Shorts, 9/22.

"[Lars] Von Trier being Von Trier, The Boss of It All has one very perverse twist: it was made without a cameraman." Geoffrey Macnab explains: "The director was using a new process, 'developed with the intention of limiting human influence,' which he has called Automavision. This entails choosing the best possible fixed camera position and then allowing a computer to choose when to tilt, pan or zoom." Not only is the new film a comedy, he's written another: Erik Nietzsche: The Early Years.

Also in the Guardian:

• Peter Bradshaw on the "explosively violent future-nightmare thriller," Children of Men: "[D]espite the stylisations and grandiloquent drama, there is something just so grimly and grittily plausible about the awful world conjured up here, and the full-on urban warfare scenes really are electrifying." More from Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman, where he finds it "makes silly errors in its treatment of non-English-speaking cultures... It's a disappointing oversight in a film that has much to recommend it, not least the proof it offers, as if any more were needed, that Alfonso Cuarón is one of the most visually inspired directors working today." And: Tim Robey's intriguingly mixed review in the Telegraph, Anthony Quinn in the Independent and James Christopher in the London Times. And Time Out gets Cuarón talking about the film.

• "To conquer racism in the present, we first need to admit its absolute cultural primacy and acceptability in the past." John Patterson argues against revisionist histories of cinema.

• "Blacking up has become acceptable in the same way that pole dancing is now sold to women as an empowering thing to do," fumes Hannah Pool; also, Patrick Barkham on the history of blackface.

• The editors remember Paul Robeson.

• Richard Williams on Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait: "[I]f their film tell us nothing about football, at least [Douglas] Gordon and [Philippe] Parreno give us a compelling study of the stillness that erupted into an historic crime passionel."

• Michael Hann talks with Cory Edwards about the unique animation process that resulted in Hoodwinked.

Signandsight translates a passage from Volker Hummel's talk with Jia Zhangke about Still Life for die taz: "Above all [the censors] didn't like the fact that the words 'Three Gorges' occur in the title ('Sanxia Haoren' means 'The good People of the Three Gorges' - ed). But when I asked what they had against the film taking place there, they didn't say. So the title remained. They also wanted to change one scene in a factory. Huge portraits of Marx, Lenin and Mao hung on the wall, and they wanted them to be cut because they suspected an ironic undertone. This shows how clueless the people in the censorship authority are about film. That they're just plain old party cadres. When I said I'd found the portraits there and asked if the three men were now frowned upon politically, the scenes were allowed."

"So I came in the next day and Jack's hair was all over the place. He was muttering to himself and the prop guy tipped me off that he had a fire extinguisher, a bottle of whisky, some matches and a handgun somewhere." That's Leonardo DiCaprio, telling one of several stories John Hiscock gathers for the Telegraph about the making of The Departed.

Erik Hedegaard has an odd conversation with Nicholson for the cover of the Rolling Stone.

The Bicycle Thief tops DiCaprio's annotated list of top ten film of all time.

Also in the Independent:

• James Mottram: "[W]hat is remarkable about The Long Good Friday is just how fresh it remains. It's also prophetic. Set on the cusp of the 80s, as [Bob] Hoskins puts it, 'What was extraordinary about it was that we were just on the verge of Thatcherism. It hit the nail so firmly on the head, of where the 80s were gonna go.'"

• Andrew Gumbel profiles George Clooney.

• Arnold Schwarzenegger on the agreement California has signed with the UK to tackle global warming.

• An excerpt from Ashley Judd's diary: "Today I have begun to see beyond Madagascar's physical beauty and into its extraordinary poverty."

• Lesley O'Toole interviews Adam Sandler.

Gary Oldman has quite a bit to say about Nil By Mouth in Time Out, where Dave Calhoun talks with Lodge Kerrigan about Keane.

"With stories ranging from 15th-century Central America to 18th-century France, from the early 20th century to World War I, World War II, post–World War II, the early Cold War, and the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, filmmakers seem to be turning their gaze from the present day. Who can blame them for not wanting to get involved in its ongoing confusion, controversy, chaos, and fear?" asks Peter Keough in his preview of the fall movie season for the Boston Phoenix.

