Shorts, 3/21.

Michael Dare has a proposal: Edit your own Being There. He's serious. He's got the materials. Who'll pick up the tab to make it happen? Via Coudal Partners.

Jonathan Jones: "A lot of illusions about our culture are challenged by watching Triumph of the Will. One of them concerns the modernist heritage.... Film is a mass art. The moderns who understood this were not, sad to say, a handful of surrealist subversives, but the court artists of the most murderous despots of all time."

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• Aid agencies are criticizing BBC Films for the traumatic effects Shooting Dogs [blog] is having on victims of the Rwandan genocide, reports Alice O'Keeffe in the Guardian. In the Observer, Linda Melvern, author of Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide, argues that the film "shows a shocking disregard for the historical record." Related: Director Michael Caton-Jones in the Independent: "I knew there was no film-making infrastructure in Rwanda and that it could quite possibly be a very miserable experience all round - but, for fuck's sake, it was their story. How could it not be made there?"

• Lynn Barber: "I must say it never in a million years occurred to me that the Redgraves might be fun - I always pictured them weeping and raging and arguing and making each other sign petitions - but Vanessa in the flesh seems somewhat warmer and less self-absorbed than I expected, though still not my idea of fun."

• Lucinda Evans reports from Rome on the reconstructed Cabiria, both the 1914 silent version and the 1931 sound version.

• Aida Edemariam talks with John Turturro about his first feature, Mac, and his latest, Romance and Cigarettes (related: at Twitch, Todd's found the trailer), Peter Stanford meets Rebecca Miller and Suzie Mackenzie interviews Susan Sarandon.

"If you are making a film of Play, you have to find a cinematic correlative to the interrogative light, which the stage directions specify as prompting every speech; otherwise the only alternative is to lock off the camera and record a live performance." The New Statesman runs an appreciation by Anthony Minghella of one of two artists who have "provided a lifelong compass," Samuel Beckett (the other is Bach), followed by further comments from Richard Eyre, Craig Raine, Charles Sturridge and John Hurt.

"The British Film Institute has Dreyer fever these days, having just released David Rudkin's study of Vampyr (1932) for their Film Classics book series and several region 2 DVDs, beginning this week with Master of the House and Ordet (1955)," writes Doug Cummings, who goes on to explain why he's happier with the DVDs than with the book.

Stop Smiling runs a tantalizing excerpt from Nicolas Rapold's interview with David Cronenberg. More: the Toronto Star's Peter Howell, via Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Ambiguity is essential to the Don Siegel aesthetic, proposes Dave Kehr, who also highlights the most interesting of this week's DVD releases. Also in the New York Times: Craig Modderno on what Jon Heder's up to, post-Napoleon Dynamite (a lot) and Charles Solomon argues that cartoon characters are too damn chatty these days.

J Hoberman in the Voice: "Possibly the least personal Spike Lee joint in the entire history of cinema, the bank-heist-hostage-policier-cryptoterrorist thriller Inside Man nevertheless manages to be a most enjoyable sampling of the director's treasured 'my way' eccentricities."

Also:

• Michael Atkinson on Steve Buscemi's Lonesome Jim, which "has the import of a deliberately squelched sitcom, or a home movie that's poisoned by unhappiness but shown anyway for stray laughs." Also: American Gun and Puzzlehead.

• Dennis Lim: "Set largely between sunset and dawn, Man Push Cart illuminates the murky beauty - and hardscrabble economics - of the city's all-night shadowland." Also: "Half Nelson pays fond tribute to, even as it slyly subverts, the inspirational classroom fable."

• "Tracking Shots": Drew Tillman on Shadow: Dead Riot, Jorge Morales on The Lady in Question is Charles Busch and Elliot Stein on Summer Storm.

V for Vendetta "should be enjoyed as the first true anarchist movie Hollywood has ever made," argues Anthony Kaufman at Alternet. "Film historians speak fondly of the paranoid cycle of American cinema in the 1960s and 70s (The Manchurian Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View) or the countercultural anti-heroic outlaws of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands, but nowhere in mainstream US cinema - and certainly not post-9/11 - has there been a pop-culture phenomenon that advocates not only overthrowing a corrupt government, but blowing it up." Related: Gill Pringle listens to Natalie Portman for the Independent: "I loved that this film is an abstract thing because, after the Holocaust, people said it would never happen again but now we have Rwanda and Bosnia. Maybe V for Vendetta can remind us to stand up against such despotism." And Jennifer Vineyard interviews Alan Moore for MTV.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader on Ask the Dust: "The depth and intensity of [John] Fante's autocritique are missing from writer-director Robert Towne's sexy, sensual, romantic, nostalgic adaptation of the novel, a labor of love he's been trying to realize for years... But to Towne's credit, he's a thoughtful and conscientious romantic." Related: Peter Sobczynski interviews Towne for Hollywood Bitchslap.

Campaspe praises William Wyler's "phenomenal ability to give his movies a sense of time and space."

