Shorts, 1/6.

Are we getting any nearer to the last lists in the universe? If they're as inspiring as a few of the following, let's hope not. Besides, we still don't have Jonathan Rosenbaum's yet.

But! Filmbrain said it was coming, and here it is, his countdown to what he considers the best film of 2004, Last Life in the Universe.

Kamera's contributors pick their films of the year; parts 1 and 2. Plus: Ann Lee's quick chat with Natalie Portman.

This week's Austin Chronicle is top tens, straight through, and that goes for the film section, too, of course. When the votes came in, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out on top; but it's the ballots that make for fun reading.

Goodbye Dragon Inn tops Jeffrey M Anderson's list; surprise entry: Millennium Mambo. But then there are the worsts.

And for Jeremy Heilman? Dogville, nine more and lots of notes.

Jeffrey Wells is looking forward to no fewer than 22 films opening in 2005. "Make it 17 picks and 5 toothpicks." He lays them out in alphabetical order and blurbs their buzz. Two years ago, you'd have been surprised by the number of docs on that list. Glad we aren't now.

The cinetrix would like to hear about your "favorite under-the-radar performances."

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez asks distribution reps from THINKFilm, Lions Gate, Zeitgeist, HBO Films and Samuel Goldwyn how the year went for indies; all in all, it was a tough one.

In the Independent, Ciar Byrne and Maxine Frith note that kids pretty much drove the UK box office to a decent showing by the end of the year.

Michael Howard meets Bahman Ghobadi, whose new film, Turtles Can Fly, "paints a radically different picture of life in Iraq from the one most western audiences have seen on their news channels. Gobadi is a deeply political film-maker, but his nuanced approach skillfully avoids the naive blustering of many on the anti-war left. 'It is an anti-war movie without slogans.'"

Also in the Guardian:

• Simon Singh on how Robert Hamer's Dead of Night "inspired Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi to develop a new model of the universe."

• Franco Zeffirelli is directing Puccini's La bohème, one of the 13 operas in La Scala's first season since reopening to lavish fanfare, but has nevertheless recently been publicly highly critical of the overall program. John Hooper reports.

• Jennifer Worth, a former midwife: "Mike Leigh's award-winning film Vera Drake, about the almost forgotten trade of an illegal abortionist, is brilliant - well written, directed and acted, evocative of London life in the 1950s. But unfortunately, it is medically inaccurate."

• Ronald Bergan remembers self-professed "Cinema Schlockmeister" Larry Buchanan, 1923 - 2004.

More news from Rotterdam, and the headline's a grabber: "Russian necrorealist Yevgeni Yufit Filmmaker in Focus." If that prompts a big, Huh?, Steve Gallagher explains all in an excellent, link-laden entry at Filmmaker's blog - where you'll also read news, via Scott Macaulay, of a project written by David Gordon Green to be directed by Sam Jones.

Steven Winn in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Endings, by their nature, are exquisitely torturous. We're all psychologically primed to crave resolving climaxes, and simultaneously inclined to doubt, mistrust, reject and even fear them."

"Nearly 10 years ago, [Voice of Pentecost Senior Pastor Richard] Gazowsky received a directive from God to make movies for the Lord," writes Lessley Anderson in the SF Weekly. He's launched a production company, Christian WYSIWYG Filmworks, and they're currently at work on Gravity: In the Shadow of Joseph, "a feature-length epic retelling of the Bible story of Joseph, set in a science-fiction world of the future. WYSIWYG plans to build spacecraft and monsters with prosthetic limbs, to cast more than 4,000 volunteer actors, and to film on location in Malta, Turkey, and Ireland." Estimated budget: $50 million.

Last month, as Helena Smith reported in the Guardian, Oliver Stone apologized to Turkey for his "over-dramatized" screenplay for Midnight Express. Paul Krassner was wondering how Billy Hayes, the author of the book the film was based on, felt about that; turns out, though some of the over-the-top scenes made sense to him at the time, he seems to feel the apology's just about right.

Also in the LA Weekly:

• David Chute on "The Nature of Things: Graham Greene on Film" series at the UCLA Film and Television Archive: "[T]he Greene we might intuit from some of his most interesting film vehicles, such as Carol Reed's adaptation of Greene's original story for The Third Man, seems less a perennial Nobel Prize also-ran and more a surreal nut-case genre writer, a brother under the skin to such hallucinogenic pulp visionaries as Cornell Woolrich and John Franklin Bardin."

• Kim Morgan on Days of Being Wild, or more generally, Wong Kar-wai: "Wong works the elements of his aesthetic - music, beautiful people and emotion - into a mood that so overtakes you it's nearly impossible to emerge from his films without feeling slightly drunk."

• Chuck Wilson on Bruce Weber's "meandering" A Letter to True.

Anatomy of Hell "is no cul-de-sac but one of a series of experiments," writes Nicolas Rapold towards the end of a piece for Stop Smiling after he's opened the cabinet of Catherine Breillat and admired more than a few of those experiments.

Before George Fasel can address what he feels are the real problems most Americans will have with Godard's In Praise of Love, he has to wipe away the superficial ones.

Margaret Cho on House of Flying Daggers: "Even though I adore the Silk 'n Sword genre, they leave me with a vague sense of existential terror."

More and more, this week's Voice emerges from the new site. Via James Wolcott, Gary Indiana's remembrance of Susan Sontag: "She knew that empathy can change history."

Guy Davenport, 1927 - 2005. An obit from Paula Burba in the Courier-Journal; and Ed Champion points to several rich resources Mark Woods has gathered.

Cinecultist Karen Wilson is slated to host an evening for the Reel Roundtable in NYC. On January 17, she'll introduce a screening of When Brendan Met Trudy and then do a bit of Q&A with Elizabeth Carmody.

New to Slate's "Movie Club," and bearing their top tens with them, are Christopher Kelly of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe.

Online browsing tip. Floating Logos. Via Wiley Wiggins.

Posted by dwhudson at January 6, 2005 2:32 PM