Shorts, 5/30.

Jonathan Rosenbaum segues into a review of Army of Shadows for the Chicago Reader: "Melville is best known for his eight noir features, all of them stylish and artificial in a way that seems utterly foreign to the more physical and neorealistic surfaces of Bresson's work. But these differences are ultimately superficial. What the two filmmakers have in common is much more important: the styles, themes, and philosophical positions of both can be traced directly to their experiences during World War II."

Girish watches two mid-60s Italian debuts, Bernardo Bertolucci's La Commare Secca and Marco Bellocchio's Fists In The Pocket.

Lists are perennial favorites, but at SF360, Jonathan Marlow presents a list you can use: "Ten near masterpieces rescued from the dustbin." Also, Michael Fox interviews San Francisco Cinematheque exec director Caroline Savage.

Paul Thomas Anderson is revving up for There Will Be Blood and posting photos. Via David Lowery.

"The hippie-burnout drama Cisco Pike is a movie in which the optimism of the 1960s slips into the disappointing loneliness that Los Angeles can cultivate like no other city," writes Sean Howe in the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

Robert Towne, who's just completed his latest screenplay, "about a real-life American adventurer in the Philippines during the Second World War," tells the Telegraph's Marc Lee what it is he admires about Renoir's Le Grand Illusion.

Chuck Palahniuk explains why he loves "a certain breed of horror movie. Why we all seem to love them. Movies I'll refer to as 'cycle' movies, which include some of the most popular movies of the past 40 years: The Ring, The Amityville Horror, Carrie, The Stepford Wives. In all of them, an individual is trapped by an established cycle of events that doom and destroy. From their story you can imagine that same cycle or process stretching into the past or future, destroying an endless chain of similar people, all of them denying the dire nature of their circumstances until their fate is inevitable."

Also in the Guardian:

• Like J Hoberman, Mark Lawson sees 9/11 as a turning point in the disaster movie genre: "United 93 simultaneously redeems and destroys the disaster movie." Related: Xan Brooks talks with the families and, in the Observer, a meditation on "speculating about what it will be like to die" from Peter Conrad.

• Alan Warner reviews Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans and Chris Petit reviews Lee Server's Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing and James Robert's Katharine Hepburn: The Untold Story.

• John Patterson explains why Revenge of the Nerds is "the Mein Kampf of the underdog class and Andrew Mueller does the paper's take on the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon.

• John Harris interviews Matthew Modine.

• Randeep Ramesh: "After decades of borrowing from western movie scripts, Bollywood is poised to have one of its biggest films remade in Hollywood. Munnabhai MBBS, starring Sanjay Dutt, a hit about a gangster who pretends to be a doctor whenever his parents turn up, is to be shot as Gangster MD starring Chris Tucker, who is best known as the wise-cracking cop in the Rush Hour movies."

One faction of India's Bharatiya Janata Party is demanding that actor Aamir Khan apologize for remarks he's made criticizing the BJP or else it'll ensure his new film, Fanaa in Gujurat. RK Mishkra reports for Outlook India, which is following the story with daily updates. In other words, it's a big deal in India. Namrata Joshi talks to Khan and finds he's in no mood to apologize. Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau." Related: Nathan Lee in the New York Times: "The epic Bollywood extravaganza Fanaa goes so far over the top that it reinvents itself halfway and launches on a brand new trajectory of the absurd."

You've heard the stats on Nollywood, Nigeria's film industry: third most prolific in the world, employing 350,000 people, releasing thousands of pictures a year. In Maissonneuve, Jonathan Kiefer writes:

But what’s really remarkable is that, until Nollywood, African filmmaking had been an overwhelmingly colonial enterprise, practised by artists trained in Europe and subsidized by European capital to make sophisticated films, on celluloid, aimed at non-African audiences. (Even the so-called father of African cinema, Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, served in the French army in Europe and studied film in Moscow.) By sharp contrast, Nollywood movies are usually made by Nigerians who have little training, with minuscule budgets; they’re shot on, and go directly to, video; and their stories consist entirely of homegrown pop-culture pulp. The mere enormity of the Nollywood phenomenon rattles our know-it-all pronouncements about cultural imperialism: Are we to congratulate or rue its market-driven ascendancy? Are we to consider it the truest index of contemporary Nigerian culture?

David Chute passes along an urgent call for help: Save a collection of over 253 feature films and over 390 trailers salvaged from Chinatown cinemas in Toronto.

David Byrne finds An Inconvenient Truth "devastating - and incontrovertible."

Michael Atkinson on The Cult of the Suicide Bomber: "This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else." And: "On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda - ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling."

Also in the Voice:

• "I certainly would imagine that when this movie is seen in theaters it's going to be significantly different," Richard Kelly tells Mark Peranson. The film at hand, of course, is Southland Tales, which Peranson sees as "a true film maudit" and a "terrific, sprawling satire."

• Carla Blumenkranz reviews The Break-Up.

• "Tracking Shots": Atkinson on two docs by Victor Dashuk which "open a window on an atrocious reality American media channels don't bother to report—social life in Belarus after the seizure of power by classic-style dictator Alexander Lukashenko" and on Coastlines; Drew Tillman on La Tropical; Jim Ridley on District B13; and Luke Y Thompson on Typhoon.