In the Independent:

• David Thomson: "[I]f the papers want to keep on getting movie advertising, they need to subscribe to the overall lie that the movies are worth seeing. In many markets, film critics with high standards have simply lost their jobs because they didn't like enough pictures." Related: Philip French in the Observer: "Sadly perhaps, there is no longer any serious antagonism between critics, film distributors and moviemakers." And at Cinematical, Karina Longworth: "Critical irrelevancy is not a new phenomenon."

• Sheila Johnstone with the Dardennes: "Animated and genial, Luc, 51, and Jean-Pierre, 54, give interviews with good grace, but they make no secret about being uncomfortable at their red-carpet status." Related: A Reverse Shot triad at indieWIRE on L'Enfant as well as, in Kamera, Edward Lamberti and Antonio Pasolini and, in the Voice, J Hoberman and Dennis Lim.

• Roger Clarke: "A quick rifle through [Catherine] Deneuve's public diary of the last 12 months shows a great deal of attendance at public events, fancy magazine launches and fashion shows - and very little in the way of acting in the movies."

Nathaniel R, currently anticipating William Friedkin's adaptation of Tracy Letts's play, among other films "coming soon but not soon enough," Bug, is hard at work on his personal list of top 100 "Actors of the Aughts."

Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times: "It's the useful business of The Film Snob's Dictionary to make cool, often genuinely witty fun of bad movies and the faux icons who make them." That doesn't mean he approves. More favorable reviews of David Kamp and Lawrence Levi's book: Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic and Diane Garrett in Variety.

Guess who's happy Crash beat out Brokeback Mountain for the Best Picture Oscar: Slavoj Zizek. Seriously. He explains in the Frankfurter Rundschau (and in German). Via signandsight. Related (and what's more, in English): An exchange in the New York Review of Books on the film between James Schamus, Joel Conarroe and Daniel Mendelsohn.

A few Wenders links worth reviving, via wood s lot: "In Defense of Places," a speech delivered in 2003, and a 2002 exhibition, Pictures from the Surface of the Earth. And, on an entirely different note, Julian Stallabrass in the New Left Review on "Spectacle and Terror."

Noy Thrupkaew for the American Prospect: "That Tsotsi - adapted from playwright Athol Fugard's novel set in a period of harsh apartheid rule in the 50s - has been so effortlessly updated into modern-day South Africa is its own damning statement on the lingering effects of racial oppression. And yet the racial critique remains a subtext in the film - a strong yet scarcely visible undertow."

Grady Hendrix can't help but post about it again, and no wonder: "Given that he makes films at the same rate most blogs are updated, was there ever a doubt that Takashi Miike would take to blogging like a duck to water?"

The Winona Ryder News Channel (no, really) interviews A Scanner Darkly animator Mike Stovall. Via Kim Voynar at Cinematical.

A Pride & Prejudice reunion of sorts: Director Joe Wright and producer Paul Webster are teaming with Keira Knightley for an adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement; Cinematical's Martha Fisher knows more. She's also pointing to David Konow's deep backgrounder on Tron for Tom's Hardware Guide.

For Time, Tim Padgett gets Mel Gibson talking - at length - about Apocalypto. Via Jeffrey Overstreet.

X has news of Hong Sang-soo's next one at Twitch.

Bradford Nordeen revisits a time when movies were made for adults.

Ray Young at Flickhead: "Never maudlin or convoluted, September 12th develops an authentic air of both mystery and sorrow."

Peter Nellhaus: "Considering the quality of some of the action films currently, or recently, in theaters, The Touch is as good, if not better."

Kevin Gilvear has a long talk with Christina Lindberg for DVD Times. Via Blake at Cinema Strikes Back.

Aidan Smith talks with Jane Birkin for the Scotsman. Via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie.

Is DIY filmmaking a myth? Sujewa Ekanayake and Caveh Zahedi discuss.

Lots of talk at ShoWest about how and where we'll be watching movies in the near future; reports from Leonard Klady and Gary Dretzka at Movie City News and, via MCN, Scott Bowles for USA Today. Also: A springtime release schedule from the New York Daily News.

Edward Jay Epstein in Slate: "The hand of Tokyo may not always be visible in the dazzling glitter of Hollywood, but it has enabled the industry to re-invent itself."

Dave Kehr: "Hollywood seems to be following the same strategy that served America so well in the Cold War: just outspend the bastards, and sooner or later, their system will collapse."

Universal's banned Anne Thompson. Nikki Finke finds out why while Eugene Hernandez comments: "The message sent by such a decree from a studio chief is quite clear: don't piss us off or we'll cut you off."

Snakes on a Plane needs your music.

New: Brand Hype, a critical resource on product placement in the movies.

Online listening tip #1. The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #1, at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

Online listening tip #2. Friday's Leonard Lopate Show features Molly Haskell talking about TCM's Essentials series and Wim Wenders talking about Don't Come Knocking.

Online viewing tip #1. Simon Pegg talks about prepping for The Hot Fuzz. Via Todd at Twitch.

Online viewing tip #2. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has found Jim Jarmusch's video for The Raconteurs and an online fiddling around tip as well: Criticker, a "personalized film recommendation engine."

Posted by dwhudson at March 21, 2006 2:53 PM