LA CityBeat. Holiday preview.

If you're looking for another annotated holiday release calendar, Andy Klein's got one for you in the LA CityBeat. Moreover, he's got a fine piece on the two-disc King Kong DVD in which he notes that the movie he's "anticipating with the greatest hope and the greatest anxieties is Peter Jackson's remake."

Klein, underwhelmed by Rent but impressed by Brokeback Mountain, also talks Ang Lee through his career while David Ehrenstein, anticipating Breakfast on Pluto, chats up Neil Jordan and Cillian Murphy: "We've all got to find our inner Mitzi Gaynor!"

"The two pillars of cinema's 'secret histories' - and two of my favorite books on the subject - are David Thomson's Suspects and Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire," writes Anthony Miller. "Five recent books about film offer their own 'secret histories'... these are books to keep on your shelves to return to, to choose films from, to quote from, to quarrel with, and, most of all, to get lost in." Miller has a paragraph each on Thomson's The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, David E James's The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, Mark Feeney's Nixon at the Movies: A Book About Belief, Clinton Heylin's Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios and Theodore Roszak's Flicker.

Dean Kuipers: "Despite a focused joint effort by studios, producers, and unions to restore California and Los Angeles as affordable filming options, the situation continues to worsen."

Steve Appleford interviews Harvey Pekar: "I'm pretty disappointed that at this point superheroes are still the most popular form of comic books." And as for American Splendor, "That lovable-curmudgeon stuff is really starting to choke me."

Posted by dwhudson at November 25, 2005 6:47 AM