Shorts, 12/15.

Ideas are in the air. Both the New York Observer and LA Weekly wonder on their covers, What if that were Woody Allen up there at the top of the world instead of Naomi Watts? In the NYO's "Power Geezers" issue, the crowds that gathered to hear him speak at Lincoln Center a couple of weeks ago have Suzy Hansen recalling a time "when it was Woody's New York and we just lived in it. For New Yorkers of a certain age - and I'm 28 - he is still our director, the Jewish Male of All Jewish Males, an important and orienting force for nascent American shiksas everywhere."

The LAW's Scott Foundas also has a long talk with Allen, who, despite attempts to ignore what anyone else thinks, readily admits that Match Point "is indeed a better film than most of the films I've made before - just by coincidence, by happy luck." But for Ella Taylor, it's "a perfectly presentable, entirely unremarkable domestic melodrama parked queasily between opera and realism, two irreconcilable forms if ever there were."

Then Foundas delivers the lump of coal in the LAW's "Holiday Films" cover package: "King Kong isn't terrible, but it’s something that none of [Peter] Jackson's previous movies ever was - it's enervating." Also, Joshuah Bearman: "It was only in 1855 that a live gorilla was first seen by Western eyes, and no specimen arrived in the United States until 1902. Wild stories circulated about sex rites in Gabon, and orangutans raping tribeswomen in their Borneo villages." And Ron Stringer on his "first big, aching movie-star crush."

At Cinemarati, Filmbrain finds Kong "a loving and loyal tribute to the original, and a great adventure film to boot."

More Kong:

• Simon Gray talks with Andrew Lesnie for American Cinematographer.

• Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "[I]ts sense of intimacy is what really sticks with you."

• In Slate, Meghan O'Rourke considers how Jackson's updated the sticky sexual politics of the story.

• Jim Tudor at Twitch: "It is the theatrical must-see movie of the year, hands down."

• Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene: "If ever a movie expressed the devil's deal an entertainer makes with his audience, [Jackson's] Kong is it."

Back to the LAW. Foundas admires Tommy Lee Jones's "altogether impressive big-screen directing debut," The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. More:

• In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis finds it "less an act of revisionism than one of reconsideration. As in most westerns, as in John Ford's Searchers and Cormac McCarthy's Crossing, the journey here is as spiritual as it is physical, as much inwardly directed as outward bound."

• For Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, if the film "has some languid patches, it's also a work of uncommon maturity and remarkable poetry. More actors, I suspect, should wait 35 years before directing their first feature. Hell, more directors should too." O'Hehir also interviews Jones.

• In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas and Susan King.

Taylor in the LAW on Caché: "I have my reservations about Haneke, who, like that other finger-wagging parson Godard, can be an awful scold when it comes to the middle classes he so palpably despises."

Also, Foundas on The Producers: "I wouldn't put it past [Mel] Brooks that this whole thing might be one big, elaborate prank whose punch line is still to come."

At AICN, Quint runs quick reviews from three readers who've caught test screenings for Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. By the way, as noted below, Radiohead was indeed approached about doing the soundtrack but passed.

Josef Braun interviews Philip Seymour Hoffman for Vue Weekly. Also: Paul Matwychuk on Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and Brian Gibson on Lost Embrace.

Chuck Stephens: "[T]he ever-escalating creepinesses in [Kiyoshi] Kurosawa's Pulse seems less attuned to the nuances of Ring's lethal videotape paradigm than to the sorts of surrealist interior decorations you might find in a film by David Lynch, if not to an altogether non-site-specific sense of Japan as a Cronenbergian dead zone, where existential isolation has attained a critical mass that not even death can dissipate." More from Johnny Ray Huston: "Pulse is one of the greatest movies about loneliness and melancholy ever made."

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: Cheryl Eddy on Down to the Bone and, briefly, Michelle Devereaux on The Producers.

