Shorts, 2/5.

Everyone's favorite story this past week has to be the one Joaquin Phoenix told about flipping his car, and then, as the wires have it, "As he lay, disorientated, in the wreckage, he heard a gentle tap on the passenger window." 'Twas Werner Herzog, telling him to simply "Relax." Phoenix found the voice "calming and beautiful... I got out of the car and I said thank you. And he was gone."

But wait, there's more. WENN is reporting that Herzog was shot during a recent interview with the BBC. "[A]s if it was the most normal thing in the world, [he] said, 'Oh, someone is shooting at us. We must go.'" And a little later, "It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid." Via Wiley Wiggins, who writes, "I fully expect a headline tomorrow to read, 'Director Werner Herzog travels back in time to best Napoleon Bonaparte in an arm-wrestling match.'" At Contact Music, we learn that it was an "air rifle," but still.

Flickhead recalls going to the movies in San Francisco in the 70s: "Located on Market Street in a section touching the squalid end of town, The Strand opened its doors late in the morning, and if you got there before noon the admission was one dollar and twenty-five cents." Terrific entry.

New York has a new, cleaner site, making it much easier to find features such as Phoebe Eaton's "Revenge of the Weinsteins," in which we learn, "These days, the motivation is all about the IPO."

Also, David Edelstein: "Explicit scenes of torture and mutilation were once confined to the old 42nd Street, the Deuce, in gutbucket Italian cannibal pictures like Make Them Die Slowly, whereas now they have terrific production values and a place of honor in your local multiplex. As a horror maven who long ago made peace, for better and worse, with the genre's inherent sadism, I'm baffled by how far this new stuff goes—and by why America seems so nuts these days about torture."

"Like other Italian filmmakers who emerged in the 1950's, between the neo-realism of Rossellini and the New Wave exuberance of Bernardo Bertolucci, [Valerio] Zurlini is somewhat overlooked today," writes Dave Kehr. But NoShame's DVD release of The Desert of the Tartars "should by itself be enough to motivate a re-examination of his work."

Also in the New York Times:

• Charles Isherwood remembers Wendy Wasserstein, too soon gone at 55: "Starting in 1977 with her breakthrough work, Uncommon Women and Others, Ms Wasserstein's plays struck a profound chord with women struggling to reconcile a desire for romance and companionship, drummed into baby boomers by the seductive fantasies of Hollywood movies, with the need for intellectual independence and achievement separate from the personal sphere." More from Walter Shapiro in Salon and Lizzy Ratner in the New York Observer.

• Roberta Smith's appreciation of Nam June Paik: "His career is a study in how radical artists can function at the center of society, and change it."

• "London has Jack the Ripper. America has the Black Dahlia," Brian De Palma tells Pat H Broeske. The film, based on James Ellroy's novel, is due in the fall.

• With Night Watch set to open "in a handful of theaters" in the US on February 17, Ross Johnson writes up a backgrounder on the full trilogy.

• Dennis Lim talks with Carlos Reygadas about Battle in Heaven.

• Sharon Waxman: "Rather than a breeding ground for auteurs, film school — and there are now some 114 colleges that offer a major in film studies, according to the College Board — has become a path to a professional career in Hollywood, a foot in the door and a place to make connections."

• It wasn't Catherine Keener portraying her in Capote or Sandra Bullock playing her in the upcoming Infamous that's drawn Harper Lee from her cocoon of privacy, reports Ginia Bellafante, but rather, an essay contest sponsored by the Honors College at the University of Alabama.

• Frank DeCaro on the return of the 1966 ABC series, The Time Tunnel, on DVD.

At indieWIRE, Jason Guerrasio reports on five indies in production.

At PopMatters, Violet Glaze luxuriates in the beauty of John Ford's Monument Valley.

Craig Phillips: "All one has to do to understand why Greta Garbo is still talked about today and why she became an instant sensation in the late 30s is to watch her first few moments in Lubitsch's Ninotchka."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Johnny Ray Huston recommends catching two docs in you can: Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt and Trudell.

Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix: "Hollywood studios looking for movie ideas should check out Jessica Sanders's After Innocence."

So The New World won't be a hit. That's to be expected. "More disheartening is to see a certain cache of movie writers come swarming out to greet Malick's latest as an exercise in how arch and unimpressed they can act in the face of a work that — whatever one's opinion of its qualities — shouldn't be denied its singularity," writes Nick Pinkerton in Stop Smiling. "An American history written in intimate, undistilled emotion; an attentive, tonally precise work with blockbuster-big outer margins - trying to place it in the context of contemporary American cinema is like hanging a JMW Turner canvas in a coffee shop art show."

Via Grady Hendrix, Mark Schilling in the Japan Times on Kiko Mitani's The Uchoten Hotel: "It's entertainment as an ingeniously staged, tightly orchestrated three-ring circus, minus the rings - though there is a magic act, not to mention a lost duck and a clownish elderly gent in white makeup."

