Shorts, 12/21.

"Can we say goodbye now to terror porn?" asks Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer. "I think that the recent Showtime series Sleeper Cell demonstrates it's come at last to a dead end." Definition, please? "In its fictional manifestations, it tends to combine an inverse pornographic structure - arousal and incitement leading, usually, to (anti-)climax, terrorist interruptus - with actual porn-like sexual interludes, apparently designed to make up for the failure of the plot (or plotters) to deliver the goods." Predecessors: "nuke porn" and "serial-killer porn." Honorable mentions: Downfall ("Nazi porn") and: "I haven't seen it, but there's one detail I noticed in the advance reviews, a climactic moment in the story of terrorism and counterterrorism that suggests a resort to terror-porn cliché."

The "it" is Munich, which Andrew Sarris reviews: "It's overlong, psychologically unfocused, thematically devious and curiously anachronistic in its crypto-pacifism.... I think that Mr Spielberg is presumptuous to preach peace and nonviolence to Israelis and the rest of us in the contemporary Munich, when the first Munich [1938] inexorably produced the Holocaust." What?! Laying the Holocaust at Chamberlain's feet? Now this crypto-pacifist has heard everything.

In Die Zeit (and in German), Helmut Zischler files a long report from the set. And more Munich: Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly and Matthew Wilder in the City Pages: "Spielberg has forgotten more about moviemaking than just about any other filmmaker has ever known, and he has evolved to a level of skill so advanced that he can throw away dazzling set pieces that Peter Jackson would kill to achieve on the best day of his life."

Also: David Schimke talks with Neil Jordan about Breakfast on Pluto, which Jessica Winter finds "studiously quirky." More from Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic.

Leading the Reverse Shot round on Caché at indieWIRE, Michael Joshua Rowin notes that Michael Haneke's early films tended to fall in to the high modernist "shock the bourgeois" trap, but: "Starting from Code Unknown in 2000, however, Haneke's work has progressed by leaps and bounds.... The uncannily prescient Caché now represents the high watermark of Haneke's current phase."

The Village Voice devotes a section to Caché, starting with Michael Atkinson's review: "The form of this unholy experience is so sublimely conceived that Haneke can rope in post-colonialist atrocity (specifically, the Paris drowning-massacre of protesting Algerians in 1961) and contemporary injustices (ever-present on Anne and Georges's plasma TV), and make it all seem of a piece with the central issues of seeing-but-not-seeing, of bobo complacence in fragile balance with Frantz Fanon's 'wretched of the earth.'" Also, a quick piece on "self-reflexive cinema - the inscrutable POV, the renegade 'I.'"

And David Ng talks with Haneke: "It's not sadistic to portray suffering - it's everywhere in the world."

Also in the Voice:

• Jessica Winter listens to Claire Denis: "I was so impressed that [Jean-Luc Nancy] could express a physical feeling in a metaphor, and that really gave me the freedom in the film to mix what is real and what is imaginary without a border between them, to treat them on the same level." Dennis Lim: "Her latest feature, The Intruder, is a decisive breakthrough - her most poetic and primal film to date, as thrilling as it is initially baffling."

• The New World will likely go unseen by many during its theatrical run, but among cinephiles, it may turn out to be the most divisive film of the year. J Hoberman stakes his ground: "As an epic, it's monumentally slight." Winter has a kinda fun sidebar. Related: Tim R ponders the fact that Terrence Malick is still editing the picture.

• Atkinson on Wolf Creek, "unimaginative, light on the grue and heavy on the faux-serious desperation." More from Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

• Ed Park on The White Countess, "something of a lacquered dud." For Stephen Holden in the New York Times, it "never develops any narrative stamina." More from Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. Related: NPR's Michele Norris talks with Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave.

• Laura Sinagra: "Rumor had it this was gonna be a stinker, and it is."

Fionnuala Halliga in Screen Daily on Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World: "Instead of finding comedy in India - he largely bottles out of the Pakistan part - [Albert] Brooks brings his own schtick to the Subcontinent in a film which starts out strongly but, like its lead character, loses all sense of direction somewhere around the Taj Mahal."

John DeFore reviews V for Vendetta for the Hollywood Reporter: "Happily, it almost is entirely free of the hollow pomposity that marred the Wachowskis' last two Matrix films."

