen: "Have I got a site for you: CremasterFanatic.com."

Wiley Wiggins has a site, too: Query Letters I Love. Wonderful.

Posted by dwhudson at December 1, 2004 1:45 PM