Shorts, 10/17.

Reverse Shot's cnw does an fine job of spelling out what's so sadly legible between the lines of the Voice's call for a new film editor. ST VanAirsdale piles on.

With or without a film editor, this week's issue is out, and J Hoberman's got an interesting pairing: Aguirre, Wrath of God, "not just a great movie but an essential one," and another jungle story, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, which is "both the death rattle of 60s utopianism and - predicated on the desire to found a New Jerusalem in the wilderness - a very American saga." In between, mention is made of Werner Herzog's "longtime champion, former Voice critic Mike Atkinson." Klaus Kinski, by the way, would have been 80 tomorrow; Jochen Förster marks the occasion in the Berliner Morgenpost (and in German).

The rest of the reviews are written by people from all over the country. Scott Foundas's LA Weekly review of Flags of Our Fathers, for example, appears two days earlier than it will in print on the west coast. It's not difficult to imagine all Village Voice Media titles being, in the relatively near future, identical in the middle with local wraparounds (local stories in the front, local classifieds in the back). And of course, being published on the same day. The story of the alternative weekly is a chapter in American media history coming to a close faster than most of us imagined it would, but as Jonathan Rosenbaum and many others have suggested, the hole it leaves is being filled just as quickly - online.

At any rate, the movie: "To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western - a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains." In short, it's "one of his best films - a searching, morally complex deconstruction of the Greatest Generation that is nevertheless rich in the sensitivity to human frailty that has become his signature as a filmmaker." But for Slant's Nick Schager, this is one "creaky history-class lecture" bearing here and there, as he sees it, "[Paul] Haggis's Crash fingerprints."

Back to Scott Foundas: "[W]here most stories that are this narratively sliced and diced leave you wishing they'd simply been laid out from A to Z, you don't long to see [Christopher] Nolan's Möbius strip movies any other way.... The Prestige, filmed with a minimum of digital chicanery, is at once a lament for the loss of the manual and analog and an awestruck marveling at the possibilities of electricity and mechanization." Back to Nick Schager: "[C]cinema's most compelling trick isn't simply superficial deception, but the ability to elicit emotional engagement in something that's inherently artificial - a feat The Prestige, for all its razzle-dazzle duplicity, never pulls off."

Besides the "Tracking Shots," what's left in the Voice is Rob Nelson's review of Running With Scissors: "[T]one is everything in a dark-comic farce, and [Ryan] Murphy pulls it off. Like the book, this deadpan celebration of neurosis makes a valiant effort to repress its comedy - which of course makes it funnier."

"Here's my nomination for best film composer of all time," announces Jan Swafford in Slate. He takes a while getting there, but it's such a fine tour, I won't tell you who it is. Start from the top.

At Midnight Eye, Nicholas Rucka talks with Takashi Yamazaki about "his first non-science fiction film to date - and coincidentally his most popular and critically successful work," Always: Sunset on Third Street.

IFC News has redesigned its site and currently features Aaron Hillis's interview with Terry Gilliam.

Recently up at cinetext: Joerg Sternagel's two pieces on acting, "Sensations of a Breakthrough Performance: Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line" and "Weight Watching: Method Acting as a Label and Subtext in The Machinist"; and Daniel Garrett offers "A reading of Elizabethtown: Ruining plans; reconciling aesthetics and life."

David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back: "Exiled is not a true sequel to Johnnie To's 1999 fan favorite, The Mission, but it is a follow-up in spirit."

Sean Uyehara at SF360: "With only two issues under its belt, Wholphin is already making itself known as an eclectic collection of works you've always wanted to see, but were never sure how to find."

Stories going round and round and round: what's next for Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese.

At Cineuropa, Camillo de Marco explains how legislative reforms, "inspired by the so-called 'French model,'" might be good news Italian cinema.

Online browsing tip. "Haunted When It Rains," Victorian post-mortem photography (à la The Others), via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Posted by dwhudson at October 17, 2006 3:54 PM