Clint Eastwood "has promised Flags of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand will attempt to show for the first time the suffering of both sides during 36 days of fighting in early 1945 that turned the island into a flattened wasteland." Justin McCurry reports.

Also in the Observer, Chris Campion on Crackheads Gone Wild, a DVD that's sold 60K copies and which "presents 'uncensored real stories' of crack addicts in Atlanta while drawing on the voyeuristic appeal and entertainment value of reality TV."

With Jared Hess's Nacho Libre opening in mid-June, Lewis Beale sketches the culture of the "lucha libre (literally 'free fight')" and the movies it's spawned. He talks, for example, with Guillermo Del Toro, who tells him they "have a 'surreal logic to them,' he said, 'and sometimes they achieve almost a dreamlike quality. There is a zany, non-Anglo sensibility that is less sophisticated, but far more charming in many ways.'"

Also in the New York Times:

• "The shrinking list of movies scheduled for review is just one more indication that the long marriage between print and film seems to have hit a midlife crisis," writes David Carr. Studios are pre-screening fewer films for critics, cutting print ad budgets and, in general, are increasingly more concerned with how their movies are perceived in that initial cloudburst of digital gossip rather than by professional critics.

• "With echo upon echo of faith-based dialogue, movie theaters today often sound like church," writes Caryn James. "But what seems like a new willingness to explore questions of faith — as if Mel Gibson's blockbuster The Passion of the Christ had made religion safe for Hollywood — has the spiritual depth of the Daily Show segment 'This Week in God,' with its quiz-show-style 'God Machine' that spits out religions to satirize."

• "Free speech trumps private property when a project is in the public interest, a term broadly defined," writes Elaine Dutka in a piece on how documentary filmmakers are having to learn to exactly when and where "fair use" begins and ends if they'd like to resort to this "tricky legal doctrine" to avoid facing the exorbitant fees demanded by studios for clips.

• Dave Kehr on Valerio Zurlini's Violent Summer and Girl With a Suitcase: "In both films it's not only age barriers that have to be crossed, but also (for Europe at least) the more formidable walls of class."

• Pixar's nervous, notes Charles Solomon, hoping Cars will push "its unbroken string of critical and box-office hits to seven. Its record is already unmatched in American animation history, even by Walt Disney himself." Related: Disney's belt-tightening may entail layoffs, reports Laura M Holson.

• David Hare will direct Vanessa Redgrave in a one-woman play, an adaptation of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Campbell Robertson reports.

• Janet Maslin: "When an author makes a point of using flagrantly cinematic action tactics, as [Dan] Brown did, he drops a strong hint that his book is adaptable, but that may not be the case." Related: Shaun Huston in PopMatters, focussing on Alan Moore vs the Wachowskis.

• Richard Siklos checks in with Internet Movie Database founder Col Needham to see how things are going. Pretty well, seems.

And the reviews:

• Stephen Holden on Cavite, "a gripping no-budget political thriller," La Moustache, "a surreal reflection on perception, reality and memory, whose focus shifts as the film burrows ever more deeply into subterranean territory," and Stagedoor, "a missed opportunity."

• Manohla Dargis on X-Men: The Last Stand: "Mostly, as so often with these types of empty entertainments, you are left to wonder why companies that hire so many fine actors to run around under latex and foam and have the best technological wizardry money can buy seem to spend so little attention to the screenplay." More X-Men: a terrific comic from Mike Russell; and Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle and Carina Chicano in the Los Angeles Times.

• Nathan Lee on What is a Man Without a Mustache?, a "pleasant if inconsequential romantic comedy from the Croatian director Hrvoje Hribar."

• Laura Kern on Shem, "just as confused as its protagonist."

• Jeannette Catsoulis on The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress, "a rough-hewn and melodramatic attack that nevertheless presents its evidence clearly and with a welcome sense of humor."

A "Maryland New Wave"?

Zach Campbell considers exploring the onscreen intersections of Freud and Marx.

"On knowledge and pleasure, right and wrong..." Daniel Garrett considers Spike Lee's Inside Man in Cinetext.

"The camera, and, to a greater degree, all technologies and their possibilities, are the driving force behind Keaton's genius," argues Violet Glaze at PopMatters.

Grady Hendrix gets a tip: Johnnie To's Election and Election 2 have been picked up for the US by Tartan Films USA.

New reviews in Midnight Eye:

• Jasper Sharp on Assassination: "Masahiro Shinoda's name might be known to students of Japanese cinema, especially through his detailed coverage in David Desser's wonderful study of the Japanese filmmaking climate of the 60s, Eros Plus Massacre, but comparatively little from his oeuvre of some thirty or so films produced across the past four decades has reached foreign shores."

• Adam Campbell on Aegis: "[T]he plot of the film is barely a lawsuit away from that of the Steven Segal shoot 'em up Under Siege." But director Junji Sakamoto "misses the action beats to drive the film on."

• Campbell on Negotiator, a "thoroughly light entertainment."

