Weekend shorts.

The Jean Renoir season at the National Film Theatre in London runs through February and David Thomson tells Guardian readers: "Nothing but greed and obsession will suffice: you have to see every film. Only then will you know which ones you need to see more than once. This will change your life."

Also, John Patterson: "Let's get real, folks. The western, America's trove of foundation myths and 'morality' tales, literally throbs with latent homoeroticism." And Dale Fuchs reports that Woody'll be shooting in Barcelona next.

"As a Christian, why would I bother to watch and review Brokeback Mountain, a film so many other Christians have condemned?" asks Jeffrey Overstreet, who, of course, offers a long, carefully thought through answer. Also, comments on the future of Narnia.

Matthew Clayfield is more impressed than he thought he would be by Fun with Dick and Jane, though he does find that among its problems is that it "tends to promote the idea that the people in charge, the corrupt elite, are the problem, and that things can be made better by replacing the people in charge, as opposed to the system itself - an untenable position, in my opinion, but still."

Stop Smiling runs an excerpt from its interview with William Friedkin.

Peter Rainer in the Los Angeles Times: "Now that Stanley Kubrick has passed on, [Terrence] Malick is the undisputed recluse/auteur of the film business, the director the most movie people would most like to work with if only they could find him." Related: Malick actually stuck around after a showing of The New World for a Q&A recently. Susan Albert reports in the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise. Via Anne Thompson.

David Walsh at the WSWS on Munich: "One is entitled to have ambivalent feelings about this film, but, in the end, it strikes me as an honest, relatively complicated and humane effort - in many ways, quite remarkable - and one that provides little comfort for defenders of the status quo, in Israel or elsewhere."

For SuicideGirls, Daniel Robert Epstein talks with Hugo Weaving about V for Vendetta. Related: Jason Morehead on The Interview.

You've heard, but Grady Hendrix puts it best: "Weinsteins Dump The Promise."

Back to the the LAT for a round of globalization-related pieces:

• "Now, faced with shrinking, fragmenting audiences at home, the studios are rethinking how they operate in foreign markets," writes Bruce Wallace in the Los Angeles Times. "And markets don't come any bigger than China: 1.3 billion people — a fifth of humanity — with more of them becoming middle class every day."

• Geoff Boucher: "There is no bigger popcorn movie for 2006 than Superman Returns, Warner Bros' attempt to relaunch the grand old Man of Steel as a heroic 21st century franchise. And the film is all the bigger for having been made in Australia, where the US dollar goes far and the talent pool runs deep."

• And Hui-Yong Yu reports that Washington State may launch its new incentives to draw productions.

Ben Sisario talks to moviegoers about another reason attendance was down this year: "Going to see a film has become an exercise in elaborate planning and, particularly this holiday season - when many big films like Munich, The New World and most famously King Kong, are clocking in at two and a half to three hours - a major time commitment." Related: Looker's special moviegoing moment.

Also in the New York Times:

• What happened to Orlando Bloom this year suggests to Sharon Waxman "a cautionary tale about the difficulty of minting movie superstars from the ranks of a 20-something generation."

• Recent movie posters suggest a move toward artier approaches, finds Christian Moerk.

• Heather Timmons on the 9/11 movies in the works.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Joshua Kosman leaps out of his seat to ferociously applaud Daniel Anker's doc, Music from the Inside Out.

The Google guys are helping finance a friend's indie. The AP reports.

Nick Rombes: "Revised Notes on the iPod Video."

Posted by dwhudson at December 31, 2005 5:22 AM