Germans and shorts.

The Goethe-Institut of San Francisco is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its Berlin & Beyond festival (tomorrow through... well, there's the poster right there; here's the trailer) with a tribute to Bruno Ganz, who'll be interviewed onstage at the Castro by David Thomson. In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey does an excellent job of succinctly encapsulating a long and varied career before blurbing a few more highlights of the fest.

The opening night film, by the way, is Hans Weingartner's The Edukators, which, last year, was the first German film to screen at Cannes in far too long. It's also made more than a few German critics' year-end best-of lists.

Also in the SFBG:

• Cheryl Eddy on The Assassination of Richard Nixon: "Despair prevails in scene after scene, but Bicke is such a pathetic guy that it's hard to get in his corner."

• Dave Kim on Hotel Rwanda, "remains very much a suspenseful drama, not an 'important' political-spectacle film."

• Max Goldberg on Bhutan's first feature film, Travellers and Magicians, "a simplistic tale offset by splendorous scenery."

But back to Berlin. That's what Franka Potente's decided, at any rate. After a year in LA. In the first half of Falko Müller and Mirko Heinemann's interview with her for Zitty, the half that's online, she explains why and she seems to have about two dozen reasons or so. As a Berliner-by-choice myself, I naturally think they're about two dozen very good ones, too. The interview's in German, but once again, Google's fuzzy translations will often do if you're really interested.

Meanwhile, the Berlinale organizers have been quietly busy. The first films have been selected for the Perspecktive Deutsches Kino and the mighty Forum, which'll mark its 35th year in February.

Two other fine festivals are shaping up: 14 films are lined up for Rotterdam's VPRO Tiger Awards Competition, as Mark Rabinowitz reports at indieWIRE. Fest runs January 26 through February 6 and has a better poster this year.

And Eugene Hernandez (who was interviewed by Mindy Bond and Raphie Frank for Gothamist yesterday) notes that Luke and Andrew Wilson's The Wendell Baker Story, which also features Owen, will open SXSW. Also mentioned: Todd Solondz will be there, taking questions, and half a dozen music docs.

Let's add mention, too, of Deadroom, an intriguing collective project many of us have been periodically checking in on via the blog of one its directors, David Lowery (and here's his 2004 top ten, by the way).

Speaking of top tens. I ♥ Huckabees is a major hit on the lists of all four critics for the City Pages.

Acquarello's 2004. Stand-out entry: Harun Farocki's War at a Distance.

Before drawing up his top ten, Tom Hall faces a cold realization - "maybe, just maybe, this wasn't the best year for films" - then sketches the running themes in an otherwise "same ol' same ol'" year before opening with Sideways at the top and counting down from there.

Andrew Sarris: "I've been in the year-end 10-best business since 1958, when Jonas Mekas graciously allowed me to share his 'Movie Journal' column in The Village Voice with my 10-best list, which I'm now ashamed to remember failed to include both Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. But that was 46 years ago, and I very much doubt that I will be around 46 years from now to second-guess my Top 10 lists for 2004. So with little fear of afterthought and without further ado, here are my considered preferences for the year past."

Also in the New York Observer:

• Rex Reed: "[I]t's a good time to raise a glass and drink one last toast to the friends we loved and lost in 2004."

• Marcus Baram and Noelle Hancock present a list of a different sort: a celeb charity report card.

• Baram talks to actors and producers about their memories of Jerry Orbach.

• "Isn't it time for Mr. De Niro to get down to the real business of acting?" asks Stephanie Zacherek. "And that line of thinking leads to a dangerous question: Just what is the business of acting?"

• Sheela Kolhatkar on how Susan Sontag livened up New York's literary scene and criticism itself: "Mary McCarthy once told Susan, 'I hear you're the new me."

• Tom Scocca on the many gigs of Lee Siegel: "He's doing something very brave," New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier said, on the phone while traveling in Chicago. "He's trying to earn a living as a freelance intellectual."

Slate's "Movie Club" takes an interesting turn towards the end of its second day. Host David Edelstein invites Village Voice film editor Dennis Lim to drop in and, as he puts it himself, "respond to the anti-Voice pileup." The response is short, sharp and stings. Then, Edelstein:

I appreciate Dennis Lim's comments and agree with some of them. But I want to add that I invited Armond [White] here (after having griped about him in previous Movie Clubs) because I think he is not just an irascible, ungovernable flame-thrower but also a hugely important voice in contemporary film criticism. I find his pieces genuinely challenging and indispensable, even when I think they're slightly nuts.

Well put.

Back at the Voice, it turns out there's new stuff this week after all. J Hoberman, for example, on Hitler's Hit Parade: "The flow of images has a terrible inexorability. Watching this movie is like watching people pirouette gaily off a cliff.... Given the image panoply of the past year, it would be illuminating to deconstruct and reassemble the sub-Wagnerian, self-flattering gesamtkunstwerk that constitutes the American social spectacle."

• Michael Atkinson on the "impromptu re-release" of Taxi Driver: "[I]magine a like-minded film of this decade killing at the box office and getting nommed for Best Picture."

• Joshua Land: "A documentary double bill brings distinctively European sensibilities to New York's worlds of high finance and fashion." The docs: Wall Street: A Wondering Trip and Knock Off: Revenge on the Logo.

• Ben Kenigsberg on Murder-Set-Pieces, "a movie so utterly degenerate it makes you wish that indie filmmakers had to prove a basic standard of decency in order to buy a camera."

• In November, Toni Schlesinger introduced the "Noir Genius Exam"; now, here're the answers and the winning essay by Buzzy Lawler.

Jonathan Romney in Artforum on Tracey Emin's Top Spot:

Emin has not made anything like a conventional piece of narrative cinema. But neither would Top Spot make sense as a gallery video. It is a sketchy hybrid, pitched uncertainly between two worlds and lacking the production values and informed interest in screen language that are increasingly expected in artists' film and video (not that anyone expected Emin to be another Shirin Neshat).

Also: Gwen Allen on Yvonne Rainer.

Andrew Leonard briefly surveys the mess that copyright law has become and asks, "Where is the iTunes store for breakthrough documentaries?"

The latest twist in the Disney wars: the book. DisneyWar, by bestselling author James B Stewart, is out in March. CBS MarketWatch's Jon Friedman thinks it could actually do some serious harm.

6ixtynin9 times 3 equals Twitch.

Online viewing tip. The trailer for After the Apocalypse, screening soon in Sarasota and at the SF Indie Fest.

Posted by dwhudson at January 5, 2005 3:38 PM