Shorts, 8/17.

"Black Snake Moan, Craig Brewer's follow-up to last year's Sundance sensation Hustle & Flow, comes as close to exploitation heaven as any studio based film made in the past 20 years," writes Mike D'Angelo for Esquire. "You watch it unfold - detonate, more like - with giddy incredulousness, stunned that somebody actually had the guts to put such supercharged images on the screen. That doesn't automatically make it a great movie, but it does make it a valuable one, especially in a culture given to endless hand-wringing over dull, mealymouthed Ron Howard versions of airport novels."

That's via Bilge Ebiri at Screengrab, where, noting that his piece on Keith Gordon's The Chocolate War has generated lots of reader interest, he follows up with a batch of related links.

Screengrab is now nestled into Nerve's Film Lounge, by the way; here are Laura Davies's first impressions at Filmmaker.

"Despite the unusual visibility of his sumptuous Proust interpretation Time Regained (1999), even DVD representation is lagging far behind in bringing together the pieces of [Raúl] Ruiz's puzzle-in-progress, the oeuvre as single work, alluring in its vast inaccessibility. Yet two new additions to the catalogue, while hardly promising Ruiz broader recognition, serve to illuminate a few shadowy corners in his singular cinema." José Teodoro for Stop Smiling on Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982) and That Day (2003).

Up-n-coming:

• Hou Hsiao-hsien has begun shooting the first of four features to be made commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Musée d'Orsay. Once Olivier Assayas completes his Boarding Gate, he'll shoot the second. Both star Juliette Binoche. And, as Fabien Lemercier reports for Cineuropa, the other two films are to be made by Raúl Ruiz and Jim Jarmusch.

• Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's sixth collaboration will be an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Chris Gardner and Pamela McClintock report for Variety.

• Ken Loach's Palme d'Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley will be distributed in the US as part of IFC First Take's "day-and-date" program. Gregg Goldstein has quotage in the Hollywood Reporter.

• Variety's Michael Fleming reports that Terry George will direct Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo in an adaptation of John Burnham Schwartz's novel Reservation Road.

At Twitch, Todd offers a mighty tantalizing preview of Bong Joon-ho's The Host. More from Richard Brunton, filing from Edinburgh. Oh, and it's doing quite well in Korea. Very well. Grady Hendrix has numbers.

At PopMatters, Marco Lanzagorta offers a brief and useful history of Fangoria, Cinefex and Video Watchdog and, at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg rounds up the latest goings on at various blogs devoted to horror.

"I've been noticing that more and more critics are becoming increasingly distrustful of Almodóvar's talent the more he's co-opted by the mainstream," blogs Ed Gonzalez. "So, Almodóvar uses a condom nowadays, but isn't the sex still good?"

"While lavishly praised by contemporary filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese and John Woo, who has famously declared that the French director was 'God for me,' Melville's legacy is contradictory," according to Richard Phillips at the WSWS. Also, a meaty interview with Fred Breinersdorfer, who wrote the screenplay for Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.

Zach Campbell: "What makes Godard (particularly the immediate post-DVG Godard, the one of Numéro deux and Ici et ailleurs) so interesting to me is that his didacticism is shared with the viewer - as is his ignorance!"

"It is a mistake to privilege any one of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales over another, though the temptation exists and is easily indulged, especially if one takes the disparate, yet complementary viewpoints of this inimitable sextet as entirely representative of its creator's own principles," writes Keith Uhlich. "Strange that auteurism should fail us so completely in the case of one of its founding practitioners, but Rohmer was always something of an odd man out among his contemporaries, if not in the remove of years (a decade older than most of his nouvelle vague brethren) then in the deceptive placidity of his art."

Also in Slant:

• Ed Gonzalez reviews LOL and explains "how a little film thinks bigger." Also, Fraticide's "startling saber-toothed violence and blend of mystic and modern impulses recalls Pasolini's audacious Porcile."

• Nick Schager on Criterion's release of Kicking and Screaming. Plus, Surviving Eden.

Eric Haynes takes another shot over at Reverse Shot: "It doesn't hold much value out of context, but in A Short Film About Love - as in all of Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema - context is everything."

"Published by Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Bound by Law? (Tales From the Public Domain) is a brief history of intellectual property and the public domain in comic-book form, written by Duke law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins and available both on the Web and in print from Soft Skull Press." Paul Cullum explains why it matters. Touchstones: Los Angeles Plays Itself, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession and many others.

Also in the LA Weekly, Ella Taylor: "Trust the Man emerges a weakling comedy of manners riffing on extramarital nooky... kooky therapy groups, New Yorkers' bad manners in public, the difficulty of finding parking spots and blah, blah, blah." (More from Armond White in the New York Press.) And Tim Grierson on Barry Lyndon and Paul Malcolm on The Hidden Blade.

MS Smith on Miami Vice: "Forms of criticism that consistently measure a film by a prescribed set of functional requirements (plot, characterization) and by the differences between its strengths and weaknesses can overlook the glories in a film such as this; they might even shake one's faith in the potential of criticism to transform the experience of cinema."

Darwin's Nightmare, the "Oscar-nominated documentary highlighting links between fish fillets flown from Lake Victoria to the European Union and the global arms trade has drawn a furious reaction from Tanzania's president and prompted harassment of local people involved in the film," reports Xan Rice. Also in the Guardian: "It was really only after Fassbinder's death... that [Daniel] Schmid became recognised as an artist in his own right," writes Ronald Bergan. Earlier: "Daniel Schmid, 1941 - 2006."

