Shorts, 1/4.

Slate's "Movie Club" has been called to order and, already, it's a pretty lively session, even taking into account the considerable agreement on a few key issues (e.g., they don't like being called Paulettes, but wasn't she great? And Dogville ticked them all off, but critics who've praised it tick them off even more).

So far the participants are... loud. Charles Taylor? Heavens. You've got to wonder if he talks like this. Armond White? You knew what to expect, and there it is. You have to wonder how Fahrenheit 9/11 cost the Democrats the election, as he asserts, if Republicans - the ones I know, anyway - demonstrably refused to see it. "Michael Moore's divisiveness worked to achieve an anti-American schism"? No, George Bush's divisiveness, etc., etc. Oh, and: Richard Linklater wasn't aiming to shoot Paris; he was focused on a man and a woman. Though AO Scott will be joining in, the tone will clearly be quite different from last year's when things got particularly meaty during the discussion of Tony Kushner and Denys Arcand. J Hoberman will be missed.

IndieWIRE's got another list for you and it may be their best: "Top 15 Undistributed Films of 2004." Each title is accompanied by a link to its site, a run-down of its "track record" (festivals it's played, etc.) and the "lowdown" (i.e., why it's made the list).

More best-of-2004 lists:

• Doug Cummings (if you only have time for one, here you go).
• Harry Knowles.
• Michael Tully.
• Dan Jardine.
• Cinema. Et Cetera.

Mind Game

Fans of Japanese cinema will want to know that Todd at Twitch has found news of a few you might well not have heard of yet via Stauffen. Also: the top ten Japanese films of the year, as chosen by Mark Schilling of the Japan Times.

Mohamed El-Assyouti wraps the year in Egyptian cinema for Al-Ahram Weekly: "For a while in midsummer, Osama Fawzi's Bahib Al-Sima (I Love Cinema) was all the rage. It drastically divided critics as to its worth and appeal, generating wide-ranging debates in and beyond the milieu." Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

And TV? Look no further than TeeVee's "recap of 'the year of living blandly.'"

"Deep in the basement is almost 100 years of history on 15 million metres of film. Images of the field battles of World War I, the communist partisans of World War II, a unique visual record of the Non-Aligned Movement born in the 1960s, Tito's Yugoslavia, Gaddafi's Libya, Nasser's Egypt... Yet these images will soon be lost forever, because Filmske Novosti is in crisis." The BBC's Matt Prodger reports on the imminent loss of one of the largest film archives in the world. Yes, we're facing a more urgent global crisis at the moment; but we seriously need to work addressing this one into our 2005 as soon as we feasibly can.

"It's a symptom, not a diagnosis." Reluctant, yet anything but coy, Lukas Moodysson tells the Guardian's Xan Brooks what was on his mind when he made A Hole in My Heart.

George Fasel is truly glad to have started off the year with a viewing of 2046: "[S]pecial mention must be reserved for Tony Leung, who has given his character a combination of worldliness and erotic aching, of dogged pursuit and rueful acceptance of what must be, which reminds me of nobody so much as Marcello Mastroianni in his prime. That is just about as large a compliment as I know how to pay."

Who'll be the stars of Sundance? Among others, Glenn Close, who'll be in three films screening at the fest. Cyndi Greening notes who else is appearing in more than one film on the program.

1967. The set of Cool Hand Luke. Bruce Conner was there with his 8mm camera. 1978. San Francisco. Bruce Conner was there, snapping away. The evidence is at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Via Movie City Indie.

It's an extraordinarily spare week for new DVD releases, which is good news for anyone who has a piece of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. For DVD Talk, Geoffrey Kleinman interviews the stars. One knows a little more about movies than the other:

Kal: Is this the one with the horse's head in her bed?
John: (Sighs), yeah. God, Kal.

Saul Austerlitz is the second New York Press critic to come up with a year-end list; Los Angeles Plays Itself is at the top. Austerlitz also reviews Hitler's Hit Parade, "an x-ray of Nazi Germany's collective unconscious."

Also in the NYP: Matt Zoller Seitz on In Good Company and Flight of the Phoenix, "two under-the-radar movies that happen to star Dennis Quaid, and that dare to believe in their material, play it straight and treat their characters with something like decency," and Armond White on A Love Song for Bobby Long, an "odd, endearing film," and The Merchant of Venice: "Pacino's amazing emphasis on Shylock's deep anger and Lynn Collins's significantly poised delivery of Portia's appeal to Christian grace, sum up this year's movie controversies."

The new site for the Village Voice is going to take some getting used to. It's slightly snazzier, though at the same time, more cluttered and, at first glance, just plain too busy. Also: Will all the old links eventually redirect to wherever it is that all those features and reviews written before last week have gone? Look up a film at IMDb and try to reach its Voice review. Yikes. In the meantime, is Dennis Lim's review of In Good Company the only new one this week? I can't tell. But there is this from Tom Sellar: Richard Foreman is turning to filmmaking, "a momentous decision for a director internationally recognized for his colorful and groundbreaking ideas about the stage."

For Flak, James Norton remembers Jerry Orbach.

Want to glimpse a possible future? Vloggercon. January 22 in NYC. Via Chuck Olsen.

Online viewing tip #1. Back in early December, Jason Deans reported in the Guardian that Ben Kingsley was reviving Sexy Beast's Don Logan for a few promos for the Band Aid campaign. A kind reader has pointed out that you can now view them, and it is a thrill to see the old bastard again. You can either click your way to the three clips through Bore Me's front door ("Top 10," then "Dec 04"; they're at #10) or snap right to 'em directly: 1, 2 and 3.

Online viewing tip #2. Some bits not 100 percent work-safe. Phamous 69, a flashily designed mag featuring in its latest issue, among other things, Adam Carr's tribute to Russ Meyer.

Posted by dwhudson at January 4, 2005 1:29 PM