Shorts, 3/3.

Federico Fellini "has been graced with a profusion of books - some thirty in English, French and Italian at last count - but Tullio Kezich's biography surpasses them all," writes Peter Cowie in the Nation. "Trenchant in its critical analysis, absorbing and sympathetic in its account of his private life, Kezich's Fellini is a revelation. It effaces virtually everything written to date about the Italian maestro."

Todd's excited. Understandably so: "Miike's Blogging! And occasional Twitch contributor and very fine Japanese film blogger Don Brown is translating it! Go now!"

The Robert Altman Blog-a-Thon has begun and will carry on all weekend long. Keep an eye on The House Next Door for updates.

Jonny Leahan surveys the varied and intriguing batch of docs nominated for Indie Spirit Awards - only one, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, is also nominated for an Oscar. Plus, the Indies remembered to nominate Grizzly Man. Also at indieWIRE, more on Indiewood's awards season from Eugene Hernandez and Jason Guerrasio checks in on five independent films in production: Anamorph, Jumping Off Bridges (set to premiere at SXSW), My Suicide, Starting Out in the Evening and The US vs John Lennon.

The Telegraph's Sheila Johnston talks with Fatih Akin about Yilmaz Güney, a "hero" about whom he plans to make a biopic at some point. And Yol: "This is such physical cinema: you're glued to the screen. The hurt, the pain the characters feel - you feel it with them. It's something you never forget."

Bruce Hainley on Liza with a "Z" in Artforum: "Whether taken as the Lacanian real in drama-queen mode or the inexplicable radioactivity of the experienced, 'live' irradiates everything the audience and the performer search for and rarely find. Many performers and most audiences have long been happy with living proof (the half-life of Elvis impersonators; the poetry of the has-been), but it's 'live' that lies at the heart of Liza, the 'mark' - exceeding life - she wants to hit every time."

"Two underappreciated films by Frank Perry, matched as part of the American Cinematheque's Return to New Hollywood series, illustrate the fragility of adapting sophisticated works." Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times on Play It as It Lays and The Swimmer.

In Metro, Steve Palopoli on Lucid, "a mind trap of a thriller that goes a long way toward suggesting how the legacy of Canadian filmmaking might be defined."

John August: "Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur." It's a longish speech in which the screenwriter ends up saying things he didn't originally plan to.

Budd Parr at Chekhov's Mistress on The Schreiber Theory: "[David] Kipen's beef is not so much with directors, but with the institutionalization of the idea that directors are the dominant creative force in film. In fact, he duly acknowledges the collaborative effort of filmmaking, as critics of auteurism have always done, but wants to put writers - schreibers in Yiddish, the mother tongue of many of America's first screenwriters - back into the spotlight they deserve." Via wood s lot.

Signandsight translates Alexandra Stäheli's Neue Zürcher Zeitung piece on Valley of the Wolves: "It could be that the Muslim media is in fact holding up a mirror, and that instead of unreadable Oriental cryptograms, it is reflecting our own, all-too-comprehensible images." More from Steven Wells in the Philadelphia Weekly.

"[T]he best vlogs today take the idea of audience seriously, and compare favorably to what we already see on television and at the movie house," writes Hans Eisenbeis in a piece for the Rake singing the praises of Chasing Windmills. Via Chuck Olsen: "I've been raving about Chasing Windmills to every reporter I've talked to in the last few months, hoping someone will get that this is a BIG DEAL."

Andrew O'Hehir's "Beyond the Multiplex" column at Salon is devoted entirely to the Foreign Language and Documentary Oscar nominees this time around, moving first from a broad historic view of past winners in the two categories to this year's contenders.

For Nerve, Ada Calhoun talks with Street Fight director Marshall Curry. Via Alternet.

Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper on three docs: Antonio Negri: A Revolt That Never Ends, Darwin's Nightmare and The Century of the Self.

At Cinematical, Kim Voynar on Coca: The Dove from Chechnya, "not so much a political film, as a human one."

Noel Murray has a good long talk with Whit Stillman. Also at the AV Club, Murray and Scott Tobias select "10 Great Films Directed by Actors."

Other Cinema is staging an Arthur Lipsett Revival on Saturday in San Francisco. Dennis Harvey in the SF Bay Guardian: "As excoriating a worldview as these movies provide, they're also very funny, and Lipsett's juxtapositions are unfailingly genius."

Also:

• Susan Gerhard previews Tribute to Two Masters: Leacock and Pennebaker: "Whether they are political, musical, theatrical, or personal, these narratives trust the performers' authenticities as much as they trust the audience to breathe in the full scope of their unscripted essences."

