Shorts, 10/2.

New York's David Edelstein has praise all around for the cast of The Departed. What's more, "William Monahan's dialogue is Mamet-speak played at Alvin and the Chipmunks speed with a broad Boston accent. While characters spit yahmuthahfuckedme expletives into one another's faces (along with peculiar citations of Shakespeare, Freud, and James Joyce), Scorsese and his fab house editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, drive the action brusquely." All that said, this is a 2½-hour film: "Classical conductors speak of the ability to 'sustain the long line' - to stay measured, to resist the impulse to break a passage up into too many climaxes. Scorsese, brilliant as he is, isn't a long-line kind of guy."

Dan Callahan: "This rather unnerving opening is emblematic of Infamous as a whole: it's risky, emotionally raw, maybe not entirely successful, but always searching and intuitive." Also in Slant, Robert Keser: "Given that screenwriter Shawn Slovo's white parents both played pivotal roles in the national struggle," Catch a Fire ought to do just what the title suggests. Keser suggests it doesn't. "Why does her script fail to dramatize the emotional grit of a father's heady decision to abandon his family for exile at military training camps in Mozambique and Angola?"

"Godard has made a career out of donning a staggering variety of masks: from existentialist raconteur in the early 1960s and anti-imperialist provocateur in the late 60s to Maoist radical in the 1970s to his 'return to form' in the early 1980s, and onward to the increasingly gnarled, self-referential, and autobiographical filmmaker of the 1990s. Not all masks have been equal." In Slate, Saul Austerlitz argues that Hail Mary (1985) was Godard's last great film. "[T]he thrill of Godard is gone, long since replaced by moody musings and willful obscurantism." This leads to a set of criteria that make for a good movie; unfortunately, they shut out the essay film.

"Everything in The Science of Sleep cuts against the sleek, cyborgian look that is now the cliche of contemporary culture at its most supposedly forward-looking and innovative; but also against the distancing nostalgia that has been the unchanging look of dystopian speculation for almost a quarter century now (ever since Blade Runner)," writes Steven Shaviro. "Gondry creates a new look, which isn't the future, any more than it is the past - it's rather a kind of displacement-in-place - can I say a displacement-in-time-in place? - a rupturing of the present, something that tears apart the present moment, multiplies it within itself, yet without pushing it either towards an impending future-as-potentiality or a hauntological past. In this way, The Science of Sleep is sort of the flip side, or the riposte and counter-statement to, the deeply hauntological Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)."

Related online viewing via Coudal Partners: Buzz Image creates the seamless effects for Eternal Sunshine. And just plain related: Kathy Fennessy winds up her interview with Gondry for the Siffblog.

For the WSWS, Richard Phillips talks with Vimukthi Jayasundara, whose The Forsaken Land, "set in rural Sri Lanka following the 2002 ceasefire of the 20-year ethnic war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)," won a Camera d'Or at Cannes.

Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the New Republic, is impressed with the subject of Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner: "He talks about current politics and its stench, but mostly about ways to live and choose.... Always he is briskly articulate (the Taliban are 'theocratic thugs') and irrepressibly genuine. What especially distinguishes his talks is their transmuted anger; the loathing of what he sees around him is transformed into concern for other people. And below that concern is a fear of despair."

More from Robert Cashill: "The inescapable flaw with Wrestling With Angels is that filming ended a year too soon. I wanted to hear from Kushner on Katrina, not to mention the 2004 election; we see him at the polling stations but there's no followup on the crushing day after. And his script for Steven Spielberg's Munich was a lightning rod for controversy on the left and the right."

MS Smith: "Whatever ingenuity the film's plot might lack, it proceeds with such delicacy and just enough detachment to make it involving. In Clean, tone is everything."

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Adam Balz revisits James Whale's The Old Dark House: "[W]hile Frankenstein will undoubtedly stand as his crowning achievement, it's this short, overlooked gem that created its own subgenre and a niche for those who followed."

John Lahr profiles Helen Mirren for the New Yorker.

For In Focus, Mike Russell has a fun talk with Christopher Nolan about recent, current and future projects.

SF360's Susan Gerhard talks with John Cameron Mitchell about Shortbus. Related: Robert Cashill's review. Related online listening: The Reeler's talk with the director.

"Home for the Holidays is a tottering but strangely durable object, just like the Larson family it chronicles," writes Nick Davis. "The Time Out Film Guide dismisses Home as 'a modest film (in every sense),' but I take exception on two grounds: that the film's modesty is just as much a credit as a demerit, and that the structural detours, lopsided gags, and vastly disparate tones in this film are often quite immodest."

The Onyx Project, about a colonel on an unauthorized mission to Afghanistan, seems to be a pretty interesting indie for two reasons. First, it's got David Strathairn as its star. And second, it's interactive. That is, it's a straight-to-DVD release because it's no ordinary DVD. You can guide the storyline or even click shuffle. Richard Siklos has more.

Also in the New York Times, Michael White reports on what the good people of Margate, a town of around 60K on the southern coast of England, were up to this weekend. Evidently, they reenacted Exodus "in modern terms with a cast of several thousand local people, a phalanx of film crews and assorted news media and cultural celebrities to help out with the locusts, flies and lice."

In the Independent, David Thomson remembers Roy M Brewer, "probably the second most important trade-unionist in the history of Hollywood" and mentor to Ronald Reagan: "As much as anyone, he created the cold climate of those days [the late 40s and early 50s] and set the example - still there for nervous souls - that the US is not the country in which you want to go against the grain."

Belinda Olas picks a few favorites from notstarring.com, which "lists the famous film roles that might have been cast very differently. Emma Thompson in Silence of the Lambs anyone?" Also in the Guardian, a Turner Prize 2006 slide show; and editors celebrate the 80th birthday of a terrific writer, Jan Morris.

"But if you had to mention just one of his 400 movie and TV roles, you'd name Scarface with Al Pacino." Peter Larsen profiles Pepe Serna for the Orange County Register, highlighting film being discussed even now by Ian P and k-punk.

Kristin Thomson has been working on her next book, The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, and "there’s suddenly a lot of updating that needs to be done."

At the House Next Door, Andrew Dignan explores the implications of the fact that, before the novelty wore off, Project Greenlight made for better TV than movies.

"Focus on Hastert," advises Alec Baldwin in the Huffington Post.

Online browsing tip. New Yorkers, even if only temporarily, at home in New York, introduced by Amanda Fortini.

Online viewing tip. Time Out's got a clip from The History Boys.

Online viewing tips. Rex Sorgatz points to some "totally good and totally new music videos."

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2006 4:49 PM