Shorts, 4/11.

"But is there still film criticism of the Pauline Kael or James Agee caliber?" asks Thomas Logoreci, one of the producers of Caveh Zahedi's I Am a Sex Addict. And Phillip Lopate replies: "People are still very passionate about movies and film criticism is still very much alive. Geoffrey O'Brien, Gilberto Perez, James Harvey, Kent Jones and daily writers like Manohla Dargis are doing a wonderful, serious, job and bring a lot of insight. There is still a fair amount of stimulating film criticism that's being written."

Also at SF360: Susan Gerhard talks with Adam Werbach about Ironweed Films (GreenCine's a partner, it should be mentioned).

In the New York Times Magazine, Ian Buruma has a long profile of a "nice, quiet, reflective family man, [a] 42-year-old director who also happens to be a master of imagery at times so brutal that it is almost unbearable to watch." Park Chan-wook, naturally: "[H]e said that only a psychiatrist could explain his preoccupation with horror and violence. In fact, however, his background offers some clues."

And in the paper, Dave Kehr on new DVDs ("Weird Foreign Stuff"), David Carr on the Producers-like version of Hairspray coming up and Julie Bosman: "For the Walt Disney Company, plans to make television shows available free online are a way to bolster revenue by selling two sets of advertising - TV commercials and online ads - for a single show."

James Wolcott: "Even if I had been able to foresee DVDs and digital downloads back in the 70s when Fassbinder was pumping out films as fast as Joyce Carol Oates novels, I never would have reckoned that someday they would be handy checkout items - collectibles."

Via Girish, Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Ten Overlooked Noirs" at DVD Beaver.

Jonathan Kiefer in Maisonneuve: "Of all the arts, movies remain our boldest agents of vicarious experience and it's telling that they can't get enough of their music-making artistic counterparts."

"The artist who created iconic images - and who, on the whole, would much rather have been a movie director - can be encountered directly in a sometimes pedantic, sometimes nit-picky, but oddly moving book by Callie Angell, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, called Andy Warhol Screen Tests," writes Anthony Haden-Guest, who then proceeds to collect stories from the subjects of these films, stories that vary as widely as their personalities.

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• Mark Kermode marvels at the movie-fed conspiracy theories surrounding Katrina and 9/11. Related: In a snippet from the Believer, Adam Curtis, talking with Errol Morris: "History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended." (One click on: that Eric Spitznagel interview with Harold Ramis.)

• "British cinema will welcome a new black heroine in a few weeks." Amina Taylor on Naomi Taylor's character in Rollin' With the Nines.

• Randeep Ramesh and Sanjay Jha: "Salman Khan, one of Bollywood's biggest stars, was behind bars last night after being sentenced to five years in jail for hunting endangered deer in western India."

Acquarello: "Stylistically evolving from avant-garde art movement inspired animation, to monochromatic, rough hewn pen and ink styled animations reminiscent of op-ed political cartoons, to his more recent films that transect the bounds of live-action and animation, [Raoul] Servais' films are magical, pensive, and provocative alchemies of passion, conscience, and inspired - and inspiring - creativity."

Adam Hartzell on Michel Brault at Hell on Frisco Bay.

In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann enjoys the Frenchness of Nathalie..., with Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart and Gérard Depardieu: "The real point of the picture is to enjoy the places designed by Michele Barthélémy, the color-hungry cinematography of Jean-Marc Fabre, and our time with the three principals." More from Ed Park in the Voice.

Only somewhat related, but still: Bernard-Henri Lévy on the strange implications of France's labor protests, and oh, hell, while we're at it, let's go: Ignacio Ramonet in Le Monde diplomatique, John R MacArthur and: "Over the next two weeks, n+1 will offer an occasional glimpse into the causes of the new French disease and the dynamics of La France's latest reruns of 1968, 1936, 1870, 1848, 1830, and 1789."

"Spielberg's film seems more truthful as the years pass." JG Ballard in the Sydney Morning Herald on Empire of the Sun, based, of course, on his own novel. Related: Craig Orback's concept for a cover.

Also via Movie City News, Marc Keinath and Kyle Nuske's "Possible 'Surprise' Endings to the New Samuel L Jackson Film Snakes on a Plane" in McSweeney's and Roger Ebert: "Ripley's Game is without question the best of the four [of the five adaptations of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels he's seen], and John Malkovich is precisely the Tom Ripley I imagine when I read the novels."

David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back:

After you watch enough gialli, the little things that were so annoying in the beginning - the predictable storylines, the ludicrously unpredictable killers, the vapid characters, the bodycounts, the seemingly arbitrary double-crosses - become oddly charming through familiarity (much like avenge-your-master plotlines in kung fu films, or long-lost siblings in Bollywood films), and you can start to focus on the incidentals. The incidentals in a giallo being, of course, the 70s atmosphere, the clothes, the girls, the set-piece slayings, and the music. For all of these, you'd be hard pressed to find better than what's on display in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.

Brendon Connelly: "Hot Fuzz - and Shaun, and Spaced - director Edgar Wright has turned out one of the fake trailers to play in Grind House."

