Shorts, 7/28.

Non-subscribers are seeing less and less of the Atlantic these days, but fortunately, Benjamin Schwartz's brief appreciation for the "eccentric choice" the Library of America has made - it has "canonized James Agee" - is accessible: "Since watching silent films as a teenager he recognized, as [Dwight] Macdonald observed, that movies were 'the great, new twentieth-century art form,' and as the film reviewer for The Nation and Time from 1941 to 1948, he was more or less the first writer to make the movies respectable to American intellectuals."

"Everyone in the Triangle who cares about movies knows the name of Godfrey Cheshire," writes Kate Dobbs Ariail. Of course, more than a few know and respect the name as well. "What very few know," continues Ariail, "is that for the last couple of years he's been writing only for the Independent [Weekly], curtailing his critical activities in order to do advance work on a new project. Now he's back home in Raleigh for most of this year, to recreate himself again - this time as the maker of films." Also: David Fellerath on Murderball and Bad News Bears.

Here's a fine twist in Lee Siegel's piece on Lauren Bacall for the New Republic: "The reality of Hollywood, more than the reality of any other place, is antithetical to the creations of Hollywood. It recalls Dostoevsky's fable of the Grand Inquisitor, who spins a lie about Christian love and redemption to keep people in their place."

Also, Christopher Orr: "Jeunet's earlier films never let you come to them. They rushed out to meet you, a little too eager to win your affection. A Very Long Engagement, by contrast, takes its time, gathering weight and drawing you in slowly." And Stanley Kauffmann on War of the Worlds and The Beat That My Heart Skipped.

For the Age, Joyce Morgan interviews Bill Viola, who "acknowledges he has wrestled with whether, in the face of political tyranny and the need for action, he could justify being an artist. And he found an answer in an unlikely quarter, in the life of the 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet St John of the Cross who was imprisoned and tortured, but bore no malice towards his tormenter." Also via Movie City Indie: Time Out's Dave Calhoun heads to Denmark to chat up Lars von Trier and, at Alternet, Jeff Chang and Sylvia Chan watch Crash and debate the question, "Can Hollywood Get Race Right?"

Also in the Age: Philippa Hawker talks with Fruit Chan about his career. Via the IFC Blog.

Margaret "Dirty Pillows" White turns in an early review of Albert Brooks's Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World: "The Albert Brooks I know and love is in fact back!... So he gets called up by the powers that be, i.e., real life ex-Senator, and current day Law & Order cast member, Fred Dalton Thompson... to go to India and Pakistan and find out what makes the Muslims laugh. This is a late in the game attempt by the government to try something other than the 'usual methods of spying and fighting' to figure out what the hell is going on on that side of the world."

Byambasuren Davaa was born in Mongolia and, with co-director Luigi Falorni, made The Story of the Weeping Camel while studying at the Munich Film Academy. Now she has a new film in German theaters, The Cave of the Yellow Dog. Der Spiegel's Lars-Olav Beier reports - in English, too, thanks to Christopher Sultan.

Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs is the movie of the week at the Village Voice. Filmmaker's Matthew Ross profiles Tartan, the distribution company that's taken on the risk of sending the explicit British film to US theaters. It's run by "Hamish McAlpine, a Scotsman known as much for his business acumen as his brash, dandyish persona (wearing white fur to premieres, getting into fistfights with Larry Clark, etc.)." Rachel Kramer Bussel tells you what you can expect to see - a lot, of course - and Jessica Winter offers "9 ways of looking at 9 Songs." More from Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly.

Also:

• Dennis Lim on Tony Takitani, which "conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness," and, briefly, a stage adaptation of the Haruki Murakami collection, The Elephant Vanishes. Also: A report from the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

• Michael Atkinson finds Bad News Bears "has no point to make and little grace with which to make it" (more from George Fasel), while the revival of The Conformist is quite another story: "[T]hat Bertolucci's masterpiece — made when he was all of 29 — will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year is a foregone conclusion." And for Armond White of the New York Press, it is "the single most influential movie of the past 35 years."

• Ed Halter has the latest on union protests at IFC Center (more from Cinematical's Karina Longworth) and reviews Robert Frank: 20 Years With a Video Camera, part of the Scanners series at the Walter Reade (today through July 31): "He sculpts an echo of a self out of that collection of things, moments, and situations he has witnessed." Manohla Dargis's overview in the New York Times is broader - to the point of wondering how much longer series of contemporary works on video will make much sense: "The event presents no urgent curatorial reason for being, namely because most of the videos could have been shot in film (if not for the prohibitive cost) and folded into other events, but there is some nifty work here nonetheless."

