Shorts, 12/26.

"One wonders how America would look today if Hollywood had romanticized trains, streetcars and bustling city streets with same fervor as it did speedy cars and rambling single-family homes," writes Ode editor Jay Walljasper at Alternet in a comparison of two Christmas classics. "[W]hile Miracle on 34th Street was jubilant in its embrace of the suburban dream, The Bishop's Wife celebrated the energy and humanity of old urban neighborhoods and lamented their downfall."

"Along with Anger's Scorpio Rising and Warhol's Chelsea Girls, Mike Kuchar's Sins of the Fleshapoids remains one of the most influential films of the 60s American Underground," writes Other Cinema, introducing its DVD (with a trailer, too). At Stop Smiling, Michael Joshua Rowin opens his long and hefty interview with Kuchar by noting, "Possessed by vivid imagination and ribald taste, [Mike and George Kuchar] were instrumental in giving rise to intentional camp cinema, and did so well before Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Susan Sontag's 'Notes on Camp.'"

Summer holidays are for beach reading, winter holidays for clamping down. For recommendations, see two stimulating posts from Zach Campbell and Matt Clayfield.

Guy Maddin is currently working on two projects and he tells Todd at Twitch what he can about them.

Benny Crick offers an early impression of Luc Besson's Angel A, noting that his "commercial trump card is his male star: Jamel Debbouze, the diminutive 30-year old Moroccan-born stage and TV funnyman who is one of France's most popular (and best-paid) entertainers... Besson turns mid-summer Paris into the film's third main character, as Thierry Arbogast's lush photography gives the script a timeless, fable-like quality." Also: Mike Goodridge on Chen Kaige's The Promise.

"[E]vangelicals as a group are becoming more sophisticated in their interaction with popular culture," theology prof Robert Johnston tells John Leland in a great piece that points to a wide range of Christian film criticism online and off.

Also in the New York Times: Michael Moore and Spike Lee aren't the only filmmakers working on capturing aspects of the aftermath of Katrina, reports Nancy Ramsey.

After many years, Flickhead revisits The Concert for Bangladesh: "Regardless of the present climate of conservative Christianity that's been a nagging concern in newspapers and magazines, I doubt if contemporary popular music shares such strong ties to spirituality as demonstrated on that stage thirty-five years ago - by artists once regarded as heathens by the mainstream, no less."

For the Orange County Weekly, Cole Akers talks with B Ruby Rich about the buzzed-up reception of Brokeback Mountain and the film's distant relationship to the New Queer Cinema of the 90s (and even greater distance to Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys. In the Nation, Stuart Klawans notes that despite that "obvious precedent," "Brokeback Mountain has unmistakably established a new screen archetype. This is no small achievement."

In the Telegraph, Sheila Johnston talks with Albert Brooks about Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.

Adam Hartzell on Tale of Cinema: "Although not my favorite Hong [Sang-soo] film (I still go back and forth between The Power of Kangwon Province and Turning Gate), this film will still satisfy any Hong fan and annoy any Hong detractor." Also at Koreanfilm.org: Kyu Hyun Kim on undergrad filmmaker Yoon Jong-bin's The Unforgiven, winner of the FIPRESCI, NETPAC and other awards at the 2005 Pusan Film Festival.

Charlie Prince at Cinema Strikes Back: "Johnnie To's latest film, Election, promised from Day One to be a new gold standard in the genre. Thus the expectations for the film were impossibly high, and certainly it is not the reinvention of cinema. Nevertheless, I recommend the film heartily, with the caveat... that it assumes a significant familiarity with the Triad film genre."

Gary Dretzka talks with Margaret Brown about Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt and its prospects for Movie City News.

Cinematical's Karina Longworth: "The New World is the best puppy-love soap opera I've ever seen." More from Manohla Dargis in the NYT, Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times and Dave Kehr: "The overwhelming impression I had was of a director drowning in a sea of 'coverage' and struggling to coax a narrative out of largely random material."

Also in the LAT:

• Ching-Ching Li on what six Chinese retirees are up to: "Strapping an old projector and rusty cases of film reels on the back of a motorbike, they've been traveling rugged country roads to bring the magic of cinema to remote villages untouched by the marvels of the big screen."

• Street Art: Classic Polish Film Posters, an exhibition at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum through March 12, gives Susan King an opportunity to explain why it is that, from the 50s through the 70s, the Poles made the greatest movie posters in the world.

• Chris Gaither on what the future holds for AtomShockwave.

• Kevin Thomas praises Scott Eyman's Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B Meyer.

AO Scott: "Imagine my surprise... when Casanova turned out to be not a bewigged and brocaded white elephant, but rather a lively, sly and altogether charming farce."

More reviews in the NYT: Scott on Rumor Has It, Stephen Holden on The Intruder, Nathan Lee on The Ringer and Dargis on Wolf Creek.

Steve Erickson in Gay City News: "The greatest achievement of Caché is turning an ordinary part of cinema's grammar - the establishing shot - into an image of horror." More from Christopher Campbell at Cinematical, AO Scott in the NYT and Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

James Brookfield at WSWS: "Though a work of fiction, Syriana gives a truer picture of life in the Middle East - as well as in the political and financial centers of the US - than the sum total of all the broadcast news in the United States since the start of the 'war on terror.'"

Peter Martin at Twitch: "Borderline racist and ragingly misogynistic, Memoirs of a Geisha is guilty of the greatest cinematic sin of all: boredom." More from NP Thompson in the Northwest Asian Weekly.

Comeback Kids in the Hollywood Reporter: Tatiana Siegel on Woody Allen and Anne Thompson on Shirley MacLaine.

David Puttnam in the New Statesman: "I have recently been making a series of programmes for BBC Radio 4 about the changing political role of British cinema. I focus on three films from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s."

What's it take to make a remake? It's more complicated that you might think. Gabriel Snyder explains in Slate. Also: Chris Suellentrop on Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie: "If it's not the best movie adaptation of all time - GoldenEye fans object whenever this claim is made about another game - then it's the game that comes closest to evoking the feelings and sensations you get while watching the movie."

P2P for free in France? Not exactly. Thomas Crampton reports in the International Herald Tribune on "amendments [tagged] onto an anti-piracy law that would establish a so-called global license fee that - once paid - would permit Internet users to download unlimited digital music and films from the Internet for personal use." Via Ditherati. Slashdotters discuss.

A year ago, Paul Boutin, assessing the next generation DVD wars in Slate, wrote, "edium at a time when we're discovering the joys of broadband connections, downloadable video, and hard drives big enough to hold a small movie library. If Sony, Toshiba, and the movie studios go to war, they might find that by the time it's over, we won't care about shiny silver disks at all." That scenario may be playing out right now, as Ken Belson reports in the NYT.

The Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series picks up again on January 2.

Online viewing tip. "Impressions of SPOTS and City Gaze" (viewable IRL during the Berlinale, too, if you're coming over); via Joni Taylor at Rhizome.

Posted by dwhudson at December 26, 2005 5:11 AM