Sunday shorts.

"[W]hen people ask me today where I live, I am often tempted to say instead of Chicago, I live on the Internet," Jonathan Rosenbaum tells Jeremiah Kipp in a terrific, wide-ranging interview for the House Next Door covering past and future writing projects. "That has affected who I am and how I function at least as much and maybe more than my grounding in the 1960s. I also see the Internet as a tool that has allowed me to implement some of my 1960s values."

In the London Review of Books, Michael Wood traces the argument for charity as it evolves throughout the work of Carol Reed.

"Crucially, Linklater withholds the urge to make fun. And that's precisely why Fast Food Nation hurts," writes for the Lumière Reader.

"As capably as an MC Escher study on shifting perspective, the thematic tropes burrow in and out and through each other in Steven Shainberg's Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," writes Michael Guillén. Meanwhile, daughter "Amy Arbus's own work has been enjoying something of a renaissance in recent weeks," and Christopher Turner meets her for the Observer, which has also pulled up Sean O'Hagan's piece on Diane Arbus's work from last year.

Nick Pinkerton grew up in Cincinnati; in Stop Smiling, he writes, "Larry Yust's Homebodies, aside from being an idiosyncratic, unpretentious, slightly dotty, and sharply made suspense film, has the distinction of being the only fully good movie lensed largely within that city of my youth; appropriately, it's a grim little urban ghost story — though one in which the ghosts happen to be not quite dead."

Noirishness is on the minds of the Bright Lights crowd these days. Andrew Grossman examines the question of whether or not Bergman might be considered to have made a few noir films and what that very question implies for a definition of noir, while C Jerry Kutner revisits "the most anti-noir of classic noirs," The Lady From Shanghai.

Speaking of Bergman, in PopMatters, Chadwick Jenkins offers the first part of a piece entitled "The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach's Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman."

According to Anthony Kaufman, writing for indieWIRE, these are the "Sure-Fire Contenders" in the race for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film: "Pedro Almodóvar's Volver (from Spain), Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (Germany), Deepa Mehta's Water (Canada) and Daniele Thompson's Avenue Montaigne (France). Other heavy-hitters that could muscle their way past the first cut include Chinese-director Zhang Yimou's latest martial arts romance The Curse of the Golden Flower, Emanuele Crialese's much-loved Italian entry Golden Door, Paul Verhoeven's Dutch-language WWII romp Black Book, Susanne Bier's Danish drama After the Wedding, and Lee Sang-il's Japanese crowd-pleaser Hula Girls."

Sheila Johnston in the Telegraph: "Alfonso Cuarón admires Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 - and he has gone to exceptional lengths to demonstrate it. 'When I knew my girlfriend was pregnant, my reaction was immediate: "The boy will be called Jonas" [after the French-language original].' Fortunately the mother had seen, and also liked, Cuarón's favorite film."

Bet you weren't expecting this: Martyn Bamber inducts Spielberg's Empire of the Sun into Slant's collection of "100 Essential Films."

Also:

• Ed Gonzalez: Requiem suggests a Dogme facsimile of The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Also, Babel: "After Amores Perros and 21 Grams, you may wonder how many times the director can make the same movie: [Alejandro] González Iñárritu definitely has a sensibility, except its strikingly, almost shockingly one-note." And: Johnnie To's Exiled; Masai: The Rain Warriors; Conventioneers.

• In Robert Altman's California Split, Eric Henderson finds "an anti-buddy parable in which George Segal and Elliott Gould's homosocial behavior is equated unflatteringly against their obsessive gambling addictions."

• Fernando F Croce on Billy Wilder Speaks: "What is surprising, for all of Wilder's puckish volubility, is how slight this series of interviews feels, providing bite-sized movie-buffish info but little insight and even less of the intergenerational portrait and 'aural history of the movie business' promised by interviewer Volker Schlöndorff."

Ella Taylor on Old Joy: "If you must have plot, motive and payoff, Kelly Reichardt's exquisite new film about an ambiguous reunion between two old friends may not be up your alley. See it anyway: It contains the whole world." (More from Dennis Cozzalio). Also in the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas also talks with Phillip Noyce about Catch a Fire. More background on that one from Kristin Hohenadel in the New York Times.

