Shorts, 10/25.

"How does anyone begin to encapsulate the audacious, manic, insightful, resonant, humane, and allegorically loaded tone of the epic work - the quintessential "anarchy of the imagination" - that is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of Alfred Döblin's thirteen chapter, Weimer Republic-era German Expressionist novel Berlin Alexanderplatz?" As you might expect, Acquarello does an awfully good job of it.

Ray Pride rounds up a "cornucopia of Walter Murch items" at Movie City Indie, including the motherlode, FilmSound.org's Murch collection. Then, over at Movie City News, Ray's current column is huge and all-encompassing.

Are We Alone? The Stanley Kubrick Extra-terrestrial Intelligence Interviews is a book coming out in the UK next month collecting interviews Kubrick conducted with 21 scientists in 1966 for what was to be a prologue for 2001 - until Kubrick realized that the film was pretty darn long as it is and cut it. The actual film is still missing, reports Anthony Barnes, and you can bet the search is still on.

Also in the Independent: "From Louisiana and Pakistan, we have suddenly had a destruction show that should satisfy any fan of 'disaster' movies," suggests David Thomson. "There are some things so real that if they are fabricated on screen, our souls may be damaged in watching - unless the creative integrity is large." And Kevin Jackson meets Lindsay Duncan.

"I didn't know it at the time, but it was the most vivid filmmaking adventure I've ever had," Jack Nicholson tells Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. That adventure was The Passenger. Recalling the mid-70s:

"My friends and I would go to the art houses expecting to see a masterpiece every week — and we did," he recalls. "Whether it was Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard, Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Truffaut or Bergman, we knew we were in good hands." Asked why those films spoke to his generation, Nicholson explained: "Because they took risks - it was the breaking of the form that excited us. Today we have cheap, smart indie movies, but it's not the same thing. Antonioni didn't feel that he needed to get every single point across right away. Today we're just slaves to melodrama."

"Whatever happened to Maria Schneider?" asks Martha Fischer at Cinematical of Nicholson's co-star in The Passenger before pointing to John Clark's answer in the New York Daily News.

Darren Hughes: "In celebration of its 15th anniversary, the IMDb has invited its editorial staff to submit their Top 15 Lists: 1990 - 2005. Never one to pass up an opportunity to obsess for a few days over such a challenge, I've put together a list of my own - a list joyfully free of editorial imposition, meaning that I can stretch and/or ignore even the most basic criteria/rules. For instance, my Top 15 includes close to 30 films."

Tim R joins the fray: "These 100 choices are going to be the films I simply couldn't live without, not the ones I think I ought to like."

Meanwhile, Premiere lists the "25 Most Shocking Moments in Movie History." Also via Movie City News: John Clark in the San Francisco Chronicle, talking with Tim Burton about his Batman movies, and Jack Malvern in the London Times, reporting that March of the Penguins director Luc Jacquet is pretty pissed his film has been hijacked by conservatives and proponents of "intelligent design."

Jean-Pierre Jeunet will direct an adaptation of Yann Martel's bestselling, Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi, reports the BBC and just about everyone else. Also: "The Libertine and Mrs Henderson Presents have received the greatest number of nominations at this year's British Independent Film Awards."

BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Peter Friedman: "Initially, Roger [Manley] wanted to make a documentary about mana objects, and I wanted make an essay about belief as the essential building block of the mind. The result is Mana: Beyond Belief."

Roberta Smith notes that the exhibition My Hand Outstretched: Films by Robert Beavers at the Whitney through October 30 "effectively adds Mr Beavers's name to the list of innovators - Andy Warhol, Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Snow and Jack Smith - who in the 1960s and 70s pushed film beyond its boundaries, toward painting, sculpture, performance and installation art."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Major Zeman battled criminals and foiled subversives... [in] one of Czechoslovak State Television's most popular serials. An unswerving Communist, Zeman pleased party leaders, galled dissidents and entertained ordinary Czechs, who still watch reruns," writes Matt Reynolds. Now young producers want to revive the character, but with a twist: He was a spy for the West all along. Some laugh at the very idea, Reynolds reports; others find it offensive.

• Daphne Merkin's big profile of Diane Keaton in the Magazine: "Everyone I talk to agrees that Keaton's talent has been strikingly underused and that the situation is more a reflection of the film industry than of her place in it." Amen.

• Dave Kehr on new DVDs.

• Ellen Maguire, briefly, on first-time directors over 40.

• Laura M Holson on how the line between movies and games is blurring.

Chuck Tryon on The War Within: "I was reminded of Don DeLillo's fascinating essay, 'In the Ruins of the Future,' in which DeLillo argues that the advantage of the terrorist is his ability not to see these faces ('this is his edge, that he does not see her'). I'm not sure that I agree with DeLillo anymore, and for reasons I can't describe precisely without giving away the film, I believe The War Within complicates DeLillo's arguments."

