Dylan and shorts.

Yes, No Direction Home is "A Martin Scorsese Picture," but long before the auteur took the helm, the project was shaped by co-producer and Dylan manager Jeff Rosen, warns David Yaffe in Slate. And then there's David Greenberg's excellent, succinct piece on why the three decades of Dylan's career that follow the focal point of Direction now go all but ignored.

Mick Brown seems to have the most complete version of the film's making in the Telegraph. To say that opinions vary widely on the doc, though, would be an understatement:

• For Larry Gross, writing at Movie City News, Direction is "not only the most overpowering film experience I've had at the [Toronto] festival, it's easily the strongest American feature film I've seen all year.... [I]ts centrality for comprehending Scorsese's whole enterprise will be beyond dispute."

• Chris Morris in the LA CityBeat: "Scorsese, who invariably brings an acute intelligence to film editing, has crafted an extraordinary movie that is no mere air-kiss to its subject."

• But for Steven Hart, writing in Salon, it "is, like the work of its subject, part fraud, part tease and part revelation, shot through with flashes of genius."

• Devin McKinney for the American Prospect: "Is it too much to ask that an elaborate superstar retrospective like this be, in addition to a treasure trove of rare sights and sounds, at least an attempt at a great movie?... Scorsese squashes Dylan into a rock-doc tin can that, when opened, sighs nostalgically, tepidly: 'Ah... baby boom.'"

• In the Observer, literary editor Robert McCrum, who quite likes the film, recalls a few forgotten yet crucial moments in Dylan's career and notes: "He can do prose, too."

• More from Dolores Alfieri at Stop Smiling and Richard Cromelin in the Los Angeles Times.

"The right song at the right time is a powerful concoction that can make a sequence, or even an entire movie," writes Cameron Crowe in a long piece for the Los Angeles Times that eventually gets to songs written specifically for films:

It's a tricky thing. Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan cracked the code with their Oscar-winning compositions for Philadelphia and Wonder Boys, but many a rocker has stumbled on the path to similar glory. For an original motion picture song to truly work, it can't be that obviously about the movie. The best original movie songs evoke the feeling of the movie more than the story. "Everybody's talking at me / Can't hear a word they're sayin'" elevated and deepened its film partner, and delivered the bittersweet tone of Midnight Cowboy. Imagine if the song lyrics had been, "We're hustlers, baby, trying to make it on the streets of New York." The poetic quotient plummets. Suddenly, everybody starts looking a little less timeless.

Also in the LAT: Carina Chocano talks with Mary Harron about The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary McNamara meets Jodie Foster and Susan King breaks down Garbo: The Signature Collection.

You'll have heard this one, but just in case, the BBC reports on Francis Ford Coppola's return to directing after eight years. On a modest budget, he'll be adapting Romanian novelist Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth.

Josh Neuhouser had always considered Steven Soderbergh a sort of "Pearl Jam to Cassavetes's Replacements or Jarmusch's Sonic Youth." Until he caught Schizopolis: "It has the energy of untamed youth, where everything is permitted not because nothing is true, but because nobody ever bothered to tell you what wasn't possible." Related: The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson asks Soderbergh about what he's cooking up with Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban.

Christian Petzold's Gespenster is scoring raves throughout the German press; signandsight translates Anke Leweke's for Die Zeit.

Alison Veneto's been hooked on the Korean TV drama Dae Jang Geum - no, not just hooked; seriously addicted. Fortunately, she got to write about it for SMRT-TV.

So what does Ingmar Bergman mean to you? Geoffrey Macnab asks Michael Winterbottom, Liv Ullmann, Mike Hodges, Thomas Vinterberg, Alexander Payne, Terence Davies, James Schamus, Stephen Woolley, Sally Potter and Oliver Assayas; also included is a previously published snippet from Woody Allen.

Also in the Guardian:

• "I did not get one phone call from a gangster." Randeep Ramesh talks with Anurag Kashyap, whose Black Friday breeches a tabu in Hindi cinema by taking as its subject the 1993 bombings in Bombay (as it was still called) that left more than 260 dead and over 700 injured.

• The complete transcript of Geoff Andrew's interview with Catherine Deneuve at the National Film Theatre. The Telegraph's Benjamin Secher talks with her as well.

• Marina Hyde revels in the bad buzz swarming Guy Ritchie's Revolver. Related: The Telegraph's Charlotte Edwardes asks the director how he's taking his "good old rumping" and, in the Independent, Helen Brown traces the trajectory of a fall.

• John Patterson wonders what John Wayne would have made of the current reworkings of his old westerns.