"Clocking in at 92 minutes, The City of Violence is so compact and lean that it will probably perturb more than a few Korean cinema fans expecting convoluted surprise endings and long melodramatic passages," writes Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org. "Unlike his previous work Crying Fist, which packed quite a emotional wallop, Ryoo Seung-wan's newest is a self-consciously generic update of the 'action films' of 1960s-70s Korea."

"Watching Takeshis' is like being presented with a challenging yet thrilling puzzle, and the director's suggestion to feel rather than think is sage advice indeed," writes Filmbrain, wondering if it's "truly the death knell it purports to be, and will Kitano successfully be able to re-invent himself, or is it all just a bit of fun?"

"Sir, No Sir! is one of the best documentaries about American protest movements since Mark Kitchell's Berkeley in the Sixties," writes Craig Phillips. He caught it at the Lark Theater, which, by the way, will be screening The Yearling on Wednesday with its then-child star, Claude Jarman, in attendance.

Speaking of Bay Area theaters, the IWW is tracking efforts by employees of the Shattuck Cinemas to form a union.

David Pratt-Robson on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and A History of Violence: "Both are, after all, genre riffs on doppelgangers and binaries, law vs. order, American dreams and American original sin, and small-town virtue and complicity."

With what'll undoubtedly be a fairly impressive box set due next week from Warners, the John Wayne/John Ford Film Collection, Universal has rushed out its own this week: John Wayne: An American Icon Collection. Sure, they're the "runts in the Wayne litter," admits John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows, but they're also "the ones that will really educate you about those fabled ups and downs in a career with as many false starts and appalling role selections as any major star ever got away with over fifty long years in the biz. There's not a one of these five that won’t fascinate you - they sure did me."

"Intentionally or not," writes Jared Rapfogel at Stop Smiling, Arkadin the film is as mysterious and out of reach as Arkadin the character." Also, Josh Tyson on two mockumentaries, LolliLove and Buckshot Boys.

New DVD reviews at Slant:

• Fernando F Croce on Winter Soldier ("less documentary than in-the-heat-of-conflict document"; more from Anthony Kaufman) and two from Amos Gitai, Devarim and Yom Yom.

• Ed Gonzalez on Gay Sex in the 70s: "[T]he film won't be a discovery to anyone remotely connected to the era."

• Paul Schrodt on Delicatessen: "Jeunet and Caro stuff themselves with all their favorite obsessions and the result is both unfunny and very unappetizing."

"Her time was hot and fierce but short, culminating in Swept Away (1974) and especially Seven Beauties (1975) with its four Academy Award nominations that included one for Wertmüller, the first woman ever to land on the ballot for Best Director," writes Ray Young, reviewing the Lina Wertmüller Collection. "Since the early 80s, Wertmüller’s films have barely been released outside of Europe, so the opportunity to see anything is welcome."

Matt Bartley inaugurates the Hollywood Bitchslap Hall of Fame by inducting Gene Hackman.

Mike Russell presents "the 3800-word 'director's cut' of my half-hour interview with Edward Norton."

"I love being inveigled into comedy," Miranda Richardson tells Genevieve Roberts in the Independent, where Gerard Gilbert talks with Richard E Grant about the movie she's in, Wah-Wah.

The BBC: "US actor Paul Gleason, whose most famous roles included Trading Places and The Breakfast Club, has died of a rare form of lung cancer aged 67." More from NPR and comments from Michael Tully and Edward Copeland.

Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times: "Henry Bumstead, the veteran Hollywood production designer who won Academy Awards for his work on To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sting and whose longtime association with actor-director Clint Eastwood kept him on the job into his 90s, has died. He was 91."

Also, James Verini bids farewell to the old-fashioned movie premiere. Similarly, Devin Gordon in Newsweek.

"Is film school a good thing?" asks David Thomson. "Well, it's not bad... There is one thing school teaches you: the inescapable need for collaboration." Also in the Independent, Jay Fernandez describes what it was like to be an extra on the set of Poseidon.

"Google is planning a new version of its search engine - designed for TV screens - that the company's co-founder and its chief executive believe will rival traditional broadcasting." Tony Glover reports for The Business; meanwhile, as Michelle Quinn reports for the Mercury News, YouTube's not sure what it wants to do, exactly.

Online viewing tip #1. "I shudder to think what would have surprised Werner Herzog." Via filmtagebuch, Mark Kermode's BBC interview with fearless director. The one in which he gets shot. Stick with it all the way through.

Online viewing tip #2. 1942. The best supporting actress nominees were Gladys Cooper, Agnes Moorehead, Susan Peters, Dame May Whitty and Teresa Wright. Nathaniel R has put together a terrific reel of clips from each performance and now, over at StinkyLulu's place, NR, SL, Nick Davis and Tim Robey are having an all out "Supporting Actress Smackdown."

Online viewing tips, round #1. Odds and ends from Michael Tully.

Online viewing tips, round #2. The Mutiny Company is a new site for Jamie Stuart. Among my own favorites: his coverage of the New York Film Festival last October, which you can now watch again with audio commentary.

Posted by dwhudson at May 30, 2006 4:57 PM