Shorts, 1/2.

"Over the course of the next week, I'll be blogging a great deal about the films of Sundance 2006." She's not kidding. Cyndi Greening has posted four robust entries since, each a thematic rounding-up of previews: war, music, art and language.

For acquarello, Catherine Lupton's Chris Marker: Memories of the Future helps clarify the "indefinable kinship" he's felt toward Marker's films. The review crescendos here: "Integrating the contextual re-evaluation that came with the personal history of A Grin Without a Cat into his recurring preoccupations of cultural legacy and collective consciousness, Sans soleil can be seen, not as a departure from his militant, film collective works, but as a logical evolution towards reconciling the failure of the social revolution with his own memory of its once seemingly unstoppable progression."

"Yoon Jong-bin emerged as the most celebrated young director at the 10th Pusan International Film Festival. His debut feature The Unforgiven received accolades from press and audiences alike, and ended up collecting no fewer than four awards, namely a special mention from the official jury, the FIPRESCI award, the NETPAC award and the PSB Public Prize." Paolo Bertolin has a short interview with him at Koreanfilm.org, where Kyu Hyun Kim reviews Won Sin-yeon's The Wig.

Philip French in the Observer:

Radu Mihaileanu, a Jewish filmmaker who fled his oppressive native Romania via Israel in 1980 to work in France, draws on his complicated emotional history (his communist father changed the family name to obscure the provocative racial affiliation) in taking the deception in the other direction. The central character of Live and Become passes himself off as a Jew or, rather, is propelled by his Ethiopian mother into 20 painful years as an impostor.

In the Independent, David Thomson considers what was on Spielberg's mind as he made Munich: "[M]ovies glorifying the action of a moment do not convey the grim calculation of history, whereby one squalid act leads to another, until moral superiority is mere rhetoric."

Peter Edidin: "[Vincent] Schiavelli's career is a reminder that film, however adept it has become at bending or inventing reality, is still ruled by the close-up - what the film theorist Bela Balazs called the 'language of the face.'"

Also in the New York Times, Alan Riding on Casanova's "reconstructed 18th-century score" and John Rockwell's preview of the Dance on Camera Festival (Walter Reade, January 4 through 7, 10, 13 and 14).

And briefly: Edidin on Typecasting, Mark Simonson's tracking of the "use (and misuse) of period typography in movies," Charles McGrath on the communal pleasures of talking back at the screen and Christian Moerk on Art Within Labs, a workshop devoted to screenplays that, as the site puts it, "are culturally relative and explore hope and truth from a Christian perspective."

Peter Sobczynski interviews Syriana writer-director Stephen Gaghan for Hollywood Bitchslap.

In New York, Adam Sterbergh meets Forest Whitaker.

Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Junebug director Phil Morrison for SuicideGirls.

Steven Wells in the Guardian: "As Kyle Bishop, lecturer in English at Southern Utah University and self-proclaimed expert on the 'zombie renaissance,' puts it, 'The zombies haven't got any scarier, it's just in the past four or five years the landscape they stalk has started to look horribly familiar. During Hurricane Katrina, the news looked uncannily like a zombie movie set.'"

Tim Lucas compares a newly revised and expanded edition of John Canemaker's Winsor McCay: His Life and Art with the 1987 version.

All in one fell swoop, Time's Joe Klein watches Munich, Syriana, Paradise Now, "and, for kicks, a DVD dash through the fourth season of the television series 24." His findings: "The moral necessity to confront the terrorists is clear. But the war is going to be fought on their terms, not ours, and we are bound to be diminished - stained, perhaps irrevocably - by it."

In TV Guide, Joss Whedon joshes about the future of TV. Via Jason Morehead.

Online browsing tip. The Movie Card Website. Via Coudal Partners.

Online browsing and viewing tip. The Marx Brothers - Night at the Opera Treasury. Via DVblog.

Online viewing tip #1. Nacho Vigalondo's Choque. Via Coudal Partners and Twitch.

Online viewing tip #2. Hall of Deleted Images. Via The Crime in Your Coffee.

Posted by dwhudson at January 2, 2006 6:18 AM