Weekend shorts.

"Nobody's perfect, but the Independent's Middle East correspondent's skill, originality, fearlessness and tenacity on the ground make him one of the greats," writes Alexander Bisley in the Lumière Reader. Indeed. And, as it turns out, Robert Fisk has quite a lot to say about film, too.

Nathaniel R has been hard at work at Michelle Pfeiffer Blog-a-Thon HQ.

It's not everyone who gets to write an entry titled, "My Dinner with Herzog." Tom Hall can, though.

Ray Pride at Movie City Indie: "The estimable Korean Film Council's just published three new filmmaker bios, of Park Chan-Wook, Ryoo Seung-Wan and Bong Joon-Ho, all of which are downloadable as free PDFs." Also: Ageeana in Tennessee.

Aaron Aradillas turns in another in his infrequent series of highly entertaining interviews with film critics at RockCritics.com: Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum. Via the cinetrix.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff about Art School Confidential. Dave Shulman meets them for breakfast and the LA Weekly foots the bill. At the AV Club, Nathan Rabin gives the film a B-.

"A recapitulation of career-long themes and tropes, Three Times finds Hou [Hsiao-hsien] in a self-reflexive mode... The greatest chronicler of our mortality, Hou makes movies that are attuned to the implacability of the past and the impermanence of the present." Elbert Ventura kicks off a trio of reviews from the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE. J Hoberman, writing in the Village Voice, finds it "improves on a second viewing." More from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "[W]hile he can seem more at ease in the past than the present (witness Flowers of Shanghai and the equally sublime Puppetmaster, from 1993, both highly recommended and available on DVD), and can seem unmoored in more contemporary settings, Mr Hou nonetheless moves across time with fluid grace."

Also in the NYT:

• Dennis Lim notes that a recent batch of indies goes "beyond dutiful multiculturalism. Implicit in their mix-and-match aesthetics is the utopian notion that all of world cinema is up for grabs. They may be the first small rumblings of the globalization of the American independent film."

• "Even as more and more movies and television shows are being shot in New York, the city that turns up on the screen is far more likely to be the teeming, terrifying, exhilarating, unforgiving New York of the popular imagination," writes John Clark. The problem, if you tend to think of it that way, is that the city has lost its edge: "'As America has gotten more like New York, New York has become more like America,' said James Sanders, editor of Scenes From the City: Filmmaking in New York, 1966-2006, to be published by Rizzoli this fall."

• Hassan M Fattah: "The plot may seem mundane but in important ways, Keif al Hal is a landmark project with big ambitions. It is the first feature film from Saudi Arabia, a country with not a single legal movie theater."

• Dave Kehr on The Passenger, Fists in the Pocket and Ziegfeld Follies. More DVDs: Susan King in the Los Angeles Times and Glenn Erickson at DVD Talk.

• Stephen Holden on The Death of Mr Lazarescu. More from J Hoberman in the Voice, where he notes it is, "in several ways, the most remarkable new movie to open in New York this spring," Marisa Carroll in PopMatters and Daniel Kasman, who also reviews Three Times.

• Tom Hanks - not just some guy named Tom Hanks, but Tom Hanks - writes an appreciation of Dan Striepeke, "my makeup man for 19 years."

• Caryn James: "If pop culture satires are working in current films while political satires aren't, it's not just because Jon Stewart and other television comedians can get there first." Also, a notebook entry on Tribeca: "Five years into the festival's existence, one of the paradoxes of this New York-centric event is that many of its freshest, most startling films are political dramas and satires from non-American perspectives."

• William Grimes on why there's such a thing as a weekend.

John Horn in the LAT: "As filmmakers tell a number of stories about Sept 11 and other attacks both real and fictionalized - a rapidly growing list that includes Munich, Syriana, Paradise Now and Friday's United 93 - there's increased demand for young Middle Eastern actors. But directors and their casting agents must convince those actors that their cinematic cause is more noble than that of directors a generation ago, who routinely depicted Arabs as cartoonish, fanatical madmen."

Also: Susan King talks with Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne about Akeelah and the Bee, reviewed by Kenneth Turan. Benjamin Strong has a note on the film in the Voice, but Armond White and Jim Ridley have more in the Nashville Scene and the New York Press, respectively.

More reviews in the LAT: Carina Chocano on The Beauty Academy of Kabul, The Devil's Miner and I Am a Sex Addict; Kenneth Turan on Look Both Ways; and Robert Abele on Revoloution.

In the LA Weekly, David Chute reviews Deepa Mehta's Water, "which hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest." More from Priya Jain in Salon, Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT and Bill Gallo in the Voice. Related: Ryan Stewart interviews Lisa Ray for Cinematical, where Kim Voynar also reviews the film.

"Jesus Camp, Camp Out and Summercamp! are vastly different experiences in both content and style," writes Jonny Leahan at indieWIRE.

David Byrne watches Richard Dawkins.

Back to the Voice:

• J Hoberman: "As allusive as its title, Jean-Pierre Melville's all but unknown Army of Shadows, a French resistance saga made - and tepidly received - in 1969, emerges from the mists of time in a new 35mm restoration as a career-capping epic tragedy." More from Manohla Dargis and Terrence Rafferty in the NYT, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon and Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. Related: Cinematographer Pierre Lhomme on the Leonard Lopate Show.

• Michael Atkinson on Lady Vengeance, Park Chan-wook's "most sullen and patient film, and yet it's breathless pop filmmaking, narratively mercurial, viscerally traumatic, and thematically infernal." More from Nathan Lee (NYT), Martha Fischer (Cinematical) and Tasha Robinson (AV Club).

