Weekend shorts.

For the Sydney Morning Herald, Garry Maddox reports on a collection of eight short films French producer Marc Obéron is putting together "to dramatise the United Nations's Millennium Development Goals." The directors on board so far: Jane Campion, Shinya Tsukamoto, Robert Altman, Jodie Foster, the Taviani brothers and Gaspar Noé, who's "shooting a film in July about the fight against AIDS in West Africa's Burkina Faso."

That's via Movie City Indie, where Ray Pride also points to Allan Koay's conversation with Tsai Ming-liang for Malaysia's Star, Shawn Levy's long talk with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Oregonian and to Time Out's announcement that the results of its poll of London readers is in and their favorite London flick by far is John MacKenzie's The Long Good Friday.

Sukhdev Sandhu in the New Statesman on Workingman's Death:

[Michael] Glawogger's elegiac and revelatory documentary shows in the most visceral fashion imaginable that, for all the recent attention paid to the phenomenon of call-centres or various forms of offshore commerce, a great deal of work in the developing world is still of the back-breaking, life-threatening variety. It is tempting to compare it with the still photography of Sebastiao Salgado; however, where the Brazilian tends towards a numeric approach - focusing his lens on swarming masses of migrants and labourers - Glawogger prefers to point his camera at smaller groups of workers in order to emphasise their hard-won solidarity.

"The one thing I'll claim, in all modesty, is that I brought the word auteur into the English language. That's all. People in America had never read what the French actually said." Annie Nocenti "moderates" an interview with Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris in the "Auteur Issue" of Stop Smiling, which has put an all-too-brief excerpt online. In fact, here at least, Nocenti doesn't get a word in edge-wise. Also: Josh Tyson reviews Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell's Fan-Tan.

Filmbrain: "From its disturbing opening all the way to its enigmatic conclusion, Innocence is a daring, brave, wholly original film that can be described as an almost somnambulistic experience - and one that lingers for days." More from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times ("The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory") and Steve Erickson for Gay City News.

Sam Peckinpah made a lot of westerns, obviously, and westerns in disguise, a little less obviously, writes Steve Boone: "But [Bring Me the Head of] Alfredo Garcia only reads like a western; it plays like the saddest, strangest 'hood movie ever made." Analysis (and spoilers, by the way) follow, and then: "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia offers young urban filmmakers torn between exhilarating Scarface/Grand Theft Auto-style genre nihilism and Boyz N the Hood sentimentality a different way to approach the reality of the streets, the housing project, the jailhouse."

Vince Keenan attends a screening of The Birds and listens in on a Q&A with Tippi Hedren: "For years, directors and producers came up to me and said they'd wanted me for a role, but Hitch wouldn't allow it,' she said. 'The worst was when I found out that François Truffaut had wanted to cast me. I'd never heard a word about it. That one hurt.'"

At Twitch, Canfield interviews horror director Gary Sherman. Also, Todd: "Chicago's Facets and California's Tidepoint Pictures - no strangers to the foreign film world already - are teaming up to create Asian Edge, a new DVD label focused on, you guessed it, edgy films from Asia."

With The Fall of Fujimori, director Ellen Perry "intrigues, perturbs, and asks many questions, but provides few answers - an approach that will likely provoke viewers into scurrying to find out more about the underreported story of Peru and its self-anointed savior-turned-strongman," writes Noy Thrupkaew in the American Prospect. Via Alternet.

Eugene Hernandez has five questions for Susan Kaplan, director of Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family. Do watch that trailer.

Also at indieWIRE: Anthony Kaufman: "Paradise Now is poised to become the biggest Arabic-language film ever released in the United States." And Eugene toasts Bob Berney.

At Cinematical, Martha Fischer points to Peter Finn's piece in the Washington Post on Russia's latest blockbuster, Company 9. But if you're in a hurry, Martha's nailed the essentials. Also: Tim Biro reviews Jericho's Echo, a doc about Israeli punks and their takes on politics.

Jason Scott, whose most recent doc is BBS: The Documentary: "I've been coy enough for too long. The next documentary I am working on is about Text Adventures, or Interactive Fiction. It is called "Get Lamp". It has a introductory website (GETLAMP.COM) and I've been noodling with it for about 3 years." Via Waxy.org.

