LA Weekly. "Fall Harvest."

The LA Weekly's got a nice-sized fall movie package. Starting with Good Night, and Good Luck, Scott Foundas profiles George Clooney and the general atmo as he attends a reception hosted by the Radio and Television News Directors Association...

On the one hand, it's impossible to witness Murrow's dogged investigation of McCarthy's half-truths and specious accusations without thinking of the similarly committed reporters who held government's feet to the fire over the Hurricane Katrina debacle. On the other, Murrow's ultimate reward for his efforts - banishment to the Siberia of Sunday-afternoon broadcasting by sponsor-conscious CBS president William S Paley (played in the film by Frank Langella) - draws discomforting parallels to current CBS chairman Les Moonves' recent comments about the need for TV news to become more "entertaining."

... and, like Sean Axmaker at our main site, interviews David Strathairn. Then, the review. Ella Taylor: "[S]omehow the gambit works, thanks to a glamorously urbane ensemble... There's a lovely, improvised lilt to their interactions..., a controlled frenzy that takes you back to the days when people actually had fun at work, even in a large corporation."

"I wanted to make a movie that would consist of really short moments, that would be a sort of mosaic," Rodrigo García tells Tim Grierson, who explains that, with Nine Lives, "García gave himself a Five Obstructions-style challenge: Take Things You Can Tell, add more vignettes, make each vignette shorter, and there can't be any cuts - each of the nine stories unfolds in real time, in one continuous camera take." Foundas: "[T]he nine female characters who form the stories' centers are all remarkable, as are the gifted (and largely under-appreciated) actresses who play them."

After linking touchstones of Noah Baumbach's career with a few of his own, Foundas writes, "The Squid and the Whale doesn't look or feel like any movie Baumbach has made before - the rhythms are looser, the textures are rougher, the emotions are rawer - but it's of a piece with his earlier work in its uncommon sensitivity to the ways in which people try to make relationships work, often for worse rather than better." Taylor meets Jeff Daniels, who is, of course, "very, very good, in an unobtrusive, can't-see-him-acting way that has caught the attention of some of America's top directors even as it has locked him into mostly supporting roles."

Paul Malcolm: "Where [Wes] Anderson's family sagas, for all their turmoil, never leave us in doubt that we are on the path to reconciliation, Baumbach gives no such reassurance. It's a risky move given the volatile emotions that the film stirs up, especially for a director who's been away from the game for eight years."

Patrick Z McGavin meets "the most coveted screenwriter in Hollywood," even though - good for him! - he's sticking to Chicago. Steve Conrad's latest is The Weather Man.

Jessica Winter talks with the filmmakers behind "[o]ne of the best pieces of visual reportage to have emerged from the war in Iraq," Occupation: Dreamland, which she also reviews; she finds it "reinforces the impression that the American rodeo in Iraq was always a murderously pointless self-security op, leaving one officer to wonder aloud, 'So what are we protecting? I don't know.'"

Back to Foundas. This time, he meets Nick Park, who "wants viewers to 'see the thumbprints' on his characters' plasticine physiognomies," one of the beautiful aspects of Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Posted by dwhudson at October 16, 2005 1:50 PM