Borat is "hilarious, but how did [Sacha] Baron Cohen get people to participate?" asks Devin Gordon. "Newsweek tracked down many of the unwitting costars. Some are angry, some amused. But to varying degrees, all of them feel foolish." For lighter fits of Borat-mania, turn to Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times and a photo gallery (no, really) at Entertainment Weekly.

Time's Richard Schickel talks with Clint Eastwood about Flags of Our Fathers: "They came back to a million people at Times Square, and climbing these paper mache mountains, all this Hollywood kind of stuff.... The propaganda machine is our subject matter." Related: Michael Koehn has the background story on Letters From Iwo Jima in the LAT.

Also in the LAT, John Horn: "Despite all their obvious differences..., the Nolan brothers [Chris and Jonah] speak with a distinct and unified screenwriting voice. Their collaborations - Memento, Batman Begins and its upcoming sequel, and Friday's The Prestige - have accomplished what few screenwriters and directors manage: They wowed moviegoers and critics simultaneously."

"Hollywood was created by Hungarians (Hungarians will tell you). And it's true their presence was formidable," writes Tibor Fischer. "The second world war changed all that. Hungary took a real pounding. The Nazis. The Holocaust. The Russians. The communists. After the war, only one decent feature film was made, Somewhere in Europe (by Geza Radvanyi, brother of the novelist Sándor Marai and, as he was, forced to emigrate). Then comes a 40-year cloud of propaganda and gloom." Nonetheless, "a spate of films seeking to be the definitive 1956 film" make for an article worth arguing with.

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• Tom Dewe Mathews on blacklisted screenwriters. Related: Christopher Reed remembers Roy Brewer, 1909 - 2006.

• Alex Bellos sees a "burgeoning number" of British "micro-budget" indies - and more than a few are drawing top notch stars to their cast.

• Gaby Wood: "Composed of multiple strands and travelling shots reminiscent of an early Robert Altman movie, Bobby is equally indebted to Irwin Allen, whose The Towering Inferno had a comparably confined setting and all-star cast."

• Mark Kermode on Wah-Wah: "Anyone who read Richard E Grant's ripping film diaries With Nails will already know that the actor is a dab-hand at the typewriter. In this semi-autobiographical feature, inspired by his childhood in colonial Swaziland, the vivacious film star also proves his mettle behind the camera, directing an engagingly offbeat tale of ordinary British madness."

• Gareth McLean interviews Liza Minnelli, Aida Edemariam talks with Jim Broadbent, Harriet Lane interviews James McAvoy and Miranda Sawyer meets Catherine Tate.

• Michael Palin has released Diaries 1969 - 1979: The Monty Python Years, and would you believe this book weighs in at nearly 700 pages. And yet, writes Anthony Holden, "There is little here... of much interest to anyone but Palin- and Python-freaks."

• Ronald Bergan again, this time remembering British beauty Sally Gray, 1916 - 2006.

Dylan Hicks in the City Pages: "Sweet Land, an independent film from first-time feature-maker Ali Selim, has been a 16-year labor of love for the St Paul-based director, so perhaps it can't be credited with punctuality. It is, however, both timeless and timely."

David Gritten talks with Andrea Arnold about Red Road.

For Deutsche Welle, Rachel Ryan asks director Madhusree Dutta about how Bollywood squelching other genres in India.

Chris Sullivan has a career-spanning talk with Ridley Scott for the London Times, where Jasper Rees interviews Samantha Morton.

Ben Walters interviews Christine Vachon for Time Out.

Up-n-coming:

• An adaptation of Donna Woolfolk Cross's bestselling Pope Joan has long been in the works, and now Constantin Film, the production company behind Tom Tykwer's Perfume, has announced that the lead's been cast: Franka Potente will play the legendary (emphasis on legendary) female pope who supposedly reigned for three years in the mid-9th century. Volker Schlöndorff will direct; shooting starts in May 2007.

