Weekend shorts.

Criterion launches its new online publication, Focus, with Chuck Stephens's "in-depth look at the five-decade-long career of the versatile and venerable leading man, chanbara icon, and Japanese screen legend Tatsuya Nakadai." Also new at the site: Chris D on the origins of "a new kind of samurai hero" in the 60s.

2006: X previews the year in Korean film at Twitch. Also: Part 2 of "The Guinness Book of Korean Cinema."

Grady Hendrix rounds up a giant batch of reviews of recent films from Asia. He's also found a new trailer for Johnnie To's Election.

So Alex Cox is blogging. Ben Slater's found the link and recalls his own Alex Cox story.

Ray Young at Flickhead: "As with many authors, the cinema is inadequate and ill-equipped for Lovecraft: his passages beckon the eye to pore over sentences and savor those subtly shifting hues of darkness, moods and tones that extend beyond the aperture's reach.... All things considered, The Call of Cthulhu certainly has its heart in the right place. And by the end, with its hints of Caligari and the Mabuse films, one can only wonder: what would Fritz Lang have done with HP Lovecraft?" Also: Seeing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time: "I've yet to see a film that touched me in quite the same way. It wasn't about being 'grossed out'; it was a lesson in flesh, bone and sanity."

Even as he reviews Where the Truth Lies and interviews Atom Egoyan, David Lowery's taking in Halloween movies as well, starting with The Innocents.

Travis Miles: "Both an aesthetic goldmine and an invaluable educational tool, Unseen Cinema will likely stand for decades as the definitive audiovisual resource for students and acolytes of the early American avant-garde." Also at Stop Smiling: Brandon Holmquest on Michael Kackman's Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage and Cold War Culture.

The Reeler has a very serious bone to pick with Robert Christgau, re: New York Doll. More on the film from Greg Allen and, in the NYT, Stephen Holden.

Meanwhile, at the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore tells M Night Shyamalan, who's been raging against collapsing windows, to shut up.

"The biggest post-Soviet film blockbuster packing the country's multiplexes is a bloody tear-jerker about a topic many Russians would rather forget - the 10-year war that resulted in the Soviet Union's messy withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989," writes Sophia Kishkovsky from Moscow. The movie is Company 9: "For many here the film also is apparently read not only as a metaphor for Russia's Chechen quagmire, but even for the very collapse of the Soviet Union."

Also in the New York Times:

• "The Passenger, arguably Mr Antonioni's greatest film," writes Manohla Dargis, "takes place more than a decade after L'Avventura, and while it features a new cast of characters passing through different locations, speaking mostly in English, the similarities between the films are more striking than their differences." J Hoberman, though, writing in the Voice sees other linkage: "Together with Blow-Up (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1970), The Passenger - co-written with cinema studies titan Peter Wollen — can be seen as part of a loose trilogy." Back to Manohla Dargis: Mikio Naruse and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 1.

• So Richard Linklater's adaptation of Fast Food Nation has begun shooting - undercover. Michael Joseph Gross gets quotes from whomever will talk, but that's not too many people involved with the production. You'd think Participant Productions is making a movie about the mafia rather than the fast food industry, but as Morgan Spurlock says of the screenplay he's seen, "You see how deep the tentacles run... You see how big the web is."

• Christian Moerk: "In a plan disclosed last month during the Toronto International Film Festival, the actors and directors Bob Balaban, Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi are each planning in January to direct an American version of a [Theo] van Gogh picture."

• Marilyn Stasio on Showtime's Masters of Horror anthology came together. Marc Savlov in the Austin Chronicle.

• AO Scott on the "graceful and fascinating" Ballets Russes.

• Alan Riding in Paris on the new home for the Cinémathèque Française.

In his "Beyond the Multiplex" column for Salon, Andrew O'Hehir meets Gidi Dar (so does Sharon Waxman in the NYT and Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly), reviews Paradise Now (so does J Hoberman in the Voice, Armond White in the New York Press, Steve Erickson for Gay City News, Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat and Noy Thrupkaew for the American Prospect) and offers quick takes on Innocence and The Passenger.

For the NYP's Matt Zoller Seitz, Shopgirl is "probably the only Hollywood movie in recent years that seems hell-bent on reminding us that real love isn't like what you see in Hollywood movies."

Both the Vue Weekly's Paul Matwychuk and the Philadelphia City Paper's Sam Adams talk with Noah Baumbach about The Squid and the Whale.