• Joshua Land on The 3 Rooms of Melancholia: "Each section is more aestheticized than the last, a strategy not without its virtues; one shudders at the thought of this subject — orphaned children in wartime — falling into the wrong hands." In the NYT, Stephen Holden calls it "one of the saddest films ever made."

• Ben Kenigsberg on the "veritable talent show," The Aristocrats. Related: An online listening tip from Cinematical's Karina Longworth, who has a terrific clip of Penn Jillette talking about "the unpitchability of good ideas, why the studios are 'desperate,' and why an ultimatum from George Carlin turned The Aristocrats into a truly independent film." And Karina has two more. Plus, NSFW: Cartman performs the joke; and clips from other versions.

• "Tracking Shots": Just One Look (more on this "gently nostalgic valentine to Hong Kong cinema" from Dana Stevens in the NYT), Oyster Farmer, A New World: Shirley Clarke, Must Love Dogs and Edgar G Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen (more).

In the New York Times, Alan Riding talks to filmmaker turned novelist turned filmmaker Dai Sijie about his versions of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Brooke Allen reviewed the book in 2001 (first chapter); more on the film from Ed Park in the Voice.

Also in the NYT:

• William Grimes on Piers Paul Read's Alec Guinness: The Authorized Biography, "a chore to read, and despite the author's admiration for his subject, the Guinness who emerges is not likely to win any friends."

• Laura M Holson reports that the major studios have probably reached an agreement on standards for digital projection (Scott Kirsner has not one but two updates) and Universal's possible acquisition of DreamWorks.

• Kelefa Sanneh on the "conundrum" posed by hip-hop and embraced by Hustle & Flow. At indieWIRE, Ellen Keohane hears producer Stephanie Allain and director Craig Brewer tell the tale of the film's making.

• Dave Kehr on new DVDs.

Kate Crane: "In [Moira] Tierney's work, what's superficial to Super-8 takes a backseat to composition, character and the electricity of moments." Also in the New York Press: Matt Zoller Seitz on Michael Bay's "migraine-inducing" The Island.

Jessica Winter in the City Pages:

The filmmaker's touchy, brittle love affair with Hollywood, recorded in the noir poses of Breathless and the MGM-musical moves of A Woman Is a Woman, had by the mid-60s irreversibly soured into feelings of contempt for American cultural imperialism in France and military imperialism in Vietnam. After the intimations of auto-da-fé in the explosive finale of Pierrot le fou - a film that Colin MacCabe in Godard calls "a reworking of all the [director's] themes to date" - Godard made it new in Masculine Feminine, his virgin eye assessing new actors, a new production team, and a cast of characters in their late teens and early 20s, for whom a political consciousness is still nascent or inchoate, the future as yet undiscovered. Godard's acidic pessimism, however, remained intact, unvirginal.

Also: Chris Godsey on the Free Range Film Festival, running tomorrow and Saturday "[j]ust outside Wrenshall, Minnesota... a blip on the map about 40 minutes south of Duluth," and Peter S Scholtes on Bad News Bears.

Which wasn't what Richard Linklater expected would be his first sports movie. That would have been Friday Night Lights. He tells Raoul Hernandez that he'd written a draft for a low-budget production but tossed it when he saw the bigger one firing up. "So I was like, 'Okay, I'll go check this out.' Then I told Billy [Bob Thornton] after, 'Forgive me. I thought you were great, but I can't be objective about that movie.' I mean, I had made that movie in my head." Also in the Austin Chronicle: Spencer Parsons on the making of Bryan Poyser and Jake Vaughn's The Cassidy Kids, Joe O'Connell's news roundup and Josh Rosenblatt on The Best of Open Screen Night: Year 2.

Some won't be happy to hear it, but as Eugene Hernandez reports, Winter Soldier is headed to theaters. Also at indieWIRE: Eugene has five questions for On the Outs directors Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnik and Brian Brooks wraps the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Rumsey Taylor takes on the sudden (though way overdue) avalanche of Errol Morris films on DVD, Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida and The Thin Blue Line. Which leads to a summertime online viewing tip, Morris's Odyssey, one of the longest of his many brilliant ads for Miller High-Life.

Besides the latest Korean news roundup, X also has entries at Twitch on Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (two versions will be shown; one will "gradually fade from full colour to black and white starting from the middle portion, using the Digital Intermediate technology"), A Bittersweet Life, The Beast & the Beauty and more DVDs. Also, Todd has a couple of big lists: Fantasia Festival winners, new titles added to the Toronto International Film Festival line-up, eight of them world premieres and the complete lineup of the Venice Film Festival. And via the indieWIRE Insider: An AP report on why there'll be fewer films at Venice this year: Security concerns.