Nick Rombes: "Why does a student today need to be told how a movie or a video game 'works its ideology on you' when the movie or game itself can't wait to confess this fact?" Also: "I know others have mentioned this before, but the similarities between Cronenberg's History of Violence and Jacques Tourneur's film noir classic Out of the Past (1947) are eerily beautiful."

In the Independent Weekly, Godfrey Cheshire considers Junebug and Loggerheads, both made in North Carolina and both about the state's "people and culture, and the filmmakers' feelings about their native state. Genre-wise, however, the films are crucially different." And David Fellerath talks with Loggerheads director Tim Kirkman.

After 15 years of stop-n-go, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are is finally on its way, directed by Spike Jonze and based on a screenplay by Jonze and Dave Eggers. Charles Flemming checks in and briefs us on the versions that might have been. We can probably safely assume things have turned out for the best. Also in the NYT: AO Scott on American road movies: "If nothing else, these movies serve to remind us that we inhabit an endlessly photogenic nation. But they also acknowledge the anxious distance that the film industry perceives between itself and the rest of the country."

"And so it was at Tina Brown's own version of a high-school cafeteria: the brains, the cool kids and Claire Danes, all mixing happily, awkwardly, in one tight space. Suzy Hansen attends one of those New York things for the NY Observer and eventually gets around to profiling the Shopgirl.

Is this the first Q&A format interview Slate's ever done? Pamela Paul with North Country director Niki Caro. And David Edelstein: "North Country is powerful and then some," while "Shopgirl is sadly vacuous, with a sadly vacuous center." (AO Scott would disagree.) Also: The problem isn't that Cameron Crowe puts his mother in his movies, both literally and figuratively, argues Sarah Hepola; it's that he's too nice to her when he does.

"60s amazing because / a poet could make films / then in the 70s be assassinated." Norman MacAfee's "The Coming of Fascism to America" in Jacket, via wood s lot.

"Both Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck equate journalistic integrity with accuracy and see compromise as a necessary part of working in the mass media," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. "The films themselves also frequently engage in compromise, lying shamelessly and sometimes unnecessarily about some matters yet trying to be scrupulously accurate about others. I suppose this inconsistency could be rationalized as poetic license, but the desire of both movies to combine poetic generalizations with prosaic specifics creates more confusion than clarity."

Stuart Klawans's latest reviews in the Nation: Paradise Now, "as well researched and responsible a movie as we're likely to get about the who, how and why of Palestinian suicide attacks," The Squid and the Whale (no handy quote, but he approves) and, briefly, the "nastily efficient" The President's Last Bang.

In Norma Barzman, Duncan Campbell's found quite an interviewee: "How many memoirists would be able to write: 'I was more excited meeting Picasso than I was in Princeton in 1940 when my then husband, Claude Shannon, introduced me to Einstein.' She became pals with Sophia Loren while Ben was writing the screenplay for El Cid, and the photographer Robert Capa stroked her pregnant belly for good luck on his way to a night of gambling."

That memoir is The Red and the Blacklist, and she's currently working on a second volume, The End of Romance. More on the first at Democracy Now!.

Also in the Guardian:

• Sam Wollaston's fun profile of Steve Coogan.

• Garth Pearce interviews Bill Murray.

• Shawn Levy, author of Rat Pack Confidential, takes a long looks at Jerry Lewis's Dean and Me: A Love Story.

• Xan Brooks on Alan Parker's collection of cartoons, Will Write and Direct For Food, "part diary, part catharsis."

• Jon Henley: "A Franco-Canadian initiative, which has won broad backing as a swipe at US 'cultural imperialism,' could mean that countries will be able to subsidise domestic film industries and restrict foreign music and content on their radio and television stations in the name of preserving and promoting cultural diversity." Update from Grady Hendrix: The proposed "Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions" passed 191 to 2.

• Dumpster diving with Marina Hyde.

Matt Clayfield: "I sincerely think that, even if I'd not just finished watching the entire series of Firefly and was thus in a slightly more objective position to comment, I'd still be calling Joss Whedon's Serenity the best film I've seen at the cinema all year."

Josef Braun in Vue Weekly: "To watch the films of Harold Lloyd in the 21st century is to be both presented with an illuminating document of American culture in the heady days of opportunity of the 1920s and to be supremely entertained by a comic talent whose best work remains truly timeless in its power to thrill with its audacity, invention and derring-do."