"A big, booming spectacle that sprawls across oceans and generations, Flags of Our Fathers, which opens on Oct 20, was anything but a simple undertaking," reports David M Halbfinger, who maps the network of players involved, some of them competitors, with this one and Letters From Iwo Jima. But also:

Above all it is a study of the callous ways in which heroes are created for public consumption, used and discarded, all with the news media's willing cooperation. And it is imbued with enough of a critique of American politicians and military brass to invite suspicions that Hollywood is appropriating the iconography of World War II to score contemporary political points. Yet just when it verges on indicting the people responsible for exploiting the troops, the movie comes round to their point of view.

Also in the New York Times:

• AO Scott on All the King's Men: "Nothing in the picture works." Related: In the LA Weekly, Ella Taylor explains why Steven Zaillian is the wrong director for an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's novel; in the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keough talks with Zaillian and pans the film. More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

• Stephen Holden on American Hardcore, "a toned-down cinematic equivalent of the music: fast and loud, but not too loud." Also, Kelefa Sanneh: "Whereas punks sneered at a broader society, hardcore kids grappled with a narrower one." Related: Though he was "more Sonic Youth than Black Flag" at the time, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir is "profoundly grateful for this film." More from Eric Kohn in the New York Press. Also: indieWIRE's interview with director Paul Rachman.

• Holden on "the riveting documentary" Jesus Camp: "It wasn't so long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong's Red Guards, turned the world's most populous country inside out. Nowadays the possibility of a right-wing Christian American version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely far-fetched." More from Andrew O'Hehir at Salon, Gary Dretzka at Movie City News and Pete Aleska at Blank Screen.

• Nathan Lee on Jackass Number Two: "It is also too exhilarating to spoil. Debased, infantile and reckless in the extreme, this compendium of body bravado and malfunction makes for some of the most fearless, liberated and cathartic comedy in modern movies." More from Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

• Holden on Renaissance: "Effectively moody as it is, the style makes a convoluted story of corporate greed, high-tech espionage and science run amok even more difficult to follow. This is a plot that goes on as many tangents and wild goose chases as The Big Sleep."

• Lee: "Despite its empty head and arduous length, Flyboys is ever so nice, in the manner of a Norman Rockwell illustration.... In another context, such politesse might feel tonic. Given the state of things, it's nearly toxic."

• Lee finds that Nathan Lopez's "effortless charisma buoys [The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros] even when it goes heavy with contrivance."

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Train Man wants us to get off our computers and get out of the house; in a country as technocentric as Japan, the suggestion that it may be time to replace the cyber with the real is not just subversive, it's downright revolutionary."

• Catsoulis: "Few things in a democracy are more sacrosanct than the right to vote, and in his furious documentary American Blackout, Ian Inaba assembles compelling evidence to support his claim that African-Americans - who are traditionally more likely to vote Democratic - are being deliberately and systematically excluded from the political process."

• Neil Genzlinger dismisses Los Lonely Boys: Cottonfields and Crossroads as "a prolonged promotional video."

• Laura Kern: "A boxing tale, an interracial love story and a prison/mob drama devoid of suspense, spark or grit, the ambitiously genre-crossing yet disastrously executed They're Just My Friends is hands down the most excruciatingly inept film to creep its way into theaters in some time."

"My entry into Paolo Gioli's sublime cinema was through the infectiously exuberant, ingeniously constructed, and irresistibly seductive Filmarilyn, an elegant and mesmerizing film that remains one of my favorite experimental works." Acquarello reviews the entries in the Giolo program at the New York Film Festival's Views from the Avant-Garde sidebar. October 8.

Marie Antoinette gets a "B+" from Nick Schager. Also, at Slant, Syndromes and a Century "boasts an unanticipated measure of droll, deadpan humor... Nonetheless, it's the film's belief in the act of remembering as essential and ongoing that remains its most enduring and poignant characteristic."

According to Monkey Peaches, early reviews of Curse of the Golden Flower in Beijing are quite positive.

"Emerging Bosnian filmmaker Danijela Majstorovic addresses this crisis of women's lives - and the troubling lack of choices - in two films which premiered at the Bosnia-Herzegovinian Film Festival in New York City." Danielle Jackson talks with her for PopMatters.

