Shorts, 8/30.

There are fresh Opening Shots and just a whole lot of other great things going on at Jim Emerson's scanners again.

Maysoon Pachachi set up a documentary course at the Independent Film & Television College in Baghdad in 2004; it was to have run three months, but it took a year. "The violence in Baghdad - criminal, political and sectarian - has increased exponentially in both quantity and brutality over the past two years, and like everyone else in the city, our students are burdened with physical and psychic traumas," writes Pachachi in the Guardian. "Many have had relatives kidnapped, injured or killed. And just getting to the school is a challenge. As one student said, 'every morning, I say a prayer, make up with my parents if we've rowed - just in case - and then leave the house. You can't just sit at home - afraid all the time.'" Their films have been made and will be seen.

Also in the Guardian:

• Simon Callow, who played Mozart, recalls the first production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, previewed five years before Milos Forman's adaptation.

• Paul Arendt reports on Michael Haneke's projected English-language remake of Funny Games: "[Producer Hamish] McAlpine is adamant that the film will not be sanitized for US audiences."

• Ronald Bergan remembers Arthur Franz, 1920 - 2006.

Ella Taylor: "Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddie looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere, and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant life in the backwaters of China." Related: at Twitch, logboy finds a trailer for Zhang Yimou's next one, Curse of the Golden Flower, with Gong Li and Chow Yun-Fat. Also in the Voice: "The Wicker Man's genre-bending, thematic daring, and tortuous history have made it the UK's definitive cult movie." Graham Fuller tells its story.

For Bilge Ebiri, Jack Clayton is "perhaps one of the most underrated filmmakers of all time." As part of Screengrab's "Forgotten Films" series, he writes that what makes Our Mother's House "so unique - and so heartbreaking - is Clayton's mastery of mood.... Clayton calibrates his tone so smoothly, we don't even notice we're watching a horror film until it's too late."

Puritan "has it all - the gorgeous cinematography heavy on shadows and contrast; the hard boiled, down on his luck anti-hero; the beautiful femme fatale; the betrayals and double crosses," writes Todd at Twitch. "Puritan has got all of the noir hallmarks in spades plus a healthy supernatural element thrown in to boot."

Frank Borzage "was a crucial developer of the ways that talking picture melodramas might resemble and distiguish themselves from their silent film predecessors," writes Brian Darr among the Cinemarati. "But it's also interesting to take a look at Borzage flourishes that did not become assimilated into the 'Classical Hollywood Style.'"

David Lowery on 8½: "It's all about any filmmaker who watches it, I think - including Fellini, who was only telling most of the truth when he said that, of all his films, this one is the least autobiographical, the most fantastical."

"Disguise is more appealing as an idea than a practice, and works best when it fails." In the London Review of Books, Michael Wood ruminates on what Michael Mann is up to in Miami Vice.

"2006 marks the moment that the dizzying pinball effect of hyperspeed editing has finally permeated every last corner of mainstream American cinema-not just the ADD-inducing action spectaculars that breed in summertime, but also the character-driven, explosion-free films offered as an alternative to the blockbusters," writes Jessica Winter in the Boston Globe. Via Jason Kottke. Paul Harrill responds, sparking several interesting comments.

After posting a friend's account of watching Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts in New Orleans (more from Paul Schrodt at Slant), the cinetrix recommends the Katrina Experience.

Has the Al Franken/Ann Coulter face-off been pulled from Al Franken: God Spoke "because Franken makes her look like the wingnut idiot that she is"? wonders Anthony Kaufman. As it turns out, yes. Commentary: Joe Leydon. Related: Jonathan Sheldon, co-author of Declaration of Independent Filmmaking, suggests "Seven Films Looking for Remakes... Starring Ann Coulter" to the Los Angeles Times. As for the film itself, Ed Gonzalez writes in Slant, "A better, less passé film about Franken's wife Franni forming the backbone of her husband's career lies dormant here, as does the man's rebel spirit. Perhaps the man could stand to learn from the Last Testament and fight fire with fire."

Solace in Cinema finds news that Richard Linklater is contemplating a sequel to The Last Detail.

Janet Maslin: "The Return of the Player does what it means to. It reanimates Griffin Mill and sends him straight from [Michael] Tolkin's darkest daydreams into your own. What it does not do is strike at the heart of Hollywood in the way the first book did, because both its interests and its fears have expanded."

Also in the New York Times:

• Dave Kehr on State of the Union, "the last important film of [Frank Capra's] career," and more new DVD releases. More takes on different releases from Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

• "[E]conomists and other academics that study the movie industry" tell Eduardo Porter and Geraldine Fabrikant that stars "are simply not worth the expense."

• Ross Johnson on Robert Evans: "His durability surely says something about the power of myth in the movie world."

Half Nelson is "a non-didactic, intergenerational historical/political critique," writes Greg Allen. "But it works, because the filmmakers never lose touch with their film's emotional core, which is Dunne's development. This is such a well-realized film, I'm tempted to say it's hard to believe it's a first film. But then, I can't really imagine this thoroughly conceived-yet-modest film coming from anyone but a young filmmaker."