Julie Tamaki reports on Carmike Cinemas' big decision: "In a big boost for digital cinema, the nation's third-largest theater chain has agreed to install thousands of systems over the next two years." Also in the Los Angeles Times: Elaine Dutka gathers a slew of initial impressions of Munich and Susan King profiles Andy Serkis.

Is Woody Allen settling comfortably into his existentialist schtick, or what? Of course, the interviewers - in this case, Emma Brockes - can't resist asking the same questions. The very title of this piece in the Guardian: "Q: Is life, essentially, comic or tragic? A: Without any question, tragic. There are oases of comedy within it. But, when it's all over, the news is bad." Also: Gwladys Fouché reports that Jean-Claude Brisseau has been found guilty "of conducting casting couch-type auditions between 1999 and 2001, while preparing for his feature Choses Secrètes (Secret Things)" and will spend a year in jail and pay a fine of 15K euros, plus 7.5K euros to each of two actors.

How weird is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? Who are these people to have, in relatively few years, created the third-most watched awards show on TV? Sharon Waxman peeks behind the curtain to find glasses of wine being flung, buttocks grabbed and, sadly, even suicide.

Also in the New York Times:

• Slamdance programmer Paul Rachman's American Hardcore has been accepted at Sundance. Charles Lyons sort of presents this as a dilemma, but everyone actually seems fine with the arrangement.

• Manohla Dargis on Fun With Dick and Jane: "If the film never settles into a groove, zigging and zagging from belly laughs to pathos, it's because Enron remains raw as a wound." More from Kenneth Turan in the LAT and Jim Tudor at Twitch.

• Dave Kehr on new DVDs, leading with two intriguing releases from New Yorker Films.

• Laura Kern, briefly on Cheaper by the Dozen 2, "a tiresome film, full of repetitive, misfired jokes, false emotions and caricatures."

Jane Austen was out to "subvert the stilted and pat nature of all the weepy, sentimentalized 18th century novels that had come before her. And most important, to undercut and deflate at nearly every turn the idea - heck, the mere suggestion - of 'romance' in all its most hackneyed forms." Which is why, argues Gina Fattore in Salon, the latest adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is so very, very wrong.

Dennis Harvey in the SFBG: "Casanova is the kind of strenuously farcical 'romp' that frisks and preens about like an ox under the delusion that it's a show pony." More from Jessica Winter in the Voice.

Ed Champion: "What makes Syriana a fantastic film, one I definitely plan to see again, is that, without really beating us over the head with didacticism too much... the film demands that we shift out of our traditional perspective and begin considering some of the global and economic connections that are kept under the radar."

Ryan Stewart at Cinematical on Memoirs of a Geisha: "The longer the film goes on, the more obvious its arcs become and the more we begin to feel that we've settled in for an experience that the movie is not really prepared to provide."

Even for things magazine, there's no getting around King Kong.

Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "The Wayward Cloud is a comedic tragedy, a musical bathed in silence."

Jason Morehead: "I'm not the first to say it, and I won't be the last, but the thing that ultimately strikes me about Tarkovsky is his dogged belief in cinema's unique ability to convey real, absolute Truth, and that as a filmmaker, it was his duty to plumb the depths of the human soul to find that Truth."

Scott Green turns in another epic anime overview at AICN.

"The future arrived last night..." writes Steve Rosenbaum. "In my living room. I saw it. Rocketboom. Full Screen. On my Flatscreen TV. On my Tivo."

Just look at those bloggers! IndieWIRE's Brian Brooks snaps 'em.

Online browsing tip. One page at a time, TaschenKino is posting photo-comic-like shots from old Chinese martial arts films. Via filmtagebuch.

Online viewing tip #1. This could be you: the trailer for Film Geek.

Online viewing tip #2. The trailer for Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn. Via Martha Fischer at Cinematical and Quint at AICN.

Online viewing tip #3. Tomek Baginski's The Cathedral. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tips, round 1. The Guardian's Kate Stables has seven.

Online viewing tips, round 2. 12 Death Cab for Cutie videos - though you can't see them just yet, they'll be there at the site. The AP reports.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Excerpts from the PBS series, Art:21. Via DVblog.

Posted by dwhudson at December 21, 2005 7:28 AM