Geoffrey Macnab offers a brief consideration of Billy Wilder. Also in the Independent, two new interviews: Emma Bell with Lars von Trier - and David Gritten has a long profile in the Telegraph - and Roger Clarke with Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter.

Matthew Hayes marvels at the Nollywood phenomenon in the Globe and Mail: "Nigerian government officials now see the industry as a crucial component of the economy." (Related: "I Go Chop Your Dollar," via Screenhead.) Via Movie City News, where J Rentilly interviews Shane Black.

More on Protocols of Zion: Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat and Steve Erickson in Gay City News.

Daniel Robert Epstein talks with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer director John McNaughton for SuicideGirls.

Mike Mills tells the Telegraph's Mark Monahan why he finds Ordinary People "subversive."

Amos Posner writes an open letter to Oliver Stone in PopMatters.

In the Los Angeles Times:

• Reed Johnson profiles Mexican filmmaker Eva Aridjis, whose "voice as a writer is humane, smart, worldly and armed with a dead-on sense of humor that never strains to be edgier-than-thou."

• Richard Hilburn: "Unlike so many actors in biopics — including, some would say, Jamie Foxx in Ray — [Joaquin] Phoenix [in Walk the Line] never seems to be just imitating a subject. Instead, he takes liberties in evoking him as the film weaves together the contradictions of [Johnny] Cash's life (from drug addiction to spiritual awakening). The result: a character whose emotional center seems somewhere between Phoenix himself and Cash."

• Susan King meets Kurt Russell.

• Gene Seymour wonders why the Dude abides.

Dakota Fanning, writes Scott Foundas, "commands the screen with a natural authority and full-bodied sense of character that elude most of her contemporaries (and a good many performers several times her age). Not since Jennifer Connelly and Diane Lane first appeared on the scene has the career of a child 'star' looked this promising." Karina Longworth rounds up Cinematical covering their Fanning and, back in the LA Weekly, Foundas reviews Dreamer, "a case study in how an unrepentant formula picture can be made to seem like it has nothing to be sorry about."

Also, Ben Quiñones: "Danny Trejo has appeared in about 100 films, usually playing the perfect bad guy." His story's told in Joe Eckardt's documentary Champion. And Ella Taylor on North Country.

Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter: "[A]s the new kid on the studio block, [Bob] Iger is swiftly emerging as the Hollywood executive most likely to lead the charge into what former studio chief-turned-Internet entrepreneur Barry Diller calls 'the radical revolution' that will continue to rock Hollywood over the next 10 years."

Hardly anyone makes movies in Tennessee, even when a movie's ostensibly set in Tennessee. But, as Jim Ridley reports in the Nashville Scene, that may soon change.

John Rogers was in a linking mood the other day:

• Things They Won't Tell You in Film School.
• Chained to the Keyboard (who, in turn, points to The Screenwriting Life).
• Fun Joel.

Six degrees of Mithun Chakraborty, courtesy of George Thomas.

Online browsing tip. Looney Tunes Hidden Gags. Via Drawn!.

Online listening tip. Recent guests on Fresh Air: Steve Martin (actually a rerun from 2003, but still) and George Carlin.

Online viewing tips #1, #2 and #3, all via Coudal Partners: Nate Harrison's projects (in particular, Can I Get an Amen?), Delicatessen's projects (in particular, Tempo di cottura) and macTV Videocast (in particular, Jed, a music video made on an Apple II).

Online viewing tip #4. Do They Know It's Halloween?, via pscholtes, who's also got a North Country roundup at the City Pages' Culture To Go. More from Manohla Dargis in the NYT.

Online viewing tip #5. The preview for Trapped by the Mormans. Via Joe Brown at the SF Chronicle's Culture Blog, where Karen Reardanz is furious that Fox has shut down a local Joss Whedon musical.

Online viewing tip #6. The trailer for Emmanuel's Gift.

Online viewing tip #7. The trailer for New York Doll. Via MCN. And via La Depsressionada, more from Carlo McCormick in Paper.

Online viewing tip #8. The teaser for 5-25-77. Via Screenhead.

Posted by dwhudson at October 22, 2005 6:20 PM