Shorts, 9/6.

A Takashi Miike "Double Whammy" at Twitch: logboy has news of a feature version of promo that served as a sequel to the PS2 game Ryu ga Gotoku (if I understand all that correctly) and a trailer for Taiyou No Kizu, opening soon in Japan.

Lou Ye says he'll go on making films despite a ban imposed on him by the Chinese government. The BBC reports.

This month's indies-in-production report from Jason Guerrasio at indieWIRE covers suspense thriller Among the Shadows; Zoe Cassavetes's debut feature, Broken English, with Gena Rowlands and Parker Posey; the scary Dismal; Brad Mays's OperaWorks; and the romantic comedy Sellin' Helen.

Matt Forsythe's got a "Norman McLaren mega-post" at Drawn!.

In The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!, Joe Eszterhas has nasty things to say about Liv Tyler, Val Kilmer, Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, Warren Beatty, Edward Norton and Madonna, and you can read them in the New York Daily News. Via Shawn Levy.

Chris Cagle has a book recommendation that might be more up your alley: Donald Crafton's The Talkies.

Scott Eyman on David Thompson's Nicole Kidman: "'I don't say she's the greatest actress ever, or even the best of her time,' he writes. He does, however, believe her to be 'the bravest, the most adventurous' actress of her era. This is a fair assessment, and it also gets to the heart of Ms Kidman's identity crisis. Half of the time she wants to be Liv Ullmann; the other half of the time she wants to be Michelle Pfeiffer. Deep-dish art movies alternating with Hollywood slop doesn't give an actress much middle ground on which to stand." Also in the New York Observer, Charles Taylor on Double Indemnity.

Matthew DeBord talks with Michael Tolkin about The Return of the Player. Related: "The Rapture is not ostensibly a horror film, but I found it deeply frightening, and it is so on a purely conceptual level," shudders Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Booth Moore on noir fashion.

Michiko Kakutani reviews Bruce Wagner's Memorial.

Also in the New York Times:

• Dave Kehr on the re-release of All the King's Men: "It's sad to see Sony treating one of its crown jewels in such a shoddy manner, but the company has not been known for handling its vast library of Columbia films with conspicuous respect." Also, Gojira and Seven Samurai. More on that one from DK Holm at Quick Stop Entertainment.

• The Brave One, due next fall, was shooting in New York this summer, and Charles McGrath watched Jodie Foster "turning into a kind of Travis Bickle."

• Sharon Waxman reports on a course at Arizona State University, "the start of a new program to grant an undergraduate certificate, and eventually a master's degree, in the nascent field the university calls EnterTech - where entertainment meets technology - with the idea of preparing young professionals to work in the warp-speed world of a changing Hollywood."

• AO Scott: "Shot on video and mingling interviews with observations of daily life, Paper Dolls is a modest film, less interested in advocacy or analysis than in sympathy." More from Ella Taylor in the Voice.

• Stephen Holden would like to have seen a little more levity in Saint of 9/11. More from Michael Atkinson (Voice).

• Jeanette Catsoulis: "A Cantor's Tale is more concerned with singing praises than with arguing over orthodoxies." More from Matt Singer (Voice).

• Monica Corcoran with Jason Statham at the Los Angeles Gun Club.

"[P]rior to Marlon Brando and James Dean, no major Hollywood star played the 'obsessed outcast' with 'dark visions' as well as [James] Stewart did," writes David Haglund at Slate. "Stewart had an unmatched ability to project 'vision,' as the scholar Dennis Bingham has written, and his characters frequently see things others can't. This ability can convey madness as well as idealism - and in his best movies, we see just how entwined those two conditions can be."

"[E]ven my Oscar Season picks are pretty genre-intensive," admits Scott Weinberg at Cinematical, highlighting three he's anticipating most. Erik Davis and Jette Kernion pick three each, too.

