Shorts, 3/9.

On the road, as I am, or not, if you're looking for big and chunky reads and browses, Alison Willmore's found them for you at the IFC Blog: there's Reverse Shot's comprehensive "Year-in-Review" issue, quite a nice selection from Cineaste's Spring issue and Ed Gonzalez's highly bookmarkable collection of "Top 10s" at Slant. Much, much to catch up with.

It's a giallo orgy over in DK Holm's latest Movie Poop Shoot column: "[T]he influence travels from the US to London to Berlin to Rome, whence it turns around and influences the whole world with its stylistics, including the pyrotechnics of the teen slasher film in the United States."

Nikki Finke, it turns out, is one of those writers blogs were made for. Great fun.

Also blogging: Caveh Zahedi.

"Rap Dreams has the raw immediacy that gave [director Kevin] Epps's first feature [Straight Outta Hunters Point] its rep - but with sharper journalistic focus and storytelling skills," writes Johnny Ray Huston. Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: Jonathan L Knapp reviews Unknown White Male while Susan Gerhard talks with director Rupert Murray; Kimberly Chun on Wholphin; and Michelle Devereaux talks with Robert Towne about Ask the Dust.

"More than a decade after Towne optioned the rights, Ask the Dust is a reality, and if the end result isn't quite a great movie, it's indisputably a reverential one, from the sepia-toned studio logo that starts the film to the pages of [John] Fante's book that turn beneath the opening credits, as if we were entering into the realm of some timeless fable," writes Scott Foundas. More from J Hoberman in the Voice and Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

Back in the LA Weekly, though, Ella Taylor on The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, "a gratuitously arty piece of child pornography carelessly knocked off from the grunge school of Harmony Korine, Larry Clark and Vincent Gallo," and Duck Season, "not (yet) the work of a great filmmaker, but it's the kind of movie in which a fledgling director traps his talent in a bottle and saves it for next time."

More on both in Andrew O'Hehir's "Beyond the Multiplex" column at Salon, plus Game 6.

And in Stop Smiling's DVD roundup: Cisco Pike, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, The Virgin Spring and Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

Girish on Hong Sang-soo's Woman is the Future of Man and Tale of Cinema: "These are deceptively simple movies, requiring - demanding - repeat viewings."

Jim Ridley talks with both Neil Young and Jonathan Demme about Neil Young: Heart of Gold for the Nashville Scene.

Michael Guillen: "The Slanted Screen made clear to me how representations of Asian-American masculinity on the screen have been desexualized and criminalized and that I have been fighting against these misguided prejudices my entire adult life."

Kim Voynar reviews Gay Sex in the 70s for Cinematical.

Signandsight points to Heike Kühn's piece in the Frankfurter Rundschau on Yilmaz Arslan's Fraticide: "The movie shows the world of Kurdish and Turkish immigrants in Germany, but it is having problems reaching its target audience."

Sean salutes early Fleischer animation at Bitter Cinema.

For the AV Club, Tasha Robinson examines the lessons to be learned from the canon of conspiracy movies.

Meanwhile, what vast left-wing conspiracy? "Maybe Hollywood is just making the films its customers want to buy," suggests Matthew Yglesias in the American Prospect.

"Slowly and quietly, ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Christian, Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz is taking over the movies. And popular culture," blogs Peter Keough. And Keough looks ahead to Hollywood's spring lineup in the Boston Phoenix.

"[W]ho is NP Thompson, and why does s/he hate me?" asks Dave Kehr. "I looked at The New World again recently on a DVD screener, and I have to confirm Hoberman's suspicions: the film does not stand up particularly well to the threat of the small screen."

The Guardian: "The decision by Bafta - the British Academy of Film and Television Art - to make computer games its 'third arm' is overdue endorsement of a genre that has struggled for artistic recognition." Also: John Patterson meets Anjelica Huston and Jon Snow remembers Ana de Skalon, 1953 - 2006.

Scott Macaulay and Matthew Ross remember Garrett Scott at Filmmaker. A tragic loss, far too early.

Posted by dwhudson at March 9, 2006 4:19 PM