A Dane, a Frenchman and a German walk onto a film set... Boyd van Hoeij has notes on three films in production at europeanfilms.net.

Gabriel Shanks: "If Kinky Boots sounds like a dubiously constructed fantasy, bingo." More from Ed Gonzalez at Slant and Matt Singer in the Voice.

"A schlockfest dressed up in sleek designer duds that feigns gruesome violence and flounders with psychological power dynamics, music video vet [David] Slade's directorial debut desperately tries to shock and disturb by exploiting male fears of castration and feminine revenge fantasies, both of which form the crux of his story about the torturous tête-à-tête between 32-old photographer Jeff (Patrick Wilson) and 14-year-old student Hayley (Ellen Page)." Nick Schager on Hard Candy in Slant. More from Rob Nelson in the Voice. Related: Ray Pride on that red hoody; Daniel Robert Epstein talks with Slade for SuicideGirls and, for Film & Video, Bryant Frazer talks with Jean-Clement Soret, one of the first colorists to be credited in the opening titles.

Also in Slant, Ed Gonzalez: "Buñuel understood that dreams, the language of the subconscious, often tell us more about ourselves than our reality. Belle du Jour comes to understand this language too and, because of it, perseveres." Related feature: "The Savage Poetry of Luis Buñuel." More, particularly on Catherine Deneuve, from Michael Atkinson in the Voice.

Michael Koresky opens Reverse Shot's round on The Notorious Bettie Page at indieWIRE, noting first what's so frustrating about the "HBO aesthetic and sensibility" before acknowledging, "Despite [director Mary] Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner's disingenuous approach to the character, Gretchen Mol's performance as Page is a bright-eyed and bushy tailed delight." More from J Hoberman in the Voice: "Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church."

Also at iW: Writer, producer and director Jim McKay: "While I have cherished the [Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers] for years and benefited from the organization and my participation in it greatly, I feel that it has, for quite awhile now, consistently failed to live up to its mission." Commentary ensues. Lots.

Back to the Voice:

• Michael Atkinson on Mountain Patrol: Kekexili: "For better or worse, no film of the last decade, not even Malick's The New World, has displayed such a ferocious intimacy with extreme landscape." Malick must've been on his mind since he'd just caught Days of Heaven, prompting the question, is it "simply a movie that never quite lives up to its cinematography (shot famously, and only, during twilight by Néstor Almendros) and its music (by Ennio Morricone), or is it, film being the sensual encounter it is, a masterpiece because of its unsurpassed textural pleasure?" Anyway, also: Look Both Ways.

• Hoberman: "Clear-cut issues and upbeat closer notwithstanding, Sisters in Law lacks a narrative arc - it's an immersion in applied feminism in which each case not only has political implications but a positive denouement."

• B Kite: "Samuel Beckett, whose centenary is celebrated April 13, pictured his project before he understood it: that exhausted journey toward an impossible goal replicated in miniature by so many of his characters."

• Julian Dibbell on the "collected works of cinematic genius Brandon Hardesty."

• "Tracking Shots": Ben Kenigsberg on Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story, Marc Holcomb on The Sisters (related: for New York, Adam Sternbergh chats with Maria Bello) and Luke Y Thompson on Herbie Hancock: Possibilities.

Mark H Harris imagines an open letter from Dave Chappelle to his white fans for PopMatters.

Alice Jones tells the stories of a few of the dancers appearing in Ballets Russes. Also in the Independent: Jonathan Romney gets the backstory on Glastonbury straight from director, Julien Temple, and David Thomson mourns Sharon Stone's future.

Nelhydrea Paupér at Flickhead on Valley of the Bees: "This wayback-machine aims for the 1200s but gets stuck in the pessimism of the 1960s."

Michael Helke in Stop Smiling on Grey Gardens: "The question of how the Maysles secured the Beales' trust - and what they ended up doing with it - is analogous to the kind that appended to Truman Capote in the years following the publication of In Cold Blood."

The War on Easter launches today.

André Soares at the Alternative Film Guide: Author Henry Farrell, whose Grand Guignol tales What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? were successfully adapted for the screen in the 1960s, died after a long illness on March 29 at his home in Pacific Palisades. He was 85."

Surely a major corporation wouldn't lie... Roger Moore, critic for the Orlando Sentinel, catches Sony at it, though. Why? Because "they expect to sucker enough people in opening weekend [in this case, for The Benchwarmers] to be able to afford the next junk-picture they whip up. Don't let them." Commentary: Jim Emerson at rogerebert.com.

Annie Young Frisbie shines DMTS's "Industry Spotlight" on our own Jonathan Marlow.

Online browsing and tweaking tip. The City of Galvez. Via wood s lot.

Online listening tip #1. The DV Show. Via Cyndi Greening.

Online listening tips #2 and #3. Cinematical and World / Independent Film are now podcasting.

Online viewing tip #1. The trailer for An Inconvenient Truth.

Online viewing tip #2. Evan Mather's The Image of the City. Commentary: David Lowery.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Videotheke.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Videos and ads by Johan Renck (Madonna, New Order, etc), accompanied by Director File's Q&A and via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at April 11, 2006 4:20 PM