• Atkinson on Clean, "a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave." And David Ng talks with Maggie Cheung. More from Stephen Holden (NYT), Stephanie Zacharek (Salon), Scott Tobias (AV Club) and Steve Erickson (Gay City News).

• Rob Nelson on Police Beat, "a film that's neither here nor there - and I mean that as a compliment." More from Manohla Dargis (NYT).

• "Tracking Shots": Joshua Land on Suite Habana, Michael Atkinson on The Lost City (more from Stephen Holden in the NYT), Jordan Harper on RV, Melissa Levine on Guys and Balls, Jim Ridley on The Whore's Son and Bill Gallo on The Sentinel and Silent Hill.

"Congratulations, Nick Swardson, you're our Bonehead of the Month." Hollywood Bitchslap lashes back at a screenwriter who's been lashing out. As if that weren't all, Erik Childress unleashes another round of "Criticwatch 2006: Critics vs Whores."

"[E]very Monday night, from 8:30 to 9, I turn my car radio to 91.7, and I don't shut it off until These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For has signed off," confesses Josh Rosenblatt. It a weekly show about - that's right - Star Wars. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Kimberley Jones reviews Screenwriters' Masterclass, "a fascinating compendium of interviews with some of the best screenwriters - American and international, big budget to no budget - working today," and Marc Savlov reviews Tsui Hark's update of his own Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain, Zu Warriors: "A wide-screen riot of color, movement, and sound, this is the chaos of Hark's inexhaustible creativity made real/reel, outlandish fun, and instantly, unmistakably his own."

"[W]hile Hollywood pats itself on the back for producing films like [To Kill a] Mockingbird and In The Heat of the Night, the truth is that The Intruder hit first, and hit hardest," argues Tom Huddleston. Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Rumsey Taylor on Days of Heaven.

Filmbrain finally catches John Frankenheimer's 99 and 44/100% Dead, "a genuinely funny, dark, mélange of genres that was perhaps far too ahead of its time. Its postmodern refusal to root itself in a single genre, tone, or mood no doubt confounded and irritated critics back in '74."

Stephen Metcalf at Slate: "Capote is not only an American tragedy, as its director Bennett Miller has said, but an important one, and a little history can help us remember why."

"And since when has futility looked so beautiful?" Gabriele Caroti in Stop Smiling on Valerio Zurlini's The Desert of the Tartars.

Chuck Tryon: "James Longley's Iraq in Fragments is one of the more compelling documentaries to focus on post-invasion Iraq that I've seen." And he's seen a lot of them, folks.

"[W]hy wasn't he like this in 2000?" David Corn for the Nation on Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth.

At Twitch, Todd reviews Tom Mes's Agitator, "without a doubt, the definitive work on the career of Japanese cult auteur Takashi Miike." Related: Tim Lucas: "Imprint was not created to entertain, but to disturb, repulse and frighten. To those ends, it works admirably well."

At Hollywood is Talking, Jerry Brewington gets a kick out of The Proper Care and Feeding of American Messiah.

The comedy short Phone Sex Grandma is set to become a feature. Shooting starts in the summer.

Also up-n-coming:

• David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen, together again, in Eastern Promises.

• Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin, also together again, in Ocean's 13.

• Brad Anderson's remake of The Edukators, Transsiberian.

• Peter Bogdanovich's Tom Petty concert movie.

• Robert Benton's Feast of Love.

• An adaptation of Robert Greenfield's Timothy Leary: A Biography.

Roger Ebert remembers Anthony James Ryan, "Sancho Panza to [Russ] Meyer's Don Quixote." Also, Jim Emerson (he's moved Scanners!) compiles "an overview of Ebert's encounters with, and observations about, [Robert] Altman over the years."

The Telegraph's John Hiscock profiles "the new Brit pack."

Sarah Stewart asks Dominic Savage about his first feature, Love + Hate. Also in the Guardian: Peter Bradshaw on Lemming.

Stephen Applebaum interviews Sam Shepard for the Independent. And: Stars have sex, too, evidently.

Nathan Rabin interviews Matt Groening for the AV Club.

"Return of the Reluctant has obtained an exclusive excerpt of the upcoming Atlas Shrugged script, which was reportedly written by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie themselves."

Jiangtu catches the Johnnie To photo exhibit in Hong Kong last month. Via Mack at Twitch.

WFMU's WmMBerger goes zombie.

"The other day I realized that within my little online social circle, there's been a lot less mention of BitTorrent lately." Jason Kottke on YouTube and Google Video. Related: Paul Boutin at Slate.

Apple may be talking to Sony and new/old pal Disney about getting them to include iPod-viewable content on Blu-ray discs, reports iClaire at the iPod Hub.

Online browsing tip. Flickhead's Claude Chabrol gallery.

Online listening tip #1. Hitchcock/Truffaut, part 4, at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...

Online listening tip #2. Those lovely Film Snobs on Soundcheck. Via the cinetrix.

Online fiddling around tip. New site for A Scanner Darkly.

Online viewing tip #1. Ang Lee and James Schamus at the Walker Art Center back in December.

Online viewing tip #2. A trailer and a request for donations from Robert Greenwald so he can complete his next film, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, by the fall. Related: Rick Jacobs in the Huffington Post.

Online viewing tips. A trailer (WMV) for Kim Ki-duk's Time. Via Twitch's logboy. And via Todd, one for The Men Who Fell and one for The Sword Bearer.

Posted by dwhudson at April 29, 2006 7:00 AM