Weekend shorts.

The Nation's Stuart Klawans reviews Machuca, "an insidiously unforced movie, never drawing attention to its own cleverness, always investing meaning and tension into its details," a retelling, with a twist, of the 1973 coup in Chile that brought Pinochet to ruthless power. It was a hit there and now, as Klawans writes, "astonishingly, will represent the country as its official entry for the Academy Awards." Page 2 is given to Gegen die Wand (Head On) and Klawans's suggestions as to why it's been such a hit in Europe came as a surprise to me, anyway; he might not be wrong.

To an extent, however limited, the evolution of American epic cinema since its "last great era" in the 50s and 60s parallels that of America itself, argues Ian Garrick Mason in the New Statesman, and what's more, the waning of its most recent flourishing may well reflect a growing distaste for war and empire-building. (If you've got problems accessing that URL, try this one.)

You might remember Nick James's piece in the current issue of Sight & Sound on the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection, those 800 rolls of century-old nitrate film discovered in 1994. Now, Ian Jack (presumably the same Ian Jack who edits Granta) has written one that resonates with its venue:

Sitting in the BFI's cinema, I felt that history had suddenly been enlarged and one of its divisions abolished, that between the living and the long dead.... The reels were the original negatives... The images, then, have a freshness and clarity, but that (to the film historian or otherwise) is only part of their appeal. What they show is a world now lost to us: the busy world of northern Britain in its manufacturing, mining heyday; the world that, among other things, created and sustained this newspaper as the Manchester Guardian.

Also:

• Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee on Vera Drake: "Excellent social history, but why bother making a film about the bad old days? Because people have forgotten. Above all, because attitudes towards sex and the young are almost as bizarrely hypocritical now."

• Steve Rose profiles Christopher Doyle: "Despite his shambolic demeanour, Doyle has been riding the Asian new wave pretty shrewdly. Now that he is a marquee name, he can be the deciding factor in whether or not a film gets made."

• John Patterson: "It's my earnest hope that out there in the backwoods and the boondocks, the next generation of great film-makers is home-schooling itself, far from the empty education offered by most film academies... The means of production are finally, within our grasp. Now comes the revolution."

• 40 years after the murders dramatized in Mississippi Burning, a former preacher and Klan leader has been officially charged, reports Suzanne Goldenberg.

• Lisa Allardice interviews Natalie Portman, who's now begun work on a film with Amos Gitai.

• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Andrew Birkin's The Cement Garden.

• John Patterson on Julia Roberts: "I guess this is the most depressing aspect of being a movie star: the fact that the vehicle never really matters - it's the driver who counts."

LA CityBEAT's Andy Klein's year-end list is presented as an alphabetical and porous thing, subject to change any moment now; he's at his most engaging, though, writing about the two films he's pulled out of the running. Also: "Twelve years after first seeing Days of Being Wild, I'm finally developing some fondness for it."

At the top of Joe Leydon's list: A Very Long Engagement.

Ray Pride's got ten, plus 15 runners-up and a lot of notes. Both he and Joe Leydon have an entry that may surprise a few: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead.

If you followed Slate's "Movie Club" this year, you'll have gotten a kick out one reader's parody of the proceedings posted right there at the end by David Edelstein, a host with a healthy sense of humor.

Dave Kehr hears Michael Mashon, a curator of the motion picture division at the Library of Congress, describe a discovery now headed to the Film Forum and DVD: "It was a moment that archivists live for... I knew in the first five minutes that this version was different. I can't begin to describe the sheer joy of discovery, the feeling that I may have been the first person since 1933 to see Baby Face uncut."

Also in the New York Times:

• Bruce Handy: "[Graham Lord's] Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven proves appropriately funny and smoothly written, with the author serving as a kind of cleareyed cheerleader, albeit one with a hard act to follow: Niven himself wrote two very amusing, best-selling memoirs, The Moon's a Balloon and Bring On the Empty Horses, which rank with the great show-biz autobiographies, up there with Moss Hart's Act One, Sammy Davis Jr's Yes I Can' and maybe even Robert Evans's book The Kid Stays in the Picture."

• Two Aviator-related pieces from Dennis McDougal: the first ticks off a list of previous Howard Hughes biopics that took shape but never got off the ground (and the names attached and then disengaged are pretty impressive); it seems to be the product of research for the second, in which he tries to trace just where it is that the work of others ends and that of John Logan's begins in the writing of the screenplay.

• Tom O'Neil: "Here's a look at the little-understood process of choosing Oscar nominees, and a forecast of which contenders are most likely to benefit from the motion picture academy's system when the nominations are announced on Jan. 25."

• Julie Salaman takes a look at the ratings system and asks the age-old question, "what are we protecting our children from, and who should do the protecting?" Also: When celebs give to charity, plentifully and publicly, how pure are their motives? Does it really matter as long as they give?

"This year, the Independent joins the BBC as a media partner for the World Cinema Award 2005." So Roger Clarke introduces the nominees - Hero, Zatoichi, Bad Education, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Return and Uzak (Distant) - while the BBC offers a little mini-site with clips and such. Also in the Independent: Lee Marshall's interview with Reese Witherspoon.

The Berlinale turns 55 this year, its Forum 35 and the Panorama, which has just announced, appropriately enough, 20 of the films it'll be screening, 20. More from Brian Brooks at indieWIRE, where you can also scan the nominees for the Producers Guild and Directors Guild awards.

A one-night film festival? If they're all shorts, it's certainly possible. If they're "eclectic" shorts, all the better. Shadowplay: Tuesday, January 11, at the Parkway Theater in Oakland, CA.

Online browsing tip. "Hollywood Noir: Satirical Photographs by Will Connell," an exhibition staged a few years ago at the UCR / California Museum of Photography. In other words, this may be old news to you, but if it isn't, you will want to view all 48 photographs. You might want to view them again as you read Hollywood Conference, a one-act play by Nunnally Johnson, Patterson McNutt, Gene Fowler, Jr and Grover Jones. Via The Crime in Your Coffee.

Posted by dwhudson at January 8, 2005 2:17 PM