Shorts, 1/13.

Leading with Jim McKay's Everyday People, Chuck Tyron's top ten provides an excellent excuse to direct you immediately to the chutry experiment.

David Poland sorts through the over 200 top tens Movie City News has collected and collated on its Top Ten Chart and discovers that the top six "are pretty much the same any way you slice it. Sideways (Craig Phillips posts a scene), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Million Dollar Baby, The Aviator, Before Sunset and The Incredibles.

So how was that New York Film Critics Circle Awards dinner on Sunday? You won't find an account any more fun than Jake Brooks's in the New York Observer. Also: Eddie Borges on Blueprint, "a new big fish in the small pond of Manhattan's film world."

David Thomson is guest curating and introducing a series of films based on his new book, The Whole Equation at the Pacific Film Archive, running today through January 30. In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Kimberley Chun chats with him and finds him "less intimidating and more down-to-earth than one imagines." Nonetheless, on a neighboring page, Max Goldberg remains skeptical of Thomson's most recent direction: "Questioning the limits of cinematic form is valid enough, but [David] Thomson can do it to the point of being reductive. With distributors, multiplexes, DVD manufacturers, and Blockbuster stores already limiting what most people can see, do we really need one of the nation's preeminent film thinkers playing the same game?"

Also in the SFBG: "Grown-up" outsider film is a rare breed indeed, but Dennis Harvey has found an oeuvre not to be ignored in the program "Phil Chambliss: Auteur From Arkansas," screening tomorrow evening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; his films are "authentic, crazy - crazily authentic." And Goldberg, briefly, on The Merchant of Venice.

With the new site and all, and until we all get used to it - as we will! - it's easy to miss new articles in the Village Voice. Fortunately, Anthony Kaufman has a blog and knows how to use it. He points to the piece, which he wrote, that inspired the response from Ted Hope right there at the top of the "Shorts" on Tuesday. The gist: "[A]s we enter Bush's second term, the country's extreme rightward turn could ignite the type of movie renaissance not seen since eight years of nuclear proliferation, HIV discrimination, and materialist greed helped produce the American independent film movement of the late 80s and early 90s. If the careers of Todd Haynes, Spike Lee, and Steven Soderbergh were all launched during the Reagan-Bush regime, imagine what's possible over the next four years." And in his most recent blog entry, he adds a few "worthy quotes from some industry folks that didn't make it into the final article."

Just one review in this week's LA Weekly: Scott Foundas on The Chorus, "the kind of foreign film, like Cinema Paradiso and Il Postino and Amélie before it, that doesn't seem foreign at all to most audiences, because it speaks in a language that obliterates the need for subtitling - that of the sentimental cliché."

Steve Rosenbaum: "In all the hot sweaty blogging about Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle - there's a interesting new set of features in iMovie that matters to folks in the documentary community." More from Wiley Wiggins and Filmmaker's Steve Gallagher.

Gossip is usually out of bounds around here, but this... well, it's having repercussions! Paul D Colford in the New York Daily News: "The breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston ranks as the mother of all celebrity news stories. It's so big that People, Us Weekly and In Touch Weekly have all taken the unprecedented step of rushing out a second issue in less than a week to splash the split on their covers."

Laura M Holson takes stock of the ongoing negotiations on just how and in what form Miramax will extract itself from Disney. Also in the New York Times: Ross Johnson previews The Last Mogul: The Life and Times of Lew Wasserman and Dana Stevens reviews About Baghdad, "grim index of the situation in Iraq that July 2003 now seems a long time ago."

"Ironic: it took a French audience to get British distributors interested in a British film." Even so, Yasmin, a film about prejudice in northern England which played on big screens throughout Europe, will premiere in the UK on Channel 4, reports Stuart Jeffries. Also in the Guardian: Anthony Harvison on a rediscovered recording of a performance of one of Dennis Potter's plays; and a Clint Eastwood quiz.

Heavens, Ray Pride's on a roll over at Movie City Indie.

And over at Twitch, a favorite since its launch, things have just gotten even livelier with the addition of a new blogger, Svet, who concentrates on European affairs.

For Film-Philosophy, Rebecca Bell-Metereau offers her take on each of the essays in the anthology Memory and Popular Film, edited by Paul Grainge. And via F-P: Miradas, a Spanish-language journal that looks vast and deep.

Add SXSW's Matt Dentler's name to the list of festival directors urging filmmakers to think twice, three times and four before submitting a work on DVD.

Video, performances, installations... the program for transmediale.05 (February 4 through 8 in Berlin) is taking shape fast. Interested primarily in the screenings? Here, then.

Minimal, in an intriguing astronomical chart sort of way: the posters for the 55th Berlinale.

Posted by dwhudson at January 13, 2005 4:22 PM