Critics and shorts.

David Chute sees his capsule reviews for the LA Weekly filleted by the editorial blade, recalls the days when there was a difference between page layouts in the alternative weeklies and USA Today and writes, "Unless I'm over-thinking this (which is always a possibility) it appears that we are now edging alarmingly close to the policing of thought, to the suggestion that any attempt to sneak around the restrictions with shorthand or allusive phraseology will be dealt with harshly. Reminds me irresistably of my favorite editorial complaint of recent years, also from a watchdog at the Weekly, that a certain graph contained 'too many facts.'"

Update: Do not read on until you have read this.

Fortunately, David Chute has a blog and it's there that we can read his takes on Typhoon and Fanaa as he intended them to be read. And readers will catch on. They will pick up the weeklies only when they're looking to buy or sell something, in other words, for the classifieds (a purely workaday service rapidly being supplanted by the likes of Craigslist), discard the rest and go online to read what their favorite writers actually have to say. It's there that, as Roger Ebert has told Cinematical's Christopher Campbell, "Good writing will prevail."

Related: Edward Copeland, Ray Pride and David Poland, commenting on Anne Thompson's piece in the Hollywood Reporter. And, as noted yesterday), she's most helpfully rounded up pointers to related entries out there: Jon Fine (Business Week), Andrew Horbal (Blogcritics), Joe Morgenstern (Wall Street Journal), Peter Suderman (Alarm!), Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine), Marc E Babej and Tim Pollak (Forbes), AJ Schnack and, of course, Dave Kehr.

Also related: Anthony Kaufman documents the slow and painful self-destruction of the Village Voice/New Times papers here and here. While you're there, read his take on why he simply cannot agree with "venerable critics who I have the utmost respect for" when it comes to Southland Tales.

Clive James [site] reviews American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now: "It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better.... [P]erceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory." Yes, he has his favorites. If you're looking for a piece to tussle with over the weekend, here you go.

Also in the New York Times:

• The Vision that Changed Cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni is a series running at the BAM Rose Cinemas June 7 through 29, and it gives Stephen Holden an opportunity to reflect on the filmmaker's impact: "When L'Avventura was released in 1960, a young generation of cineastes immediately recognized it as an intellectual and emotional expression of a mood that had already found its way into literature, painting, music and architecture. I was a college student when I saw L'Avventura for the first of many times, and it changed my life."

• Dennis Lim on the 12-and-a-half-hour Out 1: Noli Me Tangere: "If there is a movie equivalent of reading Proust or watching the Ring cycle — of committing to an artwork of overwhelming proportions that promises to repay accordingly — it's likely to be found in the films of the French New Wave veteran Jacques Rivette."

• Michael Joseph Gross talks with Bryan Singer about Superman Returns: "'Even if you're the strongest man in the world,' Mr Singer said, 'if the woman you love has found someone else that she's nearly married to that's not a bad guy, how do you figure out what your place is in that woman's life?' He added, 'I call it my first chick flick.'" Related: Mitchell Warren in the Miami Poetry Review: "10 Directors That Know How To Make Comic Book Movies." Via Frank at Chromewaves, who thoroughly despises X-Men: The Last Stand.

• Paul Cullum previews the "brazenly unconventional" CineVegas (June 9 through 17).

• Back to the NYT Book Review "Summer Reading" package and to Terrence Rafferty: "Horror is, it's fair to say, pretty determinedly nonaspirational, which is perhaps why it appeals so strongly to teenagers, slackers and fatalists, and hardly at all to normal, functioning adults, who are busy keeping the more pressing everyday anxieties — disease, financial ruin, loss of love — at bay and who may fail to see the benefit of adding vampires and zombies and poltergeists to the list." Nevertheless, he enjoys reading horror fiction and recommends a few titles to those "willing to surrender."

And on to one of my own favorites. Colm Tóibín on The Turn of the Screw:

The story has had enormous influence, indirectly, on the structure and tone of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness... and on films such as The Others.... In 1954, Benjamin Britten's opera based on the story was first produced. In 1971, Marlon Brando starred as the evil Peter Quint in The Nightcomers, a dark prequel to James's story. In 1974, ABC Television in the US made a rather clunky version of the story with Lynn Redgrave as the governess. But it is the 1961 adaptation called The Innocents starring Deborah Kerr - scripted by William Archibald, who wrote the Broadway play of the story, and Truman Capote, with some dialogue by John Mortimer, and just released on DVD in this country - that best catches the psychological eeriness, the claustrophobia and the essential ambiguity of the original story by James.

Also in the Guardian: They should've remade Omen III: The Final Reckoning instead of The Omen, argues John Patterson.

Via Cartoon Brew, Esther Leslie in Tate Etc on the "collision between high art abstraction and mass commercial culture" in the work of Oskar Fischinger.

It's not often that Ed Gonzalez gives a film four out of four stars at Slant. But then, films like Pandora's Box, "a stirring vision of the world gripped by a sinister moral vice - a nosedive into a carnal abyss of despair lined with visionary chiaroscuro sights and thorny mythological references," aren't all that common, either.

In Frieze, Tom Morton interviews Pierre Huyghe, whose "installations, films and collaborative works have looked at the relationship between our experiences, the past, our expectations and the future." Also, Max Andrews: "Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Chechnya, Lebanon: the regions visited or invoked in the six films that comprised A Picture of War is Not War were a sobering, conflict-ridden roll-call."

RES profiles:

• Lisa Delgado on VJs Eclectic Method.
• Marisol Grandon on video director Dougal Wilson.
• Joshua Ostroff on video game designer Keita Takahashi.

Acquarello: "Johan van der Keuken's sublime and exhilarating riff on the city symphony and musical documentary, Brass Unbound, is a thoughtful, infectiously engaging, and complexly resonant exposition on the transformative evolution of the ceremonial brass band in post-colonial societies from tools of enslavement and imperialism, to instruments of cultural celebration and personal expression."

Today's dose of An Inconvenient Truth comes from Chuck Tryon and comes heartily recommended.

The Chacabuco Project is a fundraising effort for Deserted Memory, "a documentary on Chacabuco, the abandoned nitrate mining town and Pinochet-era prison camp in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile."

Jay A. Fernandez in the Los Angeles Times: "A collaboration between British documentary director James Marsh (Troubleman, The Burger and the King) and writer-producer Milo Addica (Monster's Ball, Birth), The King, which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, is a movie that unfolds with the dread of a looming execution. And some viewers are likely to experience no small discomfort with the brooding drama's emotional, sexual, spiritual and thematic terrain."

On the Boston Phoenix's Outside the Frame blog, Peter Keough talks with Michael Cuesta about 12 and Holding. Related: David D'Arcy's April interview.

20 years after Heavy Metal Parking Lot [site], William F Yurasko gets John Heyn and Jeff Krulik reflecting on the whole "Parking Lot Odyssey." Via Gabriel Wardell.

Richard Linklater's working on a documentary about Texas baseball. Cedric Golden reports for the Austin American-Statesman. Via Matt Dentler.

Jason Kottke gives five out of five stars to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Online viewing tip #1. Via Movie City News, the trailer for Woody Allen's Scoop, which looks a lot more like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion than Match Point.

Online viewing tip #2. Chris Moukarbel's World Trade Center, "adaptation of an extract of the screenplay of Oliver Stone's forthcoming film," as the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art puts it. Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Online viewing tip #3. the show with zefrank. Via everybody, all of a sudden.

Posted by dwhudson at June 3, 2006 12:57 PM