Shorts, 8/27.

"When we meet Griffin this time... he is suitably consumed with dread," writes Seth Greenland, reviewing Michael Tolkin's new novel. "It is one of the achievements of The Return of the Player that it utterly captures the most salient quality of life in Hollywood: the bowel-shaking fear that underlies everything."

"[T]he Ballards' 'pathology' in Crash seems oddly healthy, their marriage a model of well-adjusted perversity." Mark Fisher explains.

"I think if you wanted to be doctrinaire about it, the ultimate test of what animation might be would be life that is created rather than just photographed." John Canemaker won an Oscar for The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation just this year, but he's been writing about and making animated films for decades now. Michael Guillén has a terrific talk with him at the Evening Class.

Satoshi Kon's Paprika "may very well be his finest work to date," writes Todd at Twitch. "Nobody captures the shifting reality of dream life better than Kon, the peculiar logic that rules there, the unsettling way that dreams can turn from pleasant to terrifying seemingly without warning." Also: "While it shows many of the growing pains that you would expect from the first ever martial arts film to emerge from Chile, Ernesto Espinoza's Kiltro also shows a great deal of promise."

Slant's Ed Gonzalez: "In spite of its improvisational roots, Le Petite Lieutenant feels a little too cleverly thought-out, but this is still a rare police film that uses work to illuminate life." Also, with Red Doors, "all [director Georgia] Lee has done is rip pages from the same Alan Ball Playbook filmmakers Arie Posin and Mike Mills used to pander to hip movie trends that nowadays guarantee a distribution deal." And: Alfonso Cuarón's 1991 feature debut, Sólo Con Tu Pareja is a "little one-note perhaps, but consistently funny and sexy."

Also in Slant: Nick Schager has a long talk with Kirby Dick about This Film Is Not Yet Rated and gives Hollywoodland two out of four stars.

"Infidelity, in a Lubitsch movie, barely registers on the sin-o-meter. The worst crime of all is to be a bore." The Self-Styled Siren on Heaven Can Wait.

Writing for Cinetext, Daniel Garrett finds in The New World "a film in which profundity can be read on its surface, in its images, dialog, and meditations, a film in which being as much as doing, perceiving as much as desiring, are important... Terrence Malick] makes being - the luminescent fact of existence - vivid."

MS Smith on Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern: "I've seen few films in recent years that are this coherent in their visual style and narrative, that rapturously fulfill the visual potential of cinema while simultaneously offering a thoroughly devastating social commentary."

For Newsweek, Lorraine Ali talks with Alejandro González Iñárritu and a few of his cast members about Babel.

In the New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon asks CC Goldwater the doc she's produced, Mr Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater. And Catherine Keener poses for the NYT Style Magazine; Lynn Hirschberg takes on the accompanying interview.

Miranda Sawyer interviews Owen Wilson for the Observer. Also, Killian Fox talks with Laurie David, co-producer of An Inconvenient Truth, about her efforts to raise awareness of global warming issues and another rave for Volver, this one from Philip French.

The adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay looks to be stalled again; Kim Voynar has details at Cinematical, where Scott Weinberg notes the nominations for Spike TV's Scream Awards and for Fangoria's Chainsaw Awards.

Via Joe Leydon, fall movie previews in the New York Daily News: the short overview from Jack Mathews and the film-by-film rundown from Mathews and Elizabeth Weitzman.

BBC: "Leading Indian filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee has died in hospital in the western Indian city of Mumbai."

Canadians: Avi Lewis will begin hosting The Big Picture on CBC on September 13.

Online browsing tip. Black Dahlia: The Story As It Was Originally Reported by the Los Angeles Times. Via Film-Fatale. Related: Peet Gelderblom presents his "contribution to what seems to have become another unofficial Blog-A-Thon" and That Little Round-Headed Boy watches De Palma's "great, unsung comedy," Phantom of the Paradise.

Online viewing tip #1. Brenda Ann Kenneally's "Children of the Storm" in the New York Times (click down to the "Interactive Feature").

Online viewing tip #2. Richard Lester's Running Jumping & Standing Still Film at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger..., where Tom Sutpen reminds us that Lester "would soon have as defining an impact on the development of Cinema in the 1960s as anyone you can name."

Online viewing tip #3. Everyone's talking about the trailer for Todd Field's Little Children; Jeffrey Wells gets word from Mark Woollen & Associates on the thinking behind its conception.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Christopher Arcella's Crime Scene Greenpoint, via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker, where he's also pointing to Nash Edgerton's video for Toni Collette's "Beautiful Awkward Pictures."

Online viewing tips, round 2. At Twitch, Todd's got a trailer for John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, another for a thriller from Russia, Obratnyy otschet, and another for Michel Ocelot's Azur et Asmar.

Posted by dwhudson at August 27, 2006 11:54 AM