Weekend shorts.

"He is a lovely man, but a gruelling interview." Evidently, but Terence Davies's rants do make for a highly entertaining read. "You're up against people who know nothing, who have done a media degree or, worst of all, have done the Robert McKee lectures."

"Why is that worst of all?" asks Simon Hattenstone (probably while ducking). "Because they've done a great deal of damage. Who can turn round and say it's good to have a climax on page six? Who said so? Robert McKee, and his theories are based on Casablanca, which was being written as it was being shot. So you're up against that level of philistinism. It beggars belief."

The man may or may not be a pain, but his films are unique and vital experiences and it is an all but literal crime that he hasn't been able to get a film off the ground in six years.

Also in the Guardian:

• "All the King's Men, as one early reviewer noted, posed the question of the age: 'Can the man of ideas work with the dictator in the interests of historic change?'" J Hoberman tells the eventful story behind the first adaptation: "[Robert] Rossen's All the King's Men makes no specific references to Louisiana or even the south. But in its combination of rough populist politics, orchestrated hoopla and a hypnotised electorate, the movie comes closer than any other in imagining a fascist America."

• "You think the plot revolves around Iraq or the culture of corruption or the botched response to Katrina, and then - poof! - it turns out that the Republican Congressional majority achieved in 1994 by Newt Gingrich will now be swept away not for all its real and quantifiable sins, but because of some minor elected representative feeling up the Congressional page boys," writes John Patterson. "The Mark Foley scandal sends me back to the first bona fide Washington DC bestseller, Allen Drury's Advise and Consent, published in 1957 and filmed, very well indeed, by Otto Preminger in 1962." He's also reminded of "Gore Vidal's political melodrama, The Best Man, made in 1964, in which Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson vie for the presidential nomination." Also: "It's time to persuade humorless actors like the ones listed below that they have no place in the serious realm of comedy."

• "From making one or two feature films a year throughout the 1990s, Colombia has almost 70 on recent release or in the pipeline," reports Maya Jaggi. "After decades of civil war involving the army, paramilitaries and guerrilla groups, the military 'solution' pushed by President Alvaro Uribe has made the cities, and main corridors, safer."

• Peter Bradshaw on I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed: "Serge Le Péron's 60s-set Paris movie has something of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Rivette: a tale of paranoia and conspiracy which is an intriguing essay in the secret history of films."

• "For more than 30 years, Danièlle Huillet, who has died aged 70, and her husband, Jean Marie Straub, worked as an indivisible entity, directing, writing and editing some of the most personal, rigorous, challenging and ultimately rewarding films in cinema history," writes Ronald Bergan. "Their films resembled no others. Now, with Huillet's death, we will probably not see anything like them again." Earlier: "Danièle Huillet, 1936 - 2006."

• Paul Arendt explains why screenwriters love architects.

• Mark Brown profiles Tim Curry.

• Eva Wiseman finds some fun trailer mashups.

Christopher Frizzelle unveils the "2006 Stranger Genius Awards." One of them's going to James Longley, and Annie Wagner writes up the profile - and the Film Shortlist.

Debating the auteur theory is one thing, but the tiff between Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga "is shaping up as something more like one of those ugly, acrimonious rock-band breakups. Or a dogfight," writes Terrence Rafferty. "[T]his particular snarlfest seems more interesting than most because it might actually illuminate something about the mysterious (and terribly fragile) nature of collaboration in the movies."

Also in the New York Times:

• Randy Kennedy has a piece on the influence of Jerome Liebling on "a generation of nonfiction filmmakers - what [Ken] Burns describes as 'all of us coming within Jerry's radiational sphere," including "Roger Sherman, Kirk Simon, Karen Goodman and Amy Stechler, who have several Emmys and Academy Award nominations among them. Sometimes called the Hampshire Mafia, they all attended Hampshire, the experimental college in Amherst, Mass, which has produced an unusual number of successful filmmakers and photographers." And Burns has a solemn video tribute.