• Cheryl Eddy: "If his appearances on Inside the Actors Studio and Oprah felt a little like damage control, one need only watch the opening five minutes of Dave Chappelle's Block Party to remember why the master of timing was offered $50 million for two seasons of Chappelle's Show." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, Nathan Rabin at the AV Club, Jim at Twitch and from Manohla Dargis who, in the New York Times, calls the film "a tantalizing sketch-portrait of the artist amid an outpouring of hard beats and soul."

• Natalija Vekic's Berlinale top ten. And at Scene and Unseen, three reviews.

  Max Goldberg, briefly, on Go for Zucker.

Christopher Bray in the New Statesman: "Kay Kendall was beautiful beyond belief - and blessed with the belief that beauty was an absurdity. Her premature death in 1959 robbed this country of the sprightliest movie comedienne it has ever produced."

"I suddenly stumbled upon HBO, and Dangerous Liaisons," writes Jennifer Makowsky. "Even though I've seen Stephen Frears's 1988 version of the film roughly 30 times already, I put the remote down and got comfortable." Ah, there are a handful of movies like this for each of us, the Casablancas, the Godfathers... Also at PopMatters, Amos Posner on work Oscar overlooked and, via Wiley Wiggins, Ryan Gillespie on Brian Eno's 14 Video Paintings.

"The Smoking Gun has obtained internal budget documents detailing where the money was allocated on an assortment of big-budget Tinseltown productions." The focus of the first round of publication: four star-studded films by M Night Shyamalan."

From Johannesburg, Rory Carroll reports on the reality behind Tsotsi: "Acclaimed as a masterpiece by many critics, the film's success has beamed international attention on to a form of armed robbery which evokes particular dread." Related: Sean Axmaker's interview with director Gavin Hood and the Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit on the South African film industry.

Also in the Guardian:

• From Jerusalem, Chris McGreal has an update on the campaign against Paradise Now. The parents of three children killed in a suicide bombing have gathered 32,000 signatures; their petition demands that the Academy drop the film from the Oscar race.

• "Set in the edgy streets of west London, Kidulthood seeks to depict the Notting Hill that is noticeably absent from the Britflicks of Richard Curtis," writes Sophie Heawood. "Over the course of little more than 24 hours, a group of mainly black friends and enemies navigate an urban teenage landscape of suicide, drug binges and underage pregnancy, with a healthy dose of gun crime and happy-slapping." She watches it with a group of... kidults? And generally, they vouch for its authenticity. Peter Bradshaw's review. More from Chris Sullivan in the Independent.

• "Where Hollywood blockbusters currently account for 63 percent of the UK market, French cinema has traditionally struggled to reach even 1 percent," notes Gwladys Fouché. Hopes are that the Renault French Film Festival, through March 30, will up that percentage a bit.

• Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, on the best and worst adaptations of King Lear.

• Michael Billington on Embers, a production of Christopher Hampton's play at Duke of York's Theatre starring Jeremy Irons.

• Neil Gaiman on writing MirrorMask; Peter Bradshaw's review.

• Oscar stuff: a downloadable chart of British critics' picks; Leo Benedictus talks to four Hollywood players behind the scenes: screenwriting guru Robert McKee, acting coach Ivana Chubbuck, agent Tory Metzger and Oscar campaign organizer Cynthia Schwartz.

"Gael García Bernal will make his directorial debut with a low-budget feature film that focuses on class differences in Mexico," reports John Hecht. Also in the Hollywood Reporter, Tatiana Siegel and Borys Kit on Zach Braff's remake of Open Hearts. More at europeanfilms.net: Susanne Bier's Brothers is also to be remade. David Benioff's writing the adaptation.

MoveOn: The Movie? Evidently. At Cinematical Martha Fischer notes that Marc Levin's next film will be funded in part by... MoveOn: "Is this unsettling to anyone else, or is it typical for the organizations/individuals being portrayed to contribute funding to documentaries?"

Mimong (Sweet Dream) is the "oldest surviving Korean movie, which was only known through historical records until it was found last year in a Chinese film archive," reports Kim Tae-jong for the Korea Times; the Korean Film Archive will be screening the 1936 film this weekend in Seoul. Via Blake at Cinema Strikes Back.

"Edvard Munch is a movie one begins in trepidation and then quickly becomes hooked on," writes Glenn Erickson at DVD Talk. Also, reviewing Prix de beauté, Erickson notes, "Louise Brooks's Pandora's Box is a German silent in dire need of the fine restoration given Fritz Lang's Metropolis." Yes. Speaking of Lang, though, Richard Armstrong reviews Eureka's release of M at Flickhead.

