Shorts, 11/2.

Did you know Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation now has an official site? From which you can buy the DVD? I didn't, but Doug Cummings did: "Like Funny Ha Ha, the film benefits enormously from a charismatic and unique lead performance that seems relaxed almost to the point of boredom yet is oddly fascinating, compulsively watchable, and ultimately touching."

Chuck Tryon joins the Club of 15.

There are interviews and there are interviews. This one's something else. Jennifer Ehle sat down and typed out answers to over a hundred questions from fans and the entire exchange is presented as handsome PDF files at the fan blog entitled simply Jennifer Ehle.

For In Focus, ME Russell talks with Harold Ramis about Ice Harvest, his influence on a younger generation of filmmakers, comedy in the crime genre, eccentrics and lots else.

The first part of Thomas Giammarco's "Brief History of Korean Animation" is up at Koreanfilm.org.

Also: Darcy Paquet on Kim Ki-young's 1977 film, Iodo and Adam Hartzell on Hur Jin-ho's April Snow.

"Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) announced its first-ever Indian co-production, in partnership with [filmmaker Sanjay Leela] Bhansali," reports Namrata Joshi for Outlook India. "The announcement is significant in that it's the first time a leading Hollywood studio has decided to pump money into its Asian counterpart, Bollywood."

"The screen, along with the skyscraper, has for some time been one of the particular features of Asian modernity," writes Tom Vanderbilt in a piece for Artforum: "[A]s the glass-curtain wall was to modernism, the screen is becoming the iconic facade of the digital age." Also, Isa Genzken and Wolfgang Tillmans chat; and Greil Marcus: "In the 50s [Harvey] Kurtzman's MAD magazine was Lenny Bruce for kids."

Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books: "There have been many films about writers writing, and generally they resort to a kind of clichéd visual shorthand to convey the agonies of what people like to call the creative process: pieces of paper being yanked in frustration out of typewriters, crumpled, and tossed into wastebaskets. Capote is the only movie I know of that comes close to suggesting successfully what the complex process of creating a literary work actually looks like." And that's just scratching the surface of all he admires in the film. Others, like NP Thompson, writing for Brainwash, would disagree.

Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books on The Constant Gardener: "Jeffrey Caine, the screenwriter, has no time for people who'll say that 'Big Pharma is too obvious a target.' He's right that there's nothing wrong with obvious targets.... You'd have to be very naive to think that they were especially interested in curing people: the best way for them to make money is by keeping ill people alive, much as it was in the spooks' interest to keep the Cold War going."

In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann admires both Nine Lives and Ushpizin.

"Although Jarhead is more visually accomplished and less empty than American Beauty or Road to Perdition, it still feels oppressively hermetic," writes J Hoberman of the latest Sam Mendes film. "As Desert Storm was the designated un-Vietnam, so Jarhead has an ambiguous relationship with the Nam movies that presumably fueled its combatants' warrior dreams." And: "Entertaining if cornball," The Dying Gaul, and the "model ethno-doc," Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan.

Also in the Voice:

• "Flightplan's deepest vein, despite a mention of "post–9-11" and an obvious pertinence to contemporary airborne anxieties, is not topical but emotional." Devin McKinney on the myth of the Vanishing Lady: "The original legend focused on a mother and daughter arriving in Paris for the Great Exposition of 1889."

• Ed Halter: "A low-budget talking-headster about man-on-man action in the years between Stonewall and AIDS, Gay Sex in the 70s is lightly entertaining, but - not unlike the cheap action it chronicles - leaves one wanting something much more substantial."

• James Crawford on Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price: "Viewers may not be surprised to learn of Wal-Mart's horrific track record, but they can't deny [director Robert] Greenwald's airtight advocacy." Related: Ray Pride has an update on Michael Barbaro's piece in the New York Times on Wal-Mart's "war room."

• Michael Atkinson on The Weather Man: "[I]f it's the most supremely odd American film of the year, that's because it sets us up, amiably enough, for ripe horseshit and then delivers something else entirely."

• Francis Davis on Mulatu Astatke, the highlight of the Broken Flowers soundtrack.

• Michael Musto's fun chat with Capote director Bennett Miller.

"Green Green Water is a documentary film about hydroelectric power and its impact on the lives of thousands of Aboriginal people in northern Manitoba," reads the site (which sports a vlog). Julia Ruekert profiles filmmaker Dawn Mikkelson.