Grady Hendrix may well make you laugh at loud with his succinct entry on Tsui Hark's future plans.

Jeanne Carstensen meets "Max Cohen, 22, the hottest director of the new wave of Yiddish-language animation. Not only is Cohen leading this new wave, but, as he explained to me last night at the SFJFF filmmakers' dinner at the Triptych restaurant, the wave actually has only one director - Cohen, and only one film, Cohen's six-minute The Tale of the Goat."

The cinetrix saw the restored Elevator to the Gallows yesterday. It is as cool and slick as today's weather is hot and sticky.

Recently in Film-Philosophy:

• Reni Celeste: "Love and Catastrophe: Filming the Sublime in Hiroshima Mon Amour."

• Jeremy J. Shapiro reviews Jean-Louis Leutrat's volume in the BFI Film Classics series on Last Year at Marienbad.

• Both Greg Hainge and Isabelle Vanderschelden review Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd's Leos Carax.

Lincoln Cho in January on Kevin Smith's Silent Bob Speaks: "It is sometimes brilliant, occasionally thought-provoking and quite often gut-wrenchingly funny but it is clearly - and I mean clearly - only for hardcore fans."

DK Holm cracks a wry smile as he launches into his review of Jimmy McDonough's Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film at Smith's Movie Poop Shoot: "[M]y three dinners with Meyer more or less chart and support the career trajectory that McDonough sets out in his book. I will recount these exposures to the Meyer whirlwind, briefly, for the edification of future generations."

Chuck Tryon glimpses the future of advertising: "The 'information rain' concept really creeps me out." But he's intrigued by news passed along by Marc Ruppel that Richard Kelly is planning a six-part graphic novel to roll out alongside his next feature, Southland Tales.

Dan Glaister interviews Daniel Clowes. Also in the Guardian:

• Carol Sarler on Jane Fonda's plan to bus across the US, protesting the war in Iraq: "You cannot march for justice, peace or freedom across the great powerless plains of small-town, fly-over America; all you can do is trample upon the fear and grief of this generation of people whose turn it has been to provide the cannon fodder for Rumsfeld's army."

• Rusty Goffe: "My life as an Oompa."

• Helen Pidd meets Kate Hudson.

A lot of people have friends who make movies, but Wendy Mitchell's a lucky one; she evidently has friends who make good movies: Michael Tully and Dominic Thackray.

Tom Hall tells Hollywood where to go and what to do with itself once it gets there.

"The movies are just sort of beside the point," agrees Mark Lotto in the New York Observer. They're "the incidental byproduct of some chemical reaction between ourselves and celebrities, the irreducible remainder of an equation we’ve already completed and forgotten."

But David Poland argues that fun's only just now about to begin.

The Nashville Scene rounds up the best of summer.

If you're in LA, David Chute recommends the International Preservation series (through August 26), featuring "works by such legendary film artists as Fritz Lang, Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjöström and Josef von Sternberg, all of which might have been lost if not for the hard work undertaken by preservationists in Paris, Bologna, Hong Kong and Berlin."

Also in the LA Weekly: David Thomson has very fine remembrance of Gavin Lambert and Paul Malcolm on Ibolya Fekete's Chico.

Kevin Thomas also hits the highlights of the International Preservation series as well as the recently wrapped Outfest. Also in the Los Angeles Times: Merrill Balassone talks with Diane Lane.

David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back: "I watched [Takashi Miike's] Izo in the theater with seven other people, and we all hated it."

In the Philadelphia City Paper, Cindy Fuchs recommends The Beautiful Country.

At Slashdot, Robin Rowe posts a note about the MovieEditor Conference in LA on August 3, co-presented byLinuxMovies.org. His title, "Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar Go Linux," prompts Sidde to ask, "So Steve Jobs runs Linux now?" Among the replies: "I got a private tour of Pixar a few years ago... About the only Macs I saw where on Steve's desk and a few 'office managers' desks." "They switched to OS X for (most of?) their desktops. Their render farm is still running on Linux."

Online browsing tip. Ling Lung, a 30s-era Japanese Chinese magazine. Via Rashomon.

Online viewing tip #1. A sneak peak at Henry Selick's Moongirl. Via Mack at Twitch, who passes along news that Selick will be directing an animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Caroline.

Online viewing tip #2. Werner Herzog and Grizzly Man co-producer Jewel Palovak at Mutiny City News.

Online viewing tip #3. Emily Chang interviews Stephen Chow for ImaginAsian TV's The Lounge. Via Blake at Cinema Strikes Back.

Online viewing tip #4. David Fincher's video for NIN's "Only." Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tip #5. Silliness from the Groen Brothers via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at July 28, 2005 12:48 PM