The Austin Chronicle preps this week for SXSW by focusing on the Interactive Festival. Also: Marc Savlov talks with Dick Rude about his "glorious, moving documentary Let's Rock Again!, the story of [Joe] Strummer's final American and Japanese tours [spinning] out like a punk rock cable from the beyond." And: Spencer Parsons on The Best of Youth.

Brian Darr, among the Cinemarati: "The results of a worldwide poll of Thai cinema aficionados have just been released at the excellent resource www.thaicinema.org." Let Brian tell you about the top three.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Ian Thomson traces the improbable origins of Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana.

"Gay cowboys, it seems, are shaping up to be like 'Who's on first?' or 'the aristocrats': a joke that keeps on giving."Virginia Heffernan on all those Brokeback Mountain spoofs. Michael Bronski goes a bit further in the Boston Phoenix, probing possible explanations for the question, "[W]hy has this particular film so gripped the moviegoing psyche?" Or, skip all that and head straight to low culture's history of Brokeback Mountain jokes, from 4000 BC through to the future.

Also in the New York Times:

• "If rap was CNN for black people, as Chuck D said in pre-bling times, the corrido fills a similar role for Latinos in post-Nafta America." Nathan Lee on Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side), an "infectious little movie."

• Stephen Holden: "If the film's sentiments about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does Joyeux Noël, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth?" Also, Doing Time for Patsy Cline, "a muddled cinematic ballad to American country music."

• Manohla Dargis: "For the first adrenaline-spiked hour of his new action flick 16 Blocks, the filmmaker Richard Donner brings back the 1980's in high-concept style." Also, a re-run, but still: "Woman Is the Future of Man is Hong [Sang-soo] in a minor key, but I urge you to see it."

• Neil Genzlinger: "The demographic gap in half-human-half-sea-creature cinema between The Little Mermaid and Splash is filled rather sweetly by Aquamarine, a combination romance and buddy film for the chapter-book set."

• Jeannette Catsoulis on Sorry, Haters: "[Y]ou have to wonder if the director, Jeff Stanzler, is entirely serious." More from Kat Parr at Cinematical and Nick Schager in Slant.

• Laura Kern on Our Brand is Crisis - it'll "will pack a punch with even the most informed viewer." More from Ed Gonzalez in Slant, Martha Fischer at Cinematical, The Reeler and Chris Barsanti.

• Sharon Waxman on the Crash producers' squabble.

• Caryn James on Oscar's trailer, Lorne Manly meets "various types" of first-time nominees and Virginia Heffernan on all the pre-ceremony hoopla on TV.

David Fellerath in the Independent Weekly: "I don't want to embarrass myself by declaring Manderlay to be in the company of master works that were notoriously rejected by ungrateful and know-nothing audiences. I do, however, feel it deserves a better fate than what it's getting: a few sneering reviews and no ticket sales."

Jason Shawhan interviews Michael Haneke and Noel Murray reviews Caché for the Nashville Scene.

Paul Matthews on Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story: "Winterbottom's movie works because it does to film production what Sterne's book did to the emerging form of the novel in the 1760s."

In the Independent, Andrew Gumbel considers what the Oscar noms have to say about the state the US finds itself in (similarly, David Walsh at WSWS). Also: Gill Pringle talks with Steve Martin and Will Self on The Proposition as an Australian Western.

The BBC: "A German court has banned the screening of a film based on the case of self-confessed cannibal Armin Meiwes."

In the LA CityBeat, Andy Klein laughs off that study claiming that critics speak volumes when they keep their mouths shut.

If you haven't been following this whole IFC-Comcast simultaneous theatrical and VOD release situation, Ray Pride has the need-to-know info at Movie City Indie.

An iTunes for movies? From Apple itself? At AppleInsider, Kasper Jade looks into how such a service might be taking shape. Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker. More from Jason Morehead.

Online listening tip #1. Patrick Macias interviews Kojiro Abe.

Online listening tip #2. The team behind Fired!, premiering at SXSW, and Accidental Genius author Marshall Fine on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online listening tip #3. Blake Eskin talks with Ian Buruma about his uncle, John Schlesinger, at Nextbook.

Online listening tips, round 1. NPR again. sSusan Stamberg asks sound mixer Dave Parker and key grip Gary Dagg about their jobs and Bob Reha visits Fargo, ND, where they've recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of Fargo by projecting it onto the side of a hotel.

Online listening tips, round 2. The Austin Film Festival podcasts.

Online viewing tip. Alternet's Evan Derkacz points to the AP video report on Bush's pre-Katrina briefing.

Online viewing tips. Girish: "I've been reading David [Lowery]'s blog regularly for over a year but only recently did I mosey on over to watch - and enjoy - his short films. Especially for someone so young, they're remarkably wide-ranging in subject and style."

Posted by dwhudson at March 3, 2006 8:32 AM