• "[T]he girls of St Trinian's are making a comeback. The classic boarding school capers of the 1950s and 1960s are to be updated for this less innocent age." In the Independent, Guy Adams reports that a series of films many outside Britain might not be familiar with is to be revived; the films will feature Rupert Everett.

• Robert Altman's next: an adaptation of Hands on a Hard Body: A Documentary.

• "Brad Pitt is to star as a crusading journalist in a film version of the BBC mini-series State of Play."

• I Slept With Joey Ramone.

"If The Departed had any hope of being a really sharp and successful - albeit blithely soulless - entertainment, it should have been helmed by some supremely skillful hack like Tony Scott," suggests Geoffrey Cheshire in the Indepedent Weekly. "With Scorsese at the controls, we get a movie that falls between the barstools - not really a Scorsese film, yet not a lean, mean, brutally efficient thrill machine either." More in Vue Weekly from Paul Matwychuk and Brian Gibson. The film is in the crossfire of another duel at Reverse Shot. "Shot": Justin Stewart; "Reverse Shot": Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega. As with many other reviewers, the film calls the work of another director to the mind of Matt Riviera: "Lighter in tone than Michael Mann's brooding thrillers, The Departed shares many similarities with Heat, a tragedy featuring men pitted against one another in a world where women are either accessories or liabilities."

In the NYT:

• "Nearly 25 years ago the documentary Style Wars, directed by Tony Silver, helped make the nascent graffiti movement a subject of fascination around the world," writes ST VanAirsdale. "And now a fresh crop of movies about graffiti culture, including Infamy and the fiction feature Quality of Life, are attracting audiences with intense, moody depictions of street art in action. Meanwhile do-it-yourself franchises like Videograf have enjoyed a DVD revival since their heyday in the early 90s, introducing 'bombers' and other outlaw artists to an international audience."

• Charles Solomon on the troubles of Goro Miyazaki. His animated feature debut, Gedo Senki (Tales From Earthsea) is a hit in Japan, but neither his father, Hayao, of course, nor Ursula K Le Guin, who wrote the story on which the film is based 40 years ago, approve of his work - which, to top it off, might not see US distribution for years to come.

• Dave Kehr greets a new line of DVDs from cinefilipino.

• Ross Johnson meets Jack Black to talk about the upcoming Tenacious D in 'The Pick of Destiny', a film "highlighting once again the risks, and potential rewards, of that Hollywood perennial, the passion project."

• Stephen Holden on Driving Lessons: "The screwball aging diva genre isn't the only formula guiding this stubbornly old-fashioned movie. Driving Lessons belongs to the silly feel-good mode of The Full Monty, Calendar Girls, Billy Elliot, Kinky Boots and dozens of other celebrations of Britons defying convention to become free, whatever that means. Since any connections between Driving Lessons and the real world are tangential at best, it's a faux liberation: the easiest kind." Related: Interviews with Julie Walters from Emine Saner in the Guardian and Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

• AO Scott: "In a pre-election season full of drama, contention and surprise, Man of the Year arrives on the scene with the blistering impact of a spoonful of cold mashed potatoes." Related: Mary McNamara talks with Barry Levinson and Robin Williams for the LAT.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "A novel teenage comedy with an astute understanding of adolescent sexual confusion and the nebulous nature of desire, Zerophilia suggests an elastic view of gender that's alternately gleeful and terrifying."

• Lynn Hirschberg meets Annette Bening for the Magazine; Sofia Sanchez and Maruo Mongiello snap shots. Related: Bening talks with Newsweek's Sean Smith and Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "Punishingly snide and unfunny, Running With Scissors, the story of a pubescent queer boy sent to live at a zany psychologist's house after his parents divorce and his mother goes nuts, is a hissy fit of gargantuan self-involvement."

• "It is a neat coincidence — perhaps a wrapping up of things by the fates — that YouTube had its big payday exactly half a century after it was found that a sequence of action could be documented cheaply and easily, viewed immediately, disseminated widely and replayed endlessly." David Hajdu has an amazing story about Jonathan Winters and the first uses of videotape; I hadn't known about that. Anyway, related: Richard Siklos on Google's purchase.