David Thomson recounts the James Dean story, repaints the backdrop of 1955, and then: "Don't miss the point, but it was the arrival of Dean - in my opinion - that started the collapse of Marlon Brando." Next: Your 60s aren't complete without Pretty Poison. Also in the Independent: Roger Clarke meets Kristin Scott Thomas.

Hollywood's getting political, trumpets Jason Solomons in the Observer. It's the 70s all over again! Well, yes, but, AO Scott might well counter: "[T]he myth of a monolithically liberal Hollywood is dead," and the most recent evidence of its demise can be found in Just Like Heaven and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. David Poland isn't buying it and calls for comments. Do scroll down to Joe Leydon's.

Also in the New York Times:

• Serenity's due in theaters on Friday; Kate Aurthur interviews Joss Whedon. But for true fans, that'll hardly be enough. Fortunately, ME Russell's a 9500-word transcript of his fun and wide-ranging talk with Whedon. Related: Looking Closer's collection of junket treasures, via Opus.

• Christian Moerk tells the story of how Capote got made. Related: Martin Grove in the Hollywood Reporter.

• John Leonard notes what's missing in the Library of America's 1600-page collection of James Agee's writing - "But what we do have is quite wonderful."

• Matthew Hayes in Vancouver on how Neal 'n' Nikki has become "the first full-blown Bollywood production - complete with six exuberant musical sequences - shot and set entirely outside India."

• Hilary de Vries on the shoes of In Her Shoes. Seriously.

David Lowery talks Thumbsucker with Mike Mills and Lou Pucci.

Shari Roman interviews Keane director Lodge Kerrigan for Filmmaker.

Daniel Robert Epstein's SuicideGirls talkathon carries on: Peter Falk (take a look at his drawings) and, talking about their Director's Label DVDs, Jonathan Glazer and Stephane Sednaoui.

Lucile Hadzihalilovic talks with Sheila Johnston in the Telegraph about Picnic at Hanging Rock: "When I watched the film again more recently after making Innocence, I was struck by the similarities between them."

A History of Violence:

• Girish: "Where to begin? There is a multitude of reasons why this movie is fascinating; here are just a few..."

• Manohla Dargis in the NYT: "The great kick of the movie - or rather, its great kick in the gut - comes from Mr Cronenberg's refusal to let us indulge in movie violence without paying a price. The man wants to make us suffer, exquisitely."

• David Edelstein in Slate: "It's staged and shot and acted and scored like nothing else this year, and it has images that will lodge themselves in your brain, rather like an ice pick. I have nothing bad to say about it - except that it shouldn't for a second be taken too seriously."

• JG Ballard in the Guardian: "Existence, in Cronenberg's eyes, is the ultimate pathological state. He sees us as fragile creatures with only a sketchy idea of who we are, nervous of testing our physical and mental limits."

• The Telegraph's David Gritten interviews Cronenberg.

• Kenneth Turan in the LAT: A "gripping, incendiary, casually subversive piece of work."

• Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "Once again, the director is dealing with an assault on identity and the breakdown of the boundaries between individual and collective views of reality."

"Pat Kingsley is in many respects the most powerful woman in Hollywood," writes the Observer's Gaby Wood, who meets with with the publicist to talk control: "If you've ever read an interview with, say, Al Pacino, Jodie Foster, Courtney Love, or, in the past, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise, and found it somewhat unrevealing, you have Kingsley to thank. 'I don't like interesting stories,' she has said. 'Boring is good. Good reporting and good writing don't help my client. New information is usually controversial. I don't need that.'"

Regardless of whether or not you care about the Oscars, David Poland's survey of the "Doc Race" is another reminder that this is an incredible period for a genre that was all but ignored not that long ago.

The Nation's Stuart Klawans on two GIs-in-Iraq docs: "At the risk of sounding heartless, I will describe Gunner Palace as the more entertaining of the films.... Occupation: Dreamland is a drier experience, and a more somber one." More from Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay, who notes in a later entry: "The Boston Globe ran today this obituary for experimental filmmaker, documentarian, and teacher Mark LaPore, who died September 11 in Boston. LaPore's newest film, Kolkata, will premiere next week at the New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant Garde."

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader: "Two new releases are defined by an inability to fathom another culture - Reel Paradise... and Dear Wendy.... Both demonstrate a middle-class complacency that fosters this inadequacy." More from Craig Phillips.

Acquarello has me wanting to see Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers.

Online viewing tip. The Killer. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tips, round 1. On top of the many new trailers popping up over at Twitch, Kurt's found lots to love at LoveFilm.

Online viewing tips, round 2. James Seo posts the "[t]hird and last of three clips this week that visualize multiple tracks in music."

Posted by dwhudson at September 25, 2005 3:04 PM