• Roberta Smith on Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, at the Brooklyn Museum through January 21: "In the show's introductory wall text, Ms Leibovitz is quoted as saying: 'I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.' But saying it doesn't make it so. This exhibition ends up refuting the premise on which it seems to be built: that an artist's life is as interesting — or in the end, even as personal - as her best work."

• James R Oestreich on Bruno Monsaingeon's Glenn Gould: Hereafter: "The film will carry you deep inside Mr Gould's musical mind: an awesome place to be, and not always a comfortable one."

• In a terrific backgrounder on Absolute Wilson, Sylviane Gold talks to both the subject, Robert Wilson, and the director: "[Katharina] Otto-Bernstein was a Wilson fan, but not by any means a scholar. And she thinks a lot of the intellectual constructs that have been proffered to explain his work are, well, hooey. 'The missing link between Dada and contemporary, the continuation of Artaud, the Wieland Wagner of the present time, tra-la-li, tra-la-lo,' she says. 'I think a lot of things were happenstance. Jacques Derrida was working with the deconstruction of language. I'm sure Bob was aware of it. But he didn't go, "Oh, deconstruction of language - let's put that on the stage."'"

• Mark Russell talks with Daniel Gordon about his third documentary about North Korea. This one, Crossing the Line focuses on four American soldiers who defected to the North decades ago: "Three of the four... came from broken homes, with missing or abusive fathers. They made homes in the most extreme totalitarian state in the world, where Kim Il-sung is portrayed at the ultimate father figure for the entire nation."

• Dennis Lim on The Bridge, Exit and a few others: "To varying degrees, these films grapple with heightened versions of a question that vexes all filmmakers, not least documentarians: What are the limits of what can be filmed and shown? They point to a new development that not long ago may have seemed unthinkable: the respectable snuff film."

• The "problem" with Running With Scissors, suggests AO Scott, "is that the efforts of the actors don't add up to much more than a series of uncomfortable, funny-horrible vignettes in a scattered, shapeless movie." The LA Weekly's Ella Taylor agrees, finding it "[s]tudded with stars giving their all to nothing very much." More from Robert Cashill. Related: Rob Kendt profiles Brian Cox for the Los Angeles Times, where Maria Elena Fernandez talks with director Ryan Murphy.

• Neil Genzlinger on Bill Plympton's "gleefully outrageous" Hair High: "Plympton nicely walks the border between ridiculously gross and outright offensive." More from Brian D Schiller at Slant. ScreenGrab has the trailer.

• Stephen Holden: "Sleeping Dogs Lie doesn't pretend to be more than it is: a blunt, provocative comedy sketch whose visual look is almost as bare as that of an episode of the underappreciated Home Box Office series Lucky Louie." More from Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Balancing [Sandra] Hüller's astonishingly physical performance with an intimate, naturalistic style, Requiem is a moving study of a tortured young woman more at peace with medieval ritual than with modern medicine. Throughout, [Hans-Christian] Schmid remains agnostic, suggesting that Michaela's problems, whatever their origin, prove only that a mind in torment is a terrible thing." Also, Sweet Land.

• "[T]he achievement of [Conventioneers] has less to do with guerrilla tactics (Haskell Wexler pulled the same thing off in his 1969 landmark, Medium Cool) than with its shrewd interface of the personal and political," writes Nathan Lee.

• Laura Kern on Masai: The Rain Warriors: "[T]he boys, like the film, come off as very human: flawed, frequently awkward, but full of goodness at the core."

• Anita Gates: "Jaan-E-Mann (the title means 'beloved') has many of its genre's shortcomings, including a shaky hold on the line between farce and stupidity and a soapy, melodramatic denouement.... Still, there is something good-natured about Jaan-E-Mann that makes it possible to forgive its many faults."

In this month's Prospect, Frederic Rafael, co-writer of the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut, tears David Thomson's Nicole Kidman to itsy bitsy, teensy weensy pieces.