Michael King talks with Secuestro Express writer and director Jonathan Jakubowicz and producer Elizabeth Avellán. Also in the Austin Chronicle: Spencer Parsons on An Angel at My Table.

Claire Zulkey interviews Chris Milk, who's directed videos for Kayne West, Courtney Love, Audioslave and Modest Mouse. Via Coudal Partners. Related: Nick Rombes on two recent music videos.

At PopMatters, Dave Brecheisen talks with Billy Bob Thornton about his new album, Hobo.

Antonio Pasolini interviews Carlos Reygadas for European Films. Related: Reygadas tells the Telegraph's Sheila Johnston what so impresses him about Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant and Robert Hanks reviews Battle in Heaven in the Independent.

At Cinematical, Robert Newton interviews The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio director Jane Anderson.

Ray Pride interviews David Strathairn at Movie City News.

The Onion AV Club's Noel Murray has a quick talk with John Carpenter.

Darren Aronofsky has signed to direct an episode of Lost. Michelle Kung has word at Popwatch, Entertainment Weekly's blog. Via Chris Barsanti. John Borland at CNET on the shows "alternate reality games."

Alan Ball's next series will be based on Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire series, notes - no, exclaims - Joe Brown at the San Francisco Chronicle's blog.

Reed Johnson hears Mel Gibson talk a little about Apocalypto, the film he's working on in Mexico: "The movie will employ relatively unknown actors along with hundreds of extras and will utilize Mayan dialect." Also in the Los Angeles Times: Henry Chu finds Fernando Meirelles back in Brazil, working on two smallish films.

Gerard Gilbert also talks with Meirelles in the Independent. Also: "Some now see Major Dundee as a botched trial run for later Peckinpah glories," writes Geoffrey Macnab. "Nonetheless, this is a substantial movie in its own right, boasting arguably [Charlton] Heston's finest screen performance." Plus, Laura Tennant takes her daughter to an audition and Nicola Christie talks collapsing windows with Steven Soderbergh.

In the City Pages, Matthew Wilder catches Marcel Ophüls's long essay-movie The Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime, the first half of which "made me sure Ophüls had lost his marbles... Luckily, the second half finds Ophüls back on his meds and up to the kind of associative yet disciplined filmmaking that is his trademark."

Lloyd Schwartz in the Boston Phoenix: "Val Lewton's films are about as close as Hollywood films ever got to being poetry."

Mike Russell uses his blogspace to expand on his Oregonian reviews of Saw II (more from Laura Kern in the NYT), Prime (AO Scott) and Three... Extremes (Dave Kehr and Dana Stevens).

Capsule reviews of all sorts of things: Ryan Wu and Rick Curnette.

Why doesn't Jonathan Coe own of copy of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film? "Because he's so rude about Billy Wilder."

Also in the Guardian:

• "Andy Warhol's three-and-a-half-hour, split-screen epic Chelsea Girls (1966) is a milestone in cinematic tedium," writes Will Hodgkinson. "But Alan Aldridge's poster for the London premiere is a vision of creativity, eroticism and imagination." Related: Stuart Comer in Artforum's diary.

• Doug Bolton meets the cast of The Proposition. (Check that 'stache on Nick Cave.)

• Oliver Burkeman interviews Cloë Sevigny.

• Why has the release of All the King's Men been bumped to next year? John Patterson considers five possible reasons.

Woody Allen's back in London, reports the Times. Also: Ian Johns looks back on The Last Emperor with Bernardo Bertolucci.

Jay Allen Sanford goes "Underground With the Celebrity Dead" in the San Diego Reader.

Variety declares awards season officially open.

Online browsing tip. The Haunted Mansion: Secrets. The history, the art, the works behind the Disneyland attraction. Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Online fiddling around tip. "A soundboard is a collection of dialog snippets from a movie that you can use to make prank calls," explains Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing, pointing to these. Also: the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive Project.

Online listening tip. Caty Borum, producer of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, on Your Call (10.27.05). Related: Matthew Ross at Filmmaker.

Online viewing tips, round 1. About 400 of them, actually. Google Video is hosting an archive of interviews conducted for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; scroll down for the names. Via Steve Monaco at City Pages' Culture to Go.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Noteworthy trailers: Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (trailer), The Libertine (trailer), Show Me (trailer), Transamerica (trailer) and, hosted exclusively at Twitch, the trailer for Zoetrope.

Posted by dwhudson at October 29, 2005 5:41 PM