Shorts, 12/22.

Bill Gibron in PopMatters on holiday memories in black and white: "Before the Rankin-Bass art of Animagic, before Hermey the elf wanted to be a dentist, before Yukon Cornelius licked his first pick axe or the Heat Miser battled his snow-bearing brother, the children of Chicago were gazing in pie-eyed wonderment at a couple of creative Christmas cards rendered in delicious 'one frame at a time' movie movement mastery."

And this is lovely: "For us, the holidays were masterpieces in monochrome: barren trees pitched against gloriously overcast gray skies; drifts of dream-like snow blanketing the steel skyscrapers of downtown like a warm winter's throw."

Related online viewing tip. "Ladislas Starewitch is often credited with inventing stop motion animation as we know it, though so are several other people." DVblog offers a one-minute clip from Le Lion Devenu Vieux, 1932.

Going back even further. "To me, there's something sad and wistful and eerie about watching thousands of the long-gone marching backward from the grave, no longer dust, often directly addressing the camera, smiling and staring at us." Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix on Electric Edwardians: The Films of Mitchell & Kenyon. (More.)

Review-wise, the day belongs to Munich and A New World. It's certainly no surprise that Armond White considers the former a masterpiece; but precisely because he's done so much thinking about the way Spielberg makes movies, he is again worth a read: "Most action films never require us to think beyond the gears clicking in a killer's head; Munich achieves multileveled postmodern analysis by paralleling Avner's killing mission to the recent cinematic history of political distrust."

The LA Weekly's Ella Taylor begins her review by relating her brief and indirect brush with Middle East intrigue. Even as indirect as it is, the reality of it sets off a little flutter: "That same frisson at being let in on a grand secret conspiracy is what makes Steven Spielberg's Munich a riveting thriller - and also what works against Spielberg's liberal-peacenik qualms about vengeance in general and government-sponsored counterterrorism in particular." More from Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper and and Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix.

Back in the New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz saves the word "masterpiece" for the second sentence (White whips it out in his subtitle). Over the course of four films in almost as many decades, Terrence Malick has forged "a powerfully modern style that could be called epic naturalism, a style that appreciates the physicality of existence - the moment-to-moment visceral intensity cherished by Walt Whitman - while acknowledging human life's impermanence, then further acknowledging that the life of a person, a nation or even a species is insignificant compared to the life of the earth."

In the LAW, Scott Foundas appreciates the beauty of the film, the mourning for a lost Eden that runs throughout Malick's work and that, in this one, "the Eden in question is literally America, and the locust in her wheat field is none other than the imperialist invader.... So I wish The New World were better."

"The Matador is undeniably clever, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy a lot of it. But it has no consistent view of its main characters, tries to dance around the delicious but disturbing fact that one of them kills other human beings for a living, and is basically (like most buddy movies) a quasi-gay love story wearing a not-so-convincing disguise." Also covered in Andrew O'Hehir's "Beyond the Multiplex" column at Salon: Caché.

"[O]ne of the weirdest strains of kung fu promises instant mastery, at the price of surrendering one's self to possession by a spirit. Known as spirit boxing (shenquan or shenda), it played a pivotal role in the early 20th century conflict known as the Boxer Rebellion." Jean Lukitsh at Kung Fu Cinema, via Cinema Strikes Back.

Josh Rosenblatt reviews Criterion's 60s swordplay classics collection, films "that used the aesthetic and technical language of the swordplay films to expose and attack the culture that had lionized them." Also in the Austin Chronicle, Louis Black on the new edition of Alain Silver's The Samurai Film, but especially on Hanzo the Razor.

At indieWIRE, ML Liu recalls that Woody Allen event at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

In the Guardian, Ronald Bergan remembers Annette Stroyberg, 1936 - 2005.

Online listening tip. Spread the Good Word: Boris Karloff narrates How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Via filmtagebuch.

Posted by dwhudson at December 22, 2005 5:22 AM