At Koreanfilm.org, Kyu Hyun Kim reviews Jang Jin's Murder, Take One: "A crackling murder mystery plot combines with drop-dead hilarious comedy, social satire and a dash of romantic fantasy to create an intimidatingly fizzy but immensely intoxicating witch's brew. Think Lieutenant Columbo wandering into Twin Peaks, with characters speaking lines written by Neil Simon." And Darcy Paquet on Kim Tae-kyun's A Millionaire's First Love: "Let's cut to the chase: if you've watched a fair number of Korean movies aimed at teens, then there will be nothing the slightest bit unusual or unexpected in this story."

Acquarello looks back to Trinh T Minh-ha's first digital feature, The Fourth Dimension.

Todd at Twitch on Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times: "Hou's typically minimal style, with dialogue held to a bare minimum and A Time For Freedom actually set as a silent with dialogue delivered via intertitles, is best suited to his first two pieces."

"A Moment of Innocence, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's fifteenth film, returns to a defining event in the director's life," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "In fact, Close-Up seems a pretty clear precursor to and model for A Moment of Innocence."

MS Smith on Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl: "The film's artistry only makes its relative neglect in North America all the more troubling."

"Virtually unremarked, cinema-goers are enjoying a golden age," announces a lead editorial in the Observer. A slow news week? Not necessarily. Evidently, the editors simply felt someone should come out and say, "highly entertaining, serious films have come out of the draughty uncomfortable art-house and into the mainstream. And we should all celebrate that."

Ok. Also:

• Why wasn't Caché nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar? "[I]t is - how the heart sinks at this - merely down to bureaucracy," explains Rachel Cooke.

• "They were all saying, 'He's so amusing. Why wasn't he more like that when he was running?'" Amen to that. Geraldine Bell exaggerates Al Gore's newfound celebrity status in the wake of An Inconvenient Truth - of course it played well at Sundance - but the profile's a good one nonetheless.

• "Can you think of any good movies without smoking in them?" asks Lynn Barber. A "diet of non-smoking films would be almost unwatchable."

• James Robinson reports on the Lexington Film Fund, which "will enable 'high-net-worth individuals' to invest at the development stage of several [British] films," replenishing to some extent the funding that was lost when Gordon Brown closed up a tax loophole.

• Susannah Clapp a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Apollo: "Kathleen Turner, last seen on the London stage in The Graduate, gives a performance of huge gusts and guts." More from Paul Taylor in the Independent. Also: Robert Lepage's The Andersen Project: "He switches from theatre to film and back again as easily as he swaps hats."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "Part of me wants to give The Tenants some water and light, as if to let it grow a little. But the fact is that this paranoid racial fantasy of early-1970s New York doesn't understand what it's really about." A bit more from Mark Holcomb in the Voice.

Writing at indieWIRE, a trio of Reverse Shot reviewers is none too impressed with A Good Woman. More from Jessica Winter in the Voice and Slant's Ed Gonzalez.

Also at Slant: Nick Schager on Something New (more from Mark Holcomb in the Voice) and Gonzalez on The Tollbooth. More on that one from Pete L'Official in the Voice.

The Vue Weekly on Louis Malle: Josef Braun on Murmur of the Heart and Carolyn Nikodym on The Silent World.

Sean Spillane posts a massive 2001 entry at Bitter Cinema.

When Jack Abramoff hit the headlines, many decided it was time to rent Red Scorpion. "But even savvy movie-watchers may have missed Red Scorpion 2," note Michael Signer and Ryan Chiachiere in the American Prospect. "If Red Scorpion is the Hollywood manifestation of the Reagan Revolution, then the straight-to-video Red Scorpion 2 captures some of the intellectual emptiness, opportunism, and crassness of today’s Republican Party."

Richard Foreman "can never wholly renounce the theater: He knows, as all of us who work there know, that the theater is an eternally alluring temptation; film is only an industry," writes Michael Feingold. Nevertheless, Zomboid! "is literally a 'film performance' in that it plays film and performance off against each other, while challenging both with its complex audio track. One of the most densely cerebral pieces Foreman has ever created, it's also, intriguingly, one of his most aggressive, though its abstractness mostly keeps its aggression from threatening the audience."

Also in the Voice, little bits left behind by other entries here: J Hoberman on The War of the Worlds (the 1953 version, that is), Michael Atkinson on Corpse Bride, La Scorta and the Bleep!? sequel, R Emmet Sweeney on Tamara and Phyllis Fong on Blossoms of Fire.

"Filmbrain can only hope that [Asia] Argento had no doubts about [JT] LeRoy and his story, for what other possible defense can there be for making this utterly repulsive film."

Tristram Shandy roundup: David Edelstein in New York, Dana Stevens in Slate and Andrew Sarris in the NYO.

Also in the NYO, Scott Eyeman:

My favorite moment in Marshall Fine's new biography of Cassavetes comes when Martin Scorsese, no demon for structure, is watching Cassavetes edit a scene from Minnie and Moscowitz (1971).

"Come on, John," said Mr Scorsese, "get to the point of the scene."

"Never!" Cassavetes shot back.

John Malkovich and Naomi Campbell star in a ten-minute ad for an Italian tire company premiering online in March. Eric Pfanner reports in the International Herald Tribune.