• The sleeper hit is the sort of phenomenon "disappearing from a business where marketing has become increasingly sophisticated and Internet buzz quite deafening," writes Stephen Farber.

• Sharon Waxman reports on an innovation that "could usher in radical change in the making of entertainment. A tool to reinvigorate the movies. Or the path to a Franken-movie monster. The Image Metrics software lets a computer map an actor's performance onto any character virtual or human, living or dead."

• Campbell Robertson: "The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard's sweeping three-part epic that will be populating Lincoln Center for the next six months, contains, among other things: 35 years of 19th-century Russian intellectual history; more than 70 roles; discussions of Hegel, Schelling, Pushkin and Kant; adulterous affairs, both secret and permitted; the revolution of 1848; scenes in Moscow, Paris, Nice, London, under a large chandelier, at a picnic, beside an ice skating rink."

• Caryn James: "No one understood or manipulated her own celebrity better than Diana, whose cultural legacy — transforming royals into pop stars — is the template for two new films, The Queen and Marie Antoinette, and a boomlet of lesser works about royals."

Armond White in the New York Press on The Last King of Scotland: "To single-out [Forest] Whitaker's Idi merely justifies the black stereotyping that Whitaker had avoided ever since his breakthrough in Clint Eastwood's 1988 Charlie Parker biographer, Bird."

David Lowery: "The Science of Sleep is a deceptive bit of whimsy; it often feels light as a feather, but has undercurrents which run deeper and darker than the romantic melancholy which made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so affecting." More from Jeffrey Overstreet.

Writing at the WSWS, Paul Bond has two questions about The Wind That Shakes the Barley: "to what extent is [Ken] Loach's film-making artistically successful, and to what extent are the historical-political positions he advances tenable?"

Amir Motlagh on Date Number One: "The film is very specific to its location, and its quirks and ticks represent the feelings and moods of the particular area, which I find almost exclusively missing from Hollywood films... There is only a positive through line in this film, and that is rare to see, especially when dealing with characters in their late to early thirties."

David Austin calls La Moglie Più Bella (The Most Beautiful Wife) "one of NoShame's best releases so far" - "engaging from start to finish, and never falls into the trap of the dull 'message picture.'"

Ray Young at Flickhead: "Rarely do I find much of interest in the ghetto of DVD bonus material, but with New Yorker Video's new edition of Mai Zetterling's The Girls (Flickorna, 1968), we've been rewarded with Christina Olofson's Lines from the Heart (I rollerna tre, 1996), a joyful celebration of these three exceptional Swedish actresses [Gunnel Lindblom, Harriet Andersson and Bibi Andersson], of Zetterling's picture, of Zetterling herself, and that spark of creative genius or madness that compels the artistic soul."

The latest Stop Smiling DVD roundup: Seduced and Abandoned, The Loved One, On the Edge: The Femicide in Ciudad Juarez and Jigoku.

Tim Lucas is mad about Ladislas Starewitch.

The "intersection of the divine and carnal" is the primary concern of Godard's Hail Mary, writes Steve Erickson at Nerve. More from Fernando F Croce in Slant and from Joe Bowman.

The Otolith Group lists "some of the films that inspire and provoke us" for Frieze.

To the AP's David Germain's list of the dozen best WWII movies, Joe Leydon adds Guadalcanal Diary.

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker on the next generation DVD standards wars: "The most important rule is that, as the economist Hal Varian says, 'the product that people expect to win will win.'"

Online browsing tip. "Hollywood may be panicking over its business prospects these days, but New York film hasn't felt this robust in years," writes Logan Hill, introducing a slide show highlighting films shot in NYC for New York.

Online listening tip. RU Sirius interviews Neil Gaiman. Via Waxy.org.

Online viewing tip #1. "Fast Film (2003) by Virgil Widrich is one of those films that reminds me why I love animation in the first place: it's a medium in which you can literally do anything you want," writes Amid at Cartoon Brew (click his name).

Online viewing tip #2. The trailer for Grindhouse.

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2006 6:55 AM