Shorts, 1/9.

"Matt Zoller Seitz has written the best review (plus some) of The New World I've read yet," writes David Lowery. "I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking about Resnais while watching it." Matt will no doubt be pleased to hear David say so. He's been defending that review in comments for a week now and yesterday opened the discussion further with a reply to a slew of Terrence Malick's critics gleefully rounded up by Edward Copeland:

The New World is all about fighting over the right to claim authorship, not just of a story, but individual lives, and the lives of villages, tribes and nations, and an entire continent. And [Erik Childress] describes the distancing effect of the characters' inner thoughts as if it's a bad thing, an unpleasant byproduct of directorial incompetence, rather than as what it actually is, a conscious artistic choice.

Next contentious director: "Spielberg is not a particularly intelligent or wise individual, but he is an exceptionally driven and egotistical one," argues John Mark Butterworth for Spero News. "We are seeing his midlife crisis playing out in his films. They aren't great. They aren't horrible. They mark time, but they aren't accomplishing what he wants. He wants to be the greatest filmmaker of all time, but he keeps coming up short." Those are the polite things he has to say; he loses me way before this point but doesn't turn ridiculous until he calls Spielberg "a moral ignoramus whose dilemmas are between his appetite for adulation and his wish to appear thoughtful." Variations of this argument are slung at Spielberg over and again, but I've yet to be convinced that he's any more or less concerned with his ego than most other film directors or that it takes precedence over the films themselves. Anyway: via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

Matt Clayfield: "A couple of us have been downloading some really lo-fi versions of Godard's post-May '68 films - British Sounds, Pravda, Vladimir et Rosa, etc. - and the prospect of viewing them, given their reputation as a rarely seen series of difficult and ugly, not to mention boring, Marxist-Leninist tracts, is at once both exciting and intimidating." More from Zach Campbell.

IndieWIRE is already deep into its Sundance and Slamdance coverage, interviewing the filmmakers on their way to Park City: So Much So Fast directors Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan and Flannel Pajamas director Jeff Lipsky. And Cyndi Greening has a bit more on that one.

Two docs, two pieces in Newsweek: Ginny Power gets the story behind Ralph Arlyck's Following Sean and Sarah Childress talks with Richard Gibson about his debut film, the fifteen-minute A Message From Fallujah.

"So does Peru's war on terror offer any lessons to the United States?" asks Alan Riding. "The American directors of two documentaries being shown at Film Forum in New York this month believe it does: at the very least, they say, the Peruvian experience is a cautionary tale because of the price paid by Peru's fragile democracy in crushing terrorism." The docs: Pamela Yates's State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism and Ellen Perry's The Fall of Fujimori. More on the first from Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

Also in the New York Times:

• Stephanie Zacharek reviews Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel's " lively and intelligent" Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making 'Rebel Without a Cause'.

• Michael Rush: "Virtual reality is now available to artists for about $3,000. This is the kind of watershed moment that video art enjoyed in 1965, when portable video recording equipment became available at mass-market prices."

• Even as Warren St John is on the trail of JT Leroy (click that), i.e., figuring out who's created him and who's cashing in, The Smoking Gun lays out its case: Much of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces is not, in fact, non-fiction.

• And briefly, Coeli Carr on tennis in the movies, Peter Gerstenzang on Strong Enough to Break, a doc about Hanson, and Wendy Knight on "adventure film festivals" such as the traveling Banff Mountain Film Festival.

Gaby Wood has a good profile of Jeff Skoll and Participant Productions, whose "express purpose is to make movies that will help to change the world." Also in the Observer: Sean O'Hagan compares and contrasts Walk the Line and Get Rich or Die Tryin' and Jason Solomons chats briefly with an old friend, Emily Mortimer.

David Thomson recounts the story of Michael Caine in the Independent.

Todd at Twitch on Seven Swords: "The film has a lot going for it and is certainly stronger than much of [Tsui] Hark's more recent work. That said it is positively begging for a re-edit." Also, Nick Sigley: "Whiskey may well be the very first Transcendental comedy!"

Matt Dentler: "In Sunday's Austin American-Statesman, Chris Garcia profiles the Austin Film Society on the eve of its 20th Anniversary week of celebration."

Alexandra A Seno interviews William Chang, Wong Kar-wai's art director, for the International Herald-Tribune. Also via Movie City Indie, Evan Bevins in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel: "Director Steven Soderbergh will reunite with the local cast he assembled for the movie Bubble as the film opens at the Smoot Theatre Thursday night."

Via MCN, Andrew Hartman reports at MovieMusicals.net that Tim Burton will direct an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, and yes, Johnny Depp will star.

Robert W Welkos in the Los Angeles Times: "Now that Brokeback Mountain is drawing acclaim and audiences, some in Hollywood are pushing to get new gay- and lesbian-themed projects off the drawing board and into production." Related, sort of: Logan Hill in New York and Ed Gonzalez in Slant on That Man: Peter Berlin.

Peter Sobczynski interviews Eli Roth for Hollywood Bitchslap.

Daniel Robert Epstein SuicideGirls interview roundup: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Neil Jordan and The Libertine director Laurence Dunmore.

Posted by dwhudson at January 9, 2006 6:37 AM