"There is no doubt that I love Mumbai. I love this city more than I love women perhaps," Ram Gopal Varma tells IBN's Anuradha Sengupta. Via Jeff at Cinema Strikes Back.

At Zoom In Online, Annie Frisbie has been talking with producer Ted Hope.

Film Threat's KJ Doughton talks with director Neil Burger about The Illusionist. So does Canfield at Twitch. Related: Bill Gallo in the Voice: "[T]his entertaining tale of wizardry and lost love vaporizes even our most serious doubts." Plus, Sara Schieron at Slant and a "B-" from the AV Club's Scott Tobias, a "C" from Doug Wallen in the Philadelphia Weekly and a "C+" from Nick Schager.

More from Jennifer Merin in the New York Press, where you'll also find Armond White on Step Up and Kari Milchman on The Puffy Chair.

The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov calls up Irvine Welsh to talk about Trainspotting ten years on.

Lesley O'Toole talks with Samuel L Jackson for the Independent. And so does Keith Phipps for the AV Club. You know why. Related: The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy meets snake handler Jules Sylvester and Phipps talks with director David R Ellis.

Sean Howe looks back: "And then, after launching the careers of a half-dozen young actors (and a half-dozen New Romantic bands), after introducing 'neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie' and 'poozer' and 'eat my shorts' into the lexicon, John Hughes decided to leave the kids behind." Also in the New York Observer, Scott Eyman reviews Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans.

David Carr has a backgrounder on Tire Tracks, a 40-minute doc on "a kind of rural car- and truck-made graffiti... one man's folk art is another's rend in the social fabric." Also in the New York Times, Stuart Elliott: "Those consumers who prefer their entertainment unbranded - that is, without the products, logos and other trappings of advertisers embedded in the content - are in for a disappointing decade, according to a new report."

And Nathan Lee on Rocky Road to Dublin: Peter Lennon's "tough-love valentine to the motherland retains interest for its historical perspective, sardonic tone, lively structure and finely etched black-and-white cinematography by the legendary Raoul Coutard." More from R Emmet Sweeney in the Voice.

"Seventeen is without a doubt one of the greatest movies, perhaps the greatest, about teenage life (not to mention American life) ever made," writes Johnny Ray Huston for SF360. "The time seems right to break down seventeen reasons why that's the case."

Anthony Kaufman: "Among the many Iraq docs I've seen over the last few years, Usama Alshaibi's Nice Bombs offers a refreshing new perspective on the quagmire."

A "major strength" of The War Tapes for Chuck Tryon is that stateside interviews, conducted after the soldiers return home from Iraq offer a perspective "unavailable with other embedded documentaries."

"The recent release of the American version of Pulse inspired me to catch up on a couple more films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa." Peter Nellhaus traces influences and associations.

At indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez checks up on the DIY distribution efforts behind Four Eyed Monsters and Head Trauma. Related: Sujewa Ekanayake.

Ron Silliman takes the makers of Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of [P.] to task and concludes, "Thomas Pynchon has a new novel, Against the Day, forthcoming this November.... At 1060 pages from a novelist who is now 69, it may well be the last big book we ever get from Pynchon, and it's only his sixth one. It would nice to imagine that people will read it for what it is, and not as a cryptogram for deciphering what the author doesn't care to share." Via Ed Champion.

"I know what you are thinking: I am not a friend of me." For the SFBG, Tyler Goodboy braves Orientation: A Scientology Information Film.

"Extracted from its contrived military context, 10th & Wolf is essentially just another story of small-time mobsters, superficially similar to the far-superior Goodfellas," writes Martha Fischer at Cinematical.

"There was a time when WC Fields seemed eternal," writes John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows. "His persona, his philosophy, seemed to embrace succeeding generations long after he'd left the stage in 1946." But "where are those teen-agers and college students of yore that lined up at revival theatres and University campuses to see him? Their numbers have not been replenished - how can they when the films are long since out of general circulation?"

Paul Mooney, "a legendary comic who wrote shit for everyone from Redd Foxx to Eddie Murphy to Richard Pryor," talks racism in the movies with RA the Rugged Man in mass appeal. Via Blank Screen.

At Facets Features, Nathan Hogan anxiously awaits Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection.

"Introduction to Film and Video Analysis." Chris Cagle's syllabus.

Favorite road movies? The cinetrix is wondering, is all.

The AV Club's weekly list: "12 Acceptable Man-Vs-Beast Films."

Congrats, Jeffrey Overstreet!

"No one will be shooting on celluloid in four years." Francis Ford Coppola, as quoted by David Poland.

"In June of this year, [the New York Times] chose the Broder-Webb-Chervin-Silberman Agency, a small but prestigious Beverly Hills firm, to represent the paper in negotiations for film and television rights to its content." In the New York Observer, Jonathan Liu explains that "[o]ptioning human-interest newspaper articles wasn't always such a complicated business."

Late summer reading tip. The Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan is offering Noël Burch's To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema as a free PDF download. Via filmtagebuch, where Thomas Groh notes that this is part of the Center's "Motion Picture Reprint Series."

Online browsing tip. The complete run of Radical Software, "a great 70s MacLuhanite zine about early video art and media activism," writes Wiley Wiggins. "This stuff is like porn for me, vintage video gear with a good dose of pre-internet media theory."

Online listening tip. Peter Sellers's British accents. Via Jason Kottke.

Posted by dwhudson at August 17, 2006 2:40 PM