Also in the City Pages: Rob Nelson salutes Noah Baumbach's mom, Georgia Brown: "'I hesitate to say Kael doesn't speak to me, but it's true,' Brown wrote in a Voice review of Kael's For Keeps, an epic anthology that, for me, has nothing on the Brown book I created from Xeroxes and gave to a colleague as a way of dealing with the news that the most underrated and inimitable of great film critics had broken her self-described 'addiction' to journalism and retired from the field." And: Terri Sutton on The Squid and the Whale and David Ng: "As made abundantly clear in Jacques Richard's engrossing documentary Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinémathèque, the man's penchant for anarchical excess was matched only by his tireless generosity - to young filmmakers, forgotten auteurs, and broke movie addicts in cine-crazy Paris."

Alexandra DuPont for the DVD Journal: "Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith: The DVD: The FAQ." More from Aidan Wasley in Slate, who sees the Compleat Star Wars as "really just one big elephantine postmodern art film. Star Wars, at its secret, spiky intellectual heart, has more in common with films like Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books or even Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle than with the countless cartoon blockbusters it spawned."

Jason Guerrasio checks in on five indies in production for indieWIRE.

At Stop Smiling: An excerpt from JC Gabel's interview with Terry Gilliam and Nathan Kosub on the Val Lewton collection.

B Ruby Rich in the San Francisco Guardian: "Paradise Now is as much about its characters' mind-sets as ours. In a way, Abu-Assad is building a bridge of subjectivity in the form of a madcap thriller." Also: Cheryl Eddy, briefly, on Jarhead.

Armond White on Lifeboat: "Hitchcock's famous toying with psychological dread has a complexity that also speaks to the present political moment." Also in the New York Press: Matt Zoller Seitz on the "epic meta-war movie," Jarhead.

At Flickhead, Kenneth Anger sends Michael I Cohen in search of Andy Arthur.

Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson, via Net Art News.

At independentfilm.com, Corey Boutilier talks with Shadowboxer director Lee Daniels.

We knew that, in the wake of the phenomenal success of The Passion of the Christ, that Hollywood would be targeting Christian audiences. Sharon Waxman reports on "Sony's release of its first high-profile DVD aimed at believers, Left Behind: World at War, the third in a series about the biblical end of days but the first time a major studio has significantly backed evangelical entertainment."

Also in the NYT, Dave Kehr on new DVDs; and Chris Elliott's run into a bit of trouble with his new novel, The Shroud of the Thwacker. He tells Edward Wyatt "that he knew Boilerplate was some kind of a spoof. But, he said, he thought it was a 19th-century spoof, not a postmodern, post-dated parody of a hoax."

In the New York Observer: Andrew Sarris on Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno Notte) and Sean Howe on Stanley Donen's Two for the Road.

retroCRUSH's "100 Greatest Horror Movie Performances," via Screenhead.

Girish resolves an ethical dilemma. Admirably.

"Why in the world do I find myself identifying with him as much as I do?" Jason Morehead watches Naked.

Looker isn't exactly transported to Heaven's Gate.

Nick Rombes: "We make blogs, digital movies, playlists, links, because we want to be consumers of our own media. A endless playback loop. A sort of narcissistic confessionalism, a blank publicity, our own 15 minutes of fame, every day."

Grady Hendrix considers Jackie Chan's playlist.

Paul Harris's deathwatch in the Guardian may be intended with respect, but it does seem rather ghoulish.

At PopMatters, Simon Wood ponders the potential impact of UNESCO's resolution aimed at protecting global cultural diversity.

"Imagine a day," proposes Margeurite Reardon at CNET, when, "[i]nstead of subscribing to a service from a cable, satellite or phone company that might offer you hundreds of channels you'll never watch, you would be able to select what you want and watch it on your own schedule. That day might not be so far away."

"The iTunes distribution model [gives] the networks a huge opportunity to reinvent themselves," argues Ivan Askwith. Also in Slate: "Pushing the reality envelope" is an exercise Hollywood enjoys offscreen as well as onscreen, Edward Jay Epstein points out.

Before iTunes really established itself as a viable means of online distribution that benefits everyone, the RIAA tripped over one PR blunder after another until finally running into a PR disaster when it started suing poor grandmothers who didn't even know they'd downloaded anything illegally. You'd think the MPAA would have taken note. Nope. Bob Purvis reports for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Gary Dretzka on collapsing windows at Movie City News.

Like Variety, the Los Angeles Times has decided that awards season has begun. Also: Susan King on Louis Malle.

Online browsing tip #1. Photos taken by lost cameras, toy cameras and more. Via Coudal Partners.

Online browsing tip #2. kinema icon. Via e-flux.

Online viewing tip #1. Shorts by Atomic Elroy. Via DVblog.

Online viewing tip #2. At Cinema Strikes Back, Blake'll point you to the "QT6 Flashback Video."

Online viewing tips. Trailers of note: Wolf Creek (trailer), The Libertine (trailer), After Innocence (trailer at the site) and Zinda (trailer).

Posted by dwhudson at November 2, 2005 4:01 PM