Shorts, 3/1.

Twitch's Todd: "What people miss with all the hype around Tetsuo... is Tsukamoto's growing desire, and ability, to wed his more surreal urges to living, breathing human characters, creating some stunning character studies in the process. He first got the mixture right with Bullet Ballet and, after a brief foray into commercial film making with Gemini, Tsukamoto returned to his distinctive vision with 2002's A Snake of June, a film that I truly believe stands as Tsukamoto's masterpiece."

You don't often see NP Thompson rave, but then, Thompson doesn't often see films that move him as deeply as The Best of Youth:

[U]ltimately six hours seems not quite enough (I can think of several 90-minute films that feel longer) to savor, to grieve, and to celebrate along with the siblings and spouses of the Carati family.... The Best of Youth isn't a perfect movie, or even a particularly consistent one, yet the mere accuracy with which it depicts various states of love, hurt and confusion shook me more profoundly than any film I can recall. I'll admit it - I wept buckets.

More from Jessica Winter in the Village Voice.

Robert Greenwald is now blogging. Via Brian Flemming.

James Wolcott explains why Ken Tucker's take on Gunner Palace in New York is preposterous. The Voice's J Hoberman finds the film "fascinating, if not entirely satisfying," has some very perceptive things to say about Michael Tucker's approach to his subject, but then drops his bomb: "It's the human face of Abu Ghraib."

The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley reviews Edward Jay Epstein's The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. The bottom line: "[T]heaters aren't where movies make money any more."

Two book reviews at Kamera: Edward Lamberti on Horizons West, "Jim Kitses's extraordinarily poised, lucid and all-encompassing study of the Western," and Ben McCann on Erica Carter's Dietrich's Ghosts, "the first major English-language study of the film aesthetics of the Third Reich."

In Salon, Allen Barra writes about what makes Francis Xavier Toole's stories work; he was the writer who published just one book in his life, and that at the age of 70: Rope Burns, a collection including "Million Dollar Baby." Also: the Dashiell Hammett novel that kept eluding adaptation, though it remains "his most important contribution to American literature - to American culture."

To Filmbrain, Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun "seems more like a personal drama than a political one."

Twenty years on, Claude Lanzmann reflects in Le Monde (and in French) on the origins of the title of his landmark documentary, Shoah. Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau," and here's a good place and moment to mention in the most celebratory of tones that Perlentaucher has launched an English-language offshoot. It's called signandsight and it's off to an excellent start.

Matthew Scott Kelemen at Alternet on Jessica Yu's In the Realms of the Unreal: "The nature of Darger's work and technique make innovation practically a requirement in telling his story."

At Hollywood Bitchslap, Scott Weinberg looks at nearly two dozen films we're likely to actually see on screens, large or small, thanks to the Miramax/Disney divorce.

Gerard Gilbert in the Independent on Julian Sands as Laurence Olivier.

David Roth at the New Republic on VH1 and Ego Trip's Race-o-Rama: "It is outrageous and serious-minded, bitterly angry and bitterly amused, crudely race-baiting and oddly inclusive, authentically street and equally steeped in college-kid hyper-irony."

Steve Rosenbaum on Brightcove and TiVo To Go.

Posted by dwhudson at March 1, 2005 9:54 AM