Weekend shorts.

Criterion's new look is kicking in and so is its release schedule. Tim Lucas explains why he's sure the box set collecting Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales is the "sure-fire contender for the most important box set of the year."

As more people turn away from newspapers, and yes, alternative weeklies and look instead to their favorite blogs for movie reviews, Paul Matwychuk wonders in Vue Weekly what the tone of future film criticism will be like: "I'm not sure, but I hope it looks a lot like the criticism being done by a pair of internet bloggers named DK Holm and Dennis Cozzalio, who are quietly turning into two of the best regular movie critics in North America."

Meanwhile, Dennis Cozzalio writes that "what shocked me in reading [Jeremiah Kipp's] interview [with Film Freak Central reviewer Walter Chaw] was the insistent thread of vitriol and exhaustion that seemed to characterize Chaw's attitudes toward films, fellow critics (most of which are apparently as deserving of hatred as the lowliest junket whore) and those who disagree with his withering observations."

"My new movie is a kind of sequel to - or riff on - Happiness, and to some extent, Welcome to the Dollhouse," says Todd Solondz, according to Gregg Kilday. "Many of the characters from these movies unexpectedly beckoned to me, and so I have explored new ways of developing and enlarging their stories, with the intent to recast them from a fresh perspective."

More up-n-coming news from the Hollywood Reporter: Scott Roxborough reports that "Naomi Watts has signed on to star alongside Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, a crime-flavored drama from Canadian director David Cronenberg" and Sam Andrews hears that "Colin Firth, Rachel Weisz, Ian McKellen and Susan Sarandon have signed to star in Katselas Films' Boer War political thriller The Colossus."

Jette Kernion: "So the film Grind House is alive and kicking after all. For those of you who haven't been following this film, Grind House is the brainchild of filmmakers Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, both big fans of the grindhouse genre (think Sixties/Seventies exploitation drive-in flicks). The movie will be made up of two short films, one by each director, that will be bundled back-to-back for release along with some fun fake trailers."

Cinematical's Martha Fischer notes that Tristán Bauer, whose Blessed by Fire won the best feature award at Tribeca, will make a doc about Che Guevara.

Zach Campbell ponders and then goes ahead and writes an amazing ten underrated movies list: "Should I write about a film I chanced upon that very few people may know, or should I use the space to defend some oft-maligned film maudit? Highlight relative classics from cine-realms generally overlooked by the wider film geek scene I consider myself part of? In the interest of breadth, I figured I'd do a little of each."

John Patterson:

Today, US television is where cultural debates are sparked, and where popular culture renews and reinvigorates itself. Over the past 10 years, TV has slowly seized the creative initiative from the movies and run with it, all the way to the Emmys - and to the bank.... And it is because of the sudden upsurge in TV drama, along with the immense fortunes to be made in it, that so many names we associate with the cinema are moving to television.

Further down that same page, Gareth McLean talks about this development with Wentworth Miller (Prison Break), David Shore (House), Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars) and Neil Baer (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) and writes up a list of movie people with TV plans.

Also in the Guardian:

• Matthew Sweet remembers Ernest Dudley. "Ernest, who died in February, was one of our last links to the lost world of British silent cinema.... In the 1890s, Hove, not Hollywood, was the centre of the movie world - and the fundamental grammar of cinema was created there by a generation of pioneer filmmakers."

• Jonathan Safran Foer's appreciation of Joseph Cornell.

• Simon Callow: "It was with a certain wryness that Orson Welles observed that he had been discouraged from standing for election because he was a) divorced and b) an actor; Reagan was, of course, both. Welles reflected even more wryly on the fact that the man who won the Wisconsin seat for which he had been invited to stand was Joseph R McCarthy."

• Chris Petit reviews James Mottram's The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollyood: "Cinema has become more superficial; a fact rather than a criticism."

• Simon Hattenstone meets Vinnie Jones.

• Dan Glaister catches "high-camp Al," the Pacino of Oscar Wilde's Salome.

• John Patterson, watching Art School Confidential, realizes "film school may be worse than art school, because so many cosseted rich kids end up there thinking they're artists, not realising they have in fact joined glorified trade schools for the media-industrial complex."

"The last few weeks have been a remarkable frenzy of fear, rage, self-righteous retribution, and self-righteous control that has made for an ugly, ugly time for the entire industry." David Poland explains.

Girish, already looking ahead to Toronto, gathers comments filmmakers have made on films by other filmmakers in past "Dialogues" programs.