"[R]esearch for Tate Britain's exhibition Gothic Nightmares has revealed a parallel story: the many connections that exist between Gothic paintings of the late-18th century and the design or visualisation of horror films," writes Christopher Frayling. And Audrey Niffenegger reviews the exhibition.

Also in the Guardian:

• John Patterson would like to liven up Brief Encounter.

• Andrew Pulver reports on Nick Love's efforts to raise funding for his next feature online.

• Anthony Smith remembers Joan Root, filmmaker and conservationist, 1936 - 2006.

• And a couple of news items: China has banned Memoirs of a Geisha, "reportedly because of government fears that it could fan the flames of anti-Japanese sentiment." Meanwhile, Wong Kar-wai may be close to shooting a film about "the human tragedy that unfolded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina."

"What makes The Office so important?" asks Ed Champion. "When was the last time, for example, that you saw any show dramatizing the way a corporation keeps its workers baited for life with impossible dreams (such as the graphic arts training program or the 'human' face of a meeting in which extremely personal questions are asked and it’s really more about reporting these things back to HR)? Of course, in a world where you can be downsized tomorrow, these long-term prospects are little more than prospects."

Gleaming Cinematical for news of up-n-coming films; click the bloggers' names for details: Sean Penn's signed to adapt Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (Martha Fischer); Grind House (Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez) to roll (Mark Beall); the Coen brothers will adapt Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (Fischer).

"[T]here really aren't too many Anglo-American filmmakers who really care about the concept of having a visual style," argues Peter Nellhaus.

"The Siren adores the Marx Brothers." The Siren has excellent taste.

And Guysterrules has a nice Shelley Winters story.

"If my personal moviegoing history has taught me anything, it's that you shouldn't get unduly excited over an advance rave, because when you finally do get to judge for yourself, you will probably be disappointed," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "That said, Jeffrey Wells's overwhelmed response to Robert Towne's Ask the Dust, starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, automatically pushes the film to number one on my list of Movies I Can't Wait to See."

Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter: "[M]ore than 90 percent of the target moviegoer demographic ages 13 - 34 go online to get their movie information."

"Are you an apologist for the Disney-Pixar deal?" asks Matt Palmquist in the SF Weekly. "Take our quiz and find out!" Acquiring Pixar is actually a pretty risky move on Disney's part, argues Edward Jay Epstein in Slate.

Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene: "Great news about those Oscar nominations for Walk the Line, huh? Not long ago, a Fox executive told Tennessee's film commission chief to enjoy the movie's success - since it would be the last one the studio shot here."

Dennis Cozzalio takes his three-year-old daughter to a movie. Suddenly, a "gotcha!" moment: "But before I could say anything, she looked up at me and said, 'That scared me!' And then I noticed she was grinning. And then I heard she was laughing. And then I knew that this truly was my daughter, and that I loved her so much more than I could understand, and I began to hope that someday she and I would be looking at scary movies together and laughing as our hearts got caught in throats time and time again."

In the Los Angeles Times: Robert W Welkos on the making of Curious George and Susan King on phones in the movies.

Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books: "[T]o see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously - and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement." Related, and via Movie City News: David Graham in the Toronto Star: "[A]t least one psychologist who counsels gay men in Santa Fe, NM, is convinced the tortured relationship between farm hand Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) represents a psychological condition that exists in many gay men today." And Ryan Wu writes a spoilerific appreciation of the film.

Why see Throw Momma From the Train again? "Early in Danny DeVito's comedy," remembers Vince Keenan, "Oprah Winfrey lavishes praise on the author of a searing autobiographical book. It turns out said author is passing off her ex-husband's manuscript as her own."

Volume 2 of the Journal of Short Film is out.

Online snicker tip. Mike Russell's "Postcards from Park City."

Online listening tip #1. Metropolitician Michael Hurt interviews Koreanfilm.org's Darcy Paquet (who most recently reviews The King and the Clown, "a rather different sort of Korean blockbuster").

Online listening tip #2. Film School's "On & On."

Online viewing tip #1. Christopher Walken: Space Traveler. Via Screenhead.

Online viewing tip #2. In case you haven't seen it yet, Brokeback to the Future, via Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing.

Online viewing tip #3. Daragh Sankey's Ninja and Zombie, a new serial about, that's right, a ninja and a zombie. Who happen to be roomies.

Online viewing tip #4. "Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip." Via filmtagebuch.

Online viewing tip #5. Matt Singer talks to your favorite film bloggers for IFC News.

Online viewing tips #6 and #7. Todd at Twitch: "A second trailer for Christian Volckman's sci-fi animation Renaissance has just come online and it is every bit as stunning as the first." Also: The trailer for Ayassi's Vinzent.

Online viewing tip #8. From the front page of Movie City News, find "A Video Chat With The Director Of Sundance Entry Journey From the Fall." That would be Ham Tran and the video's by Rose Kuo and Mitch Marcus.

Online viewing tip #9. Harmony Korine's video for Cat Power's "Living Proof," via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

And of course, online viewing tip #10. Jack Black. Trailer. Poster. Ain't It Cool. Nacho Libre.

Posted by dwhudson at February 5, 2006 2:56 PM