"This is the story about the little Jeep that dreamed, an Orlando animator who dreamed him up, an industry that's all about dreams, a local studio that sold them - and the nightmares that now haunt them all." And it's told by Scott Powers in the Orlando Sentinel. At Cartoon Brew, Amid Amidi has the trailer for Tugger: The Jeep 4x4 Who Wanted to Fly and a bone to pick with the paper: "I find it odd that the Sentinel decided not to discuss the obvious religious aspect of the scam."

"So, The Wicker Man is, on the whole, an insistence that we are the meaning-makers, that nothing is intrinsic or given. Reach for the Nietzsche," writes Adam E Dobson in a comparison of the original and the remake. Related: Michael Atkinson in the Voice.

"A long-shelved, not-screened-for-critics, high-concept science-fiction comedy that's being released in a handful of cities with all the fanfare of a CIA black-ops mission, Idiocracy gives viewers many reasons to be suspicious," admits Nathan Rabin, who gives the film an "A-" from the AV Club. "There's a good chance that [Mike] Judge's smartly lowbrow Idiocracy will be mistaken for what it's satirizing, but good satire always runs the risk - to borrow a phrase from a poster-boy for the reverse meritocracy - of being misunderestimated." More from Ray Pride at Movie City Indie.

Also: "The AV Club presents our second annual Fall TV preview, a badly researched report on shows we haven't seen. Put it away. Pull it out at the end of the season. You'll see, we were right all along."

The Reeler catches Cocaine Angel.

"Coming armed with a small battery of festival awards, Man Push Cart is a diminutive film, finally—vying for a neorealist vibe, it lacks the Italian history makers' narrative urgency, and the sociopolitical conflict at the heart of the immigration "issue" is hardly engaged," notes Michael Atkinson. Related: Writer and director Ramin Bahrani on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Also in the Voice, Silke Tudor on Monkey Town - dinner and a movie in Williamsburg.

J Robert Parks: "Long-time readers know that I appreciate movies that portray and reveal something about the world we live in, and Half Nelson is one of those." Related: Matt Prigge interviews Ryan Fleck and Shareeka Epps for the Philadelphia Weekly.

Little Miss Sunshine is a "sometimes amusing farce gives me the opportunity to plug a few far greater comedies that it echoes," writes Waggish.

A "signpost film" for MS Smith? Breathless.

"The American Film Institute officially proclaimed Sunday evening something most of us already knew: Singin' in the Rain is the greatest movie musical ever made." Joe Leydon comments.

At Greenbriar Picture Shows, John McElwee looks back on Raoul Walsh's swan song, A Distant Trumpet.

"What is interesting about Living in Oblivion is [Tom] DeCillo's ability to rove between dream and reality without drawing undue attention to himself." Irene Dobson in ArtsEye in 1995 - with postscript that's longer than the review, at Flickhead.

"Scriptwriting in Bollywood is a rather bizarre profession," notes Namrata Joshi in Outlook India. "In the hierarchy of credits, they figure lower than lyricists and singers and are amongst the lowest paid of the 'technicians.' It's also a profession where men have always mattered more.... So are Bhavani [Iyer] and Venita [Coelho] and the half dozen other women now writing Bollywood scripts making any difference, or is it just more of the same?"

There's a twist to the AV Club's latest list: "Is the Devil Good or Evil?"

The Journal of Short Film has issued a call for submissions.

Brian Flemming admits to Anthony Kaufman, over at the Daily Reel, that he's receiving loads of attention due to all the speculation, but no, he is not lonelygirl15.

Dawn C Chmielewski reports on Amazon's and Apple's movie download plans for the LAT.

"Internet video is the new Top Forty radio," argues Mark Netter at the Daily Reel.

Online viewing tip #1. The trailer for Fur, via the IFC Blog, where Alison Willmore's rounded up news on all sorts of up-n-coming films.

Online viewing tip #2. This Iranian American Life. Via Chuck Olsen.

Online viewing tip #3. Ajit Anthony Prem's Blurring Fat.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Alien-themed shorts, hand-picked by Erik Davis at Cinematical.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Clips from Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep.

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2006 11:20 AM