Brian Darr caught the Bruce Conner retrospective in San Francisco: "It's exciting to see new material from this great filmmaker, even if it (like last year's Luke) is rooted in projects started decades ago. In the q-and-a Conner intimated that he doesn't need to continue making the fast-paced films he's famous for when so many others are doing it for him."

For Cinematical, Robert Newton interviews Transamerica writer and director, Duncan Tucker.

Writing in Screen Daily, Patrick Z McGavin finds The New World "more accessible and emotionally resonant than Malick's previous work, the World War Two feature The Thin Red Line."

Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema is finally headed to DVD - in France. Todd has details at Twitch. Also: Hal Hartley will soon begin shooting Fay Grimm, the sequel to Henry Fool he talked about back in April with Hannah Eaves.

Brokeback Mountain:

• NP Thompson: "The insight - to say nothing of the courage - of this film makes it a masterpiece. Or close enough."

• Michael Musto in the Voice: "At the premiere, when the film tried too hard to tug at our faygeleh-loving heartstrings, I thought, 'At last we have a gay romance as banal as the straight ones. We've finally arrived!'"

• John Walsh offers a brief history of gay movies in the Independent.

• Robert W Welkos and Elaine Dutka in the LAT: "[T]here's one important landmark the film has yet to reach - roping in a mass audience." Also, Susan King profiles Michelle Williams.

• Rob Nelson in the City Pages: "[I]it doesn't fail to hit straight men where they live." Also, King Kong.

• David Letterman: "Top Ten Signs You're a Gay Cowboy," via Gabriel at Modern Fabulosity.

Amen: Looker's got an entry on Anthony Lane entitled simply, "Somebody Stop This Man!"

Back to the New York Times:

• Stephen Holden on the "small, witty" Grace Lee Project. Related: ML Liu has five questions for director Grace Lee in indieWIRE; more from Christopher Campbell at Cinematical.

• Caryn James on why, though Ralph Fiennes "is among today's most artistically successful actors," he's nonetheless "been robbed of awards or nominations so far this season."

• Janet Maslin: "Although Striking Back is not linked with [Munich], its publication is conveniently timed to imply a connection and capitalize on the inevitable debate."

A new production of Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's Once in a Lifetime, basically about actors racing from Broadway to Hollywood, chasing opportunities heralded by the advent of sound in the movies, opens in London tomorrow. The Guardian runs a piece Londoners will find in their programs by David Thomson, a fun bit of Hollywood history. Also: Ryan Gilbey meets Nathan Lane.

Stop Smiling runs a pack of brief DVD reviews. More from the Austin Chronicle.

The BBC reports on the opening of Chen Kaige's The Promise in China.

Aaron Dobbs and Lily Oei talk with Ron Hogan about his new book, The Stewardess is Flying the Plane for the Gothamist.

At the Berlinale site, Panorama director Wieland Speck talks about the upcoming retrospective dedicated to the fest's gay and lesbian Teddy Award.

Brian Brooks looks ahead to the Palm Springs International Film Festival (January 5 through 16) at indieWIRE.

PodART at Fine Art in Space is "the first group exhibition of video art intended to be viewed and sold solely on the iPod." Via Cult of Mac by way of Cinema Minima.

The Reeler hits MoMA's Pixar: 20 Years of Animation exhibition.

Online viewing tip #1. The Hidden Massacre. Via Marc Wells, who interviews director Sigfrido Ranucci for the WSWS: "There are hundreds of private viewings in associations, clubs, halls. It's been shown even on the walls of a shopping mall in Rome during shopping hours."

Online viewing tip #2. X's collection of Korean music videos at Twitch.

Online masochism tip. Gabriel at Modern Fabulosity: "What do four of 2006's biggest blockbusters-in-waiting - The Da Vinci Code, Poseidon, Miami Vice, and Mission Impossible: 3 - have in common? Two things: first, they all recently released their first trailers. Second, all the trailers look like ass." Couldn't have put it better. See for yourself.

Posted by dwhudson at December 15, 2005 7:15 AM