"A Hollywood movie being shot in Bosnia about the hunt for a genocide suspect tries to ask the wider question of why wanted men like Radovan Karadzic and Osama bin Laden are still free, its director said on Wednesday." Nedim Dervisbegovic reports for Reuters on Flak Jacket, directed by Richard Shepard and starring Richard Gere.

"You Kill Me leads to what I have always thought about [John] Dahl," writes Steve Ramos about the mob comedy due next year. "He consistently makes the opportunity for one more triumph."

Don R Lewis interviews Joe Swanberg for Film Threat. Also, Eric Campos recommends Chalk, a mockumentary based on the idea of explaining why so many high school teachers - 50 percent? - call it quits within three years.

Jennifer Merin talks with writer-director Frank E Flowers about his first feature, Haven. Also in the New York Press, Mark Peikert finds Keeping Mum "much darker than the usual Brit comedy exports."

In Half Nelson, Ryan Gosling plays "the most believable protagonist in any American movie I've seen this year," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. More from David Fellerath in the Independent Weekly.

"Volver does not rely on mystery to sustain our interest," writes Vincent Deary in the Times Literary Supplement. "Rather, it provides an intensely compelling, rich and mythic vision of women." Related: Jeff Reichert on Law of Desire at Reverse Shot.

Though he's seen it three times and will likely see it again, Arthur C Danto explains his frustration with Ric Burns's Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film in the Nation: "[T]he breakthrough period of creative genius, (1961-65)... That period was really the 'Exploding Plastic Inevitable,' to use Warhol's name for his famous East Village nightclub - a condensed renaissance in which contemporary art was invented and the history of Western art up to that point definitively ended - and it calls for an equally innovative cinematic format."

Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "Aside from appreciating the film's love for Gotham, Shortbus is one of the most optimistic films discussing - not simply depicting - sex and relationships that I have seen in some time."

"As the talkies and the Depression hit Hollywood practically simultaneously, an old vaudeville trouper named Marie Dressler found the greatest success of her spotty career. Large, rumbly and rubber-faced, able to pile triple-take onto double-take, Dressler was a queen of schtick who was also able to create a disciplined sort of deep-seated pathos." Dan Callahan surveys a career at the House Next Door.

"Does anyone else share my longstanding affection for this show?" John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows on David O Selznick's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

"1956's Street of Shame, which was to be [Kenji Mizoguchi's] last film, will seem a curious work for those viewers only familiar with more majestic films like Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff," writes Leo Goldsmith at Reverse Shot.

Peter Nellhaus: "While The Quiet Duel can be categorized with Kurosawa's other socially concerned films, looking beyond the narrative is a critique of Japanese manners, especially the custom of indirectly addressing a concern in conversation, as well as the misplaced sense of shame."

Tim Lucas on The Man Who Changed His Mind: "The most surprising aspect of this mind-boggling melodrama is its keen and immediately apparent sense of fun."

Jim Emerson explains why he feels "the most exciting place for film criticism, and an informed film community, these days is on certain Internet blogs - where each individual blogger can write in detail (with digressions and tangents into other areas of related knowledge) - but that is just the beginning of the conversation, since others can post comments, continue the discussion, and elaborate upon the original post. The blogger also has the opportunity to clarify, refine, and move the discussion into a fruitful direction."

Chris Cagle recommends Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors, "a fun and thought-provoking read.... [James] Morrison is interested in reading larger socio-cultural formations (high culture, the art film, modernism) in certain key films, which if not representative moments are at least moments pregnant with significance."

C Jerry Kutner offers a "Brief History of Noir" at Bright Lights After Dark.

Eric D Snider presents a list of his top 50 films of the last ten years.

Andrew Krucoff has a few questions for Sydney Pollack about LA for the 92Y Blog.

European-films.net is tracking European submissions to the Academy as they're announced.

Online viewing tip. The dance of the ghosts sequence from Satyajit Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne at TickleBooth.

Online viewing tips. The Flash Animation 10, the most influential online Flash animation shorts, compiled by Aaron Simpson, with commentary, interviews, the works. Via Cartoon Brew.

Posted by dwhudson at September 22, 2006 11:55 AM