More lists, awards and shorts.

Sideways topping another critics' poll isn't news; but Sideways topping Film Comment's 5th annual critics' poll is. Just check the names of the contributors. But don't skip over the list of the "30 Best Unreleased Films of 2004," just under the top 50 usual suspects. It's Café Lumière with a bullet; Jia Zhangke's The World is a distant second.

Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE: "After a promising spring and a beleaguered early summer (thanks to the domination of Fahrenheit 9/11), foreign language films have bounced back in the latter half of 2004, showing staying power, impressive box office figures and an indelible presence rivaling their English-language art-house counterparts."

For the New Republic, Elbert Ventura writes up eight of the "top unheralded films of the year."

Ironically, you can probably read Robert Wilonsky's year-end assessment of the state of the battle between Indiewood and truly independent films in many a New Times weekly; just do. Soldiers on both sides are quoted and Peter Biskind is given credit for Primer's Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Accompanying best-of list: the New Times reviewers' top ten.

And here's the first online viewing tip. AtomFilms has selected its top ten. Via The Crime in Your Coffee, which tips one that didn't make the list, the 11-minute "Black XXX-Mas" (site).

MSNBC's John Hartl, who's been wondering lately whatever happened to Robert De Niro, picks a top ten while Michael Ventre slams a bottom ten.

Never mind 2004. David Poland's already looking ahead to the summer of O-Five. Even so, as the awards keep popping, Movie City News will chart them. The latest from Aaron Barnhart at TV Barn: "Beyond a doubt, the most consequential action in the TV industry in 2004 was the federal government’s crackdown on broadcast content - and the networks' almost complete capitulation in the face of it."

Hotel Rwanda prompts more than just another review from Salon's Charles Taylor:

In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman points out that the left, steeped in the Rousseauist principles of enlightenment, has had trouble crediting the irrational, even when the irrational is embodied in the fascist movements the left has traditionally opposed. [Director Terry] George and [co-writer Keir] Pearson understand that no explanation can ever fully account for an outbreak of the irrational on as massive a level as the Rwandan genocide. In essence, they are saying that evil took over in Rwanda.

[...]

This is not a subtle or nuanced view. But to want something subtle or nuanced in a film made to show the shame of a genocide that could have been prevented is to say that aesthetics should trump moral urgency.

Joe Leydon: "I can't help but marvel at how many critics - and, for that matter, how many plain ol' movie buffs - are waxing nostalgic about Robert Aldrich's original Flight of the Phoenix while eviscerating John Moore's newly released update. Gee whiz, have any of these people actually looked at Aldrich's film lately? I think not."

Mark Schilling interviews Shinya Tsukamoto and reviews his latest, Vital for the Japan Times. That's via Todd at Twitch, who reviewed the film back in September, and gathers oodles more Japanese film-related news in one big spanking entry. Plus: a review of 2046 and a pointer to the trailer for Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda.

For Filmmaker, Peter Bowen reports on the making of In the Realms of the Unreal.

Definitely a film to keep an eye on: Black Dahlia, starring, among many others, Kristen Kerr, David J, who's already won an award for his original score though the film has yet to be completed, Karen Black, Caveh Zahedi and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

There were protests out in front of the Castro Theatre in San Francisco this weekend. For background, see Johnny Ray Huston's cover story in the San Francisco Bay Guardian last month, and for an update on the situation, including an introduction to the new programmer, see Cheryl Eddy's current "Script Doctor" column. Steve Rhodes sends word of a few shots snapped at the weekend's goings on; in the meantime, a discussion of what actually needs to be done is underway at SF IndieBlog.

Meanwhile, in this week's SFBG:

• Dennis Harvey opens his review of Bad Education with a compare-n-contrast exercise: "John Waters and Pedro Almodóvar, intentional bad-taste pioneers in their respective countries who now find themselves at very different career and artistic-stature places."

• Edward E Crouse on The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou: "Many critics, or at least some of the arch jargon-slingers, think [Wes] Anderson has finally gone too far into his own whizzing head. Don't believe it."

• Harvey finds the "bizarre Christmas Day release," The Woodsman, "powerful in its quietude."

"For decades we have been told that tragedy, however valid in the past, is a dead duck today." But Michael Billington discovers its "rebirth" in the theatrical adaptation of Festen at the Lyric in London. Also in the Guardian: Kate Stables offers seven online viewing tips for the holidays.

Simon Doonan gets everything just right for a photo shoot with Colin Farrell; and then it all goes terribly, amusingly wrong.

Also in the New York Observer:

• Rex Reed's ten best and worst of the year; you'll find the surprises among the worsts.

• Andrew Sarris on Hotel Rwanda, The Assassination of Richard Nixon and Donkey Skin.

• Bruce Feirstein, out in LA, listens around: "Beyond the Oscars and audience values, there's an additional component to the Hollywood political connection that people have been discussing lately - in this case, concerning the waning power and demystification of celebrities."

In the mid-90s, if you wanted to understand your contemporary moment, there was no getting around Escape Velocity. And as we barreled toward the year 2000, we were bombarded with countless tomes seeking to analyze our collective panic, but I never found a better one than The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. The author of both is Mark Dery, who has just pried open the maws of Shovelware, wherein his most welcome first post is an entertaining riff on why:

Some of my favorite blogs reclaim the radical promise inherent in the notion of an online journal, letting casual passersby eavesdrop on a stranger's innermost thoughts, see the world through another mind's eye. Call it the Being John Malkovich effect. The cultural critic Julian Dibbell had it just about right when he theorized the weblog as postmodern wunderkammer - an idiosyncratic jumble of found objects (in this case, ideas and images, facts and fictions scavenged from the global mediastream) that "reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the 'discovery' of the networked world."

Speaking of which. 'Tis an honor to have scored a spot on Rex's "Blogs of the Year" list at Fimoculous. Seriously.

Régis Wargnier's Man to Man has been selected to open the 55th Berlinale on February 10; the fest runs through February 20. In the meantime, much of the schedule for transmediale05 (February 4 through 8) is now in place.

Some poor unbylined Frieze writer on the video work of Nina Könnemann, currently on view in London: "Her videos gently unhinge your sense of time and space. No special effects are used, and all the actions shown are real events, none of them what you might call spectacular."

Ryan Griffis for Net Art News: "Art Mobs, a new project named after Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs uses the capabilities of portable, decentralized broadcasting devices to create peer-to-peer gallery tours."

Posted by dwhudson at December 22, 2004 3:30 PM