Jason Morehead on Little Miss Sunshine: "[T]he constant quirkiness and oddity becomes as rote and routine as any generic Hollywood melodrama, and just as subtle - this one just happens to reference Proust and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and have a foul-mouthed grandpa." More from Paul Schrodt at the Stranger Song and from Jeffrey Overstreet.

Daniel Kasman: "If Match Point was about what a morally compromised person can do when put in an awful, trying position, the elements that move forward to bring about death, Scoop is about coming to terms that not everything is what it seems, and about laughing at the seriousness of the façade and understanding what is behind it, for better or for worse."

In an interview translated into French, Bob Dylan tells Paola Genone and Thierry Gandillot in L'Express that he imagines his albums as films that tell stories of American identity. And in El Pais (and in Spanish), Michel Legrand, who has composed scores for the likes of Godard, Louis Malle and Jacques Demy, tells Rodrigo Carrizo Couto:

These days, I can't find a good film composer anywhere. Only John Williams and Ennio Morricone remain, although recently I've been finding them boring at times. The music of the avant-garde is a cul de sac. Atonal, serial, experimental music, it's all dead. The work by people like Boulez or Stockhausen often seems to be to be pure betrayal. Fortunately, we're gradually becoming aware of when we're being fooled. The music of the future, I believe, will draw closer to that of the great masters of the past.

That's translated from the German translation of Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau," where I found both interviews. In German, you'll find Verena Lueken and Michael Althen in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung talking with producer Bernd Eichinger about Perfume and a disappointed Fritz Göttler in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He's seen Tom Tykwer's adaptation and suggests that it might have been a terrific little "dirty movie" (he uses the English there) had it been filmed in the 40s or 70s; as it is, Eichinger is banking on the genre known as "world literature adaptation," as he has in the past with The Name of the Rose and House of the Spirits. "Perfume, too, is aimed at the world market and is meant to prove that big international cinema can be made in Germany - at a cost of more than 50 million euros [over $64 million], it's the most expensive production ever made in this country." That's made Eichinger and Tykwer too cautious, argues Göttler, too worried to get through "without mistakes."

In Slant:

• Nick Schager on Looking for Kitty: "Ed Burns's "habitual regurgitation of well-trod themes (romantic loss, masculine bonding, and maturation) continues to pay ever-smaller dividends." And Crossover.

• DVDs: Eric Henderson on Let's Scare Jessica to Death ("Let's bore gorefreaks to distraction") and Keith Uhlich on Iron Island ("clear-sighted and compassionate, a mythic expression of people in a constant state of flux").

• Ed Gonzalez on Saint of 9/11, Paper Dolls and more DVDs: Summer Storm, Say Uncle and Guys and Balls.

Jeffrey Wells asks: What film have you loved that the rest of the world sneered at? The comments, they are streaming.

Joan Blondell would have been 100 today. Josh R pays tribute at Edward Copeland on Film.

Previously undiscovered love poems by Marlene Dietrich have been, well, discovered. Among the addresses: Noël Coward, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Yul Brynner and... Ronald Reagan? Evidently. Anna Weinberg has the story at the Book Standard. Via Ed Champion, who's found another one.

Apple's "possible entry into the movie download business could change the landscape of video entertainment much like its iPod devices and iTunes service rocked the music world," reports Patrick Seitz for Investor's Business Daily.

Mediabistro notes that Paramount is donating ten percent of the profits made during World Trade Center's opening five days to to 9/11 charities. That's $2.6 million. Related: Stanley Kauffmann's review for the New Republic.

For Stop Smiling, Michael Helke talks with Paolo Ventura about his mixed-media work, War Souvenir.

Online you-gotta-see-this tip. Tom Sutpen posts an amazing photo at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

Online listening tip. Vince Keenan and Rosemarie " take a look at two groundbreaking films from an era when films about sex were for adults and not horny teenagers: Last Tango in Paris and Carnal Knowledge."

Online viewing tip #1. StinkyLulu is hosting another "Supporting Actress Smackdown," the year is 1962, and Nathaniel R's got the clip reel so you can sample the performances of Mary Badham in To Kill a Mockingbird, Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, Shirley Knight in Sweet Bird of Youth, Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate and Thelma Ritter in Birdman of Alcatraz. StinkyLulu and Nathaniel R are joined in their rumble by Nick Davis and Tim R.

Online viewing tip #2. The Memory. Via wood s lot: "In this house the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky spent his childhood and adolescence, Zamoskvorechye, 1st Schipkovsky Lane, 1997."

Online viewing tips, round 1. At the Daily Reel, Anthony Kaufman points to "a number of professionally-made politically charged viral videos" by Franklin Lopez.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The Trailer Mash. Via Movie City News. Related: Trailer Trashers at Google Video.

Online viewing tips, round 3. DVblog offers a couple of Hal Hartley clips.

Online viewing tips, round 4. Save the Internet. Via filmtagebuch.

Posted by dwhudson at August 30, 2006 2:02 PM