"Teen sex comedies - each of those words defined incredibly loosely - blossomed from 1982 to 1985," writes Andy Selsberg in the Believer, examining a genre in which sex "often requires enduring a kind of hell."

Stephen Holden on 12 and Holding: "Until the very end of this poignant, beautifully acted film, when one of its three interwoven stories stretches credibility beyond the breaking point, it allows you to relive the raw feelings of your 12-year-old self. If you were a sensitive, suburban middle-class geek, that experience could be especially uncomfortable and revelatory." More from Steve Erickson in Gay City News and Marcy Dermansky; SuicideGirls' Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Michael Cuesta. Also from Holden: Mouth to Mouth.

Also in the New York Times:

• Ginia Bellafante on HBO's Baghdad ER, "an unusually commendable film not because it tries to argue that war is madness — a generic idea — but because its perspective forces the viewer to focus on the clinical facts of physical injury, a consequence of war that lacks the narrative grandeur of death or psychological displacement. In addition to the more than 2,400 American soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq, nearly 18,000 have been wounded, a number that seems to receive relatively less attention."

• Manohla Dargis on Over the Hedge (more from Nicholas Tam in Vue Weekly and Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times) and The King: "[F]itfully engaging, finally exasperating." More from Wendy Ide in the Times of London, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog and Tim Robey in the Telegraph, where John Madden tells Sheila Johnston that Bonnie and Clyde "begs to be re-released because a whole new generation would relate to it."

• "With a body count now estimated at some 400, the killings have been called the maquiladora murders because some of the victims worked in the city's factories, which are also known as maquiladoras." Pat H Broeske tells the story behind The Virgin of Juárez and, still in post-production, Bordertown - "neither movie suggests the scope of the issue."

• Christian Moerk diagnoses the X-Men's various psychological disorders.

• AO Scott: "[Dominik] Moll is clever, and for the first half of Lemming he manages to imbue ordinary goings-on with inklings of strangeness that are at once sinister and quietly comical. But there is, in the end, less to this film than meets the eye."

• Jeannette Catsoulis on Revoloution and Dana Stevens on Forgiving Dr Mengele.

Kim Tae-yong's Family Ties "is likely to be one of the most interesting films that Korea produces in 2006," writes Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org.

For the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, Andy Garcia's The Lost City "suggests a dutiful if clunky pastiche of The Godfather and a right-wing Reds." More from Charles Mudede in the Stranger, where he also revisits Enemy of the State and comes away "convinced that the 90s saw in dreams what was coming its way." Also: Jen Graves on Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9.

Chuck Tryon: "[W]hat will make Sir! No Sir! an important document long after the Iraq War, [is] its use of archival materials to remind audiences of a history of protest that has been lost, if not entirely rewritten in the years since the Vietnam War." A bit more from Andrew at Lucid Screening.

Geoffrey Macnab talks with Deepa Mehta and Water producer David Hamilton about the issues raised in the film and why right-wingers in India were dead set against seeing it made. More on the film from Noy Thrupkaew in the American Prospect. Also in the Independent, by the way, Gill Pringle meets Kelsey Grammer.

John Adair on The Trial of Joan of Arc: "Most interesting about the film is Bresson's focus on the physicality of his characters."

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "Despite its expressive brilliance and the greater complexity of its thematic content, I can't embrace Lady Vengeance quite as fully as Oldboy."

Back in Vue Weekly: Carolyn Nikodym on Live and Become, Josef Braun on Battle in Heaven and Brian Gibson on A State of Mind and: "If two environmental films with the titles Children of the Mountains and Water is Life sound far too precious, you're half right. This double bill, courtesy of last year's Global Visions Festival, offers one rather simplistic, condescending look at the Agta people in the Philippines and one rather complex, detailed look at the water crisis in Ghana."

Travis Miles for Stop Smiling: "Cult Epics have performed a great service for adventurous filmgoers and fans of European cinema with a three-DVD release of outstanding films from the entire range of [Walerian] Borowczyk's career: Les Astronautes; Goto, Island of Love; The Beast; and Love Rites (in two versions)."

TLRHB's not forgetting Ned Beatty.

Online viewing tip #1. HelloZiyi has a trailer for Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet. Via Todd at Twitch.

Online viewing tip #2. 10 Things I Hate About Commandments. Via... well, all over.

Posted by dwhudson at May 20, 2006 5:32 PM