Last month, David D'Arcy wrote here that Alain Tasma's Nuit noire, 17 octobre 1961 "reminds you of the officially-condoned horrors of the recent past, and focuses your attention on present horrors." Now that the film is being released in France, it's stirring quite a debate, as Jason Burke reports in the Observer: "For some, Nuit Noire is an overdue attempt to throw light on a shameful episode; for others, it is an unwarranted slur on a glorious imperial history. The bitter division reflects deep fissures in modern France, pitting the young, the left and millions of immigrants and their children against older, white, conservative nationalists."

Also:

• Saint Etienne have captured on film the industrial Lower Lea Valley, three miles from central London and slated to be "erased," as Sean O'Hagan puts it, to make way for the 2012 Olympics. "On the screen, the place looks implausibly, surreally beautiful, transformed by the camera into a place of mysterious possibility," writes O'Hagan. The band's film: What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?

• Kate Kellaway chats with Anthony Minghella and his wife, Carolyn Choa, a choreographer, about their collaboration his first time out as an opera director. Madam Butterfly opens at the English National Opera on November 5.

• Mark Salibury meets Monica Bellucci.

Today's excerpt from an interview in Stop Smiling's "Auteur Issue": James Hughes with Robert Altman.

For Creative Screenwriting, Jeremy Smith talks with Richard Kelly about writing Domino. Related: Blake rounds up Southland Tales news and interviews at Cinema Strikes Back.

"New York Doll, a rather low-key documentary bio of the former New York Dolls bassist Arthur 'Killer' Kane, is more admirable for what it isn't than what it is," writes Nick Pinkerton in the first of three takes from the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE. More on the film and other related projects from Richard Cromelin in the LAT.

Sylvie Simmons: "When Keven McAlester, a former music journalist, decided to make his first film, You're Gonna Miss Me, he chose one hell of a subject: Roky Erickson, singer with the 13th Floor Elevators, the Texas band credited with inventing psychedelic rock." Also in the Guardian: Pascal Wyse talks with Mike Mills.

Members of the band playing at the Yule Ball in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Jarvis Cocker and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and drummer Phil Selway. Karina Longworth has more at Cinematical. Related: Posterwire.com considers varying approaches to marketing the film in different foreign countries.

Pablo Villaça expected to hate Brazil's official national entry in the Oscar race, 2 Filhos de Francisco (2 Sons of Francisco), but it's won him over. He explains how at MCN. More from Michael Gibbons at indieWIRE, where Eugene Hernandez the 58 titles competing for Foreign Language noms.

Iran is clamping down on "American and other films that promote Western culture," reports the AP.

The Simpsons are heading to Egypt. In the Al-Ahram Weekly, Hicham Safieddine wonders if this is going to work. Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

At Twitch, X presents "the first part of a long piece on the 'Guinness Book of Korean Cinema' and all its fun facts and anecdotes," and Todd has NoShame's 2006 release schedule.

At Koreanfilm.org, Adam Hartzell reviews two films that screened at the Pusan Film Festival, Zhang Lu's New Currents prize winner, Grain in Ear and Hwang Byung-kuk's Wedding Campaign.

"So here it is, an arena rock type film event for lovers of Asian cinema." Eric Campos reviews Three... Extremes at Film Threat.

Central Park Media is now offering anime for the video iPod, reports Peter Cohen for Playlist. But you don't need a video-enabled iPod to watch their hentai. You'll notice, by the way, that BlueCine is GreenCine's new door opening onto alt.porn, filmed erotica and more along that racy line.

The Pioneer, "NYC's smallest movie theater," launches a blog: Inside the Pioneer.

"Great critics are rare birds; rare birds, though, need a welcoming aviary, and the zookeepers are not on the lookout for such special - and specialist - breeds of plumage any more." Yes, Michael Coveney's complaint in Prospect has mostly to do with the UK press and with theater, but still. On a related note, somewhat, Ben Yagoda in Slate back in August on freelancing: "I'm done."

Double Plus Ungood.

Online browsing tip #1. Border Film Project. Via Brooke Singer at Eyebeam's reBlog.

Online browsing tips #2 and #3. Movies Wallpapers. Also via Wiley Wiggins: "Glue Sniffing and Pills."

Online viewing tip. Steve Rosenbaum's justifiably celebratory post regarding Inside the Bubble's rise to #5 on iFilm's "Most Downloaded Documentaries of All Time" list sent me there - where I also found Jarhead-related interviews and clips.

Posted by dwhudson at October 25, 2005 3:37 PM