"What would [Diane] Arbus have made of [Nicole] Kidman in Fur?" asks Dan Callahan in Slant. "My guess is that she would have recognized a Vogue fashion model when she saw one and sent Kidman over to be photographed by her husband." 2½ out of four stars anyway.

Also in Slant, Ed Gonzalez finds Commune "loose-limbed and not at all artful - which is to say, it's scarcely bourgeois and just as the Black Bear Ranch people would like it." And, in As the Call, So the Echo, "we're reminded that there are doctors out there who pride charity above payback."

Nick Schager: "What ultimately gives Inland Empire its dark enchantment, however, is Lynch's combination and reconfiguration of aesthetic and narrative components until what remains... is a sense of hidden, inextricable connections intertwined in ways both clear and obscure - an impression that lends this, the director's most challenging and rich work, a through-the-rabbit-hole mystery saturated with endless interpretive possibilities."

Matt Riviera on Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men: "A bleak and gritty political thriller disguised as a blockbuster, this is a relentlesssly depressing work whose narrative restraint is frustrating and admirable in equal measure."

"All the King's Men, The Last King of Scotland, The Departed, The Queen, Marie Antoinette, Death of a President, Apocalypto - these are not movies in which a Republican administration and Congress could find much comfort," writes the Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "Rather, they chart deep and growing discontent, the dismay of a people who have suffered patiently through years of deceit, incompetence, abuse of power, and arrogance. On the surface, perhaps, their outrage has been muted, even silent, because that is how good Americans behave in times of trouble. But on a deeper level, in those places where doubt and anger grow, places explored by dreams and movies, changes are already under way."

Also: Gerald Peary on Time to Leave.

Filmbrain: "With a twist ending that somehow manages to be both poignant and maudlin at the same time, Death of a President can best be described as an opportunity wasted. Neither polemic nor satire, it's a film that will only offend those who refuse to see it. The decision by Regal Entertainment Group and Cinemark to ban the film outright from their cinemas says more about life in Bush's America than the film itself."

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston actually goes back a while with Jon Raymond, who wrote the original story and co-wrote Old Joy with Kelly Reichardt. And so they talk. Todd Haynes's name comes up here and there, it should be mentioned. Then, at SF360, Huston writes about another acquaintance from his Portland days, Miranda July.

Owen Hatherley: "Safe is the edge of hysteria in Joan Didion's neurasthenic LA teased out and emphasised to the point of total psychosis, which shouldn't obscure the fact of how prevalent its mysterious 'environmental illness' has become." Via Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay.

"There are few great filmmakers - and Fellini certainly was one - who went so wrong so resolutely," argues Charles Taylor. It was La Dolce Vita, "one of those enormous critical and commercial successes that, as 2001 did with Stanley Kubrick, set a director on a path that negates everything that had been good about his work." Heavens. That said, "in Amarcord, for once, Fellini's self-indulgence doesn't overtake the movie, doesn't wear you out. You can see everything that's wrong with the picture and it remains a pleasure to watch."

Roger Ebert talks with Michael Apted about 49 Up.

"What would you do if asked by a well-known film director to re-create a musical scene for which the fate of the whole project hinges?" asks Mark Rubin. "How about hiring and rehearsing a band, working out a musical arrangement long distance, then booking the recording date at a studio you've never even heard of while not being able to tell anyone who's on the session? How about setting up said recording session with a vocalist you've never heard sing, with no chance of rehearsal, and no one to tell you what key she likes to sing in? That's precisely where I found myself the first week of January 2005." The movie was Infamous and the singer, of course, Gwyneth Paltrow. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Liz Welch Tirrell interviews Douglas McGrath.

"It's always a shame to see revolutionaries spinning their wheels, stuck in a shallow groove," sighs Brian Gibson in Vue Weekly. "Back in 1963, Larry Kent made Canada's first indie film, The Bitter Ash. Now, more than four decades later, he's made The Hamster Cage, a stale slice of dark suburban comedy."

Tom Sutpen at Bright Lights After Dark on Sleazoid Express: "[T]his book could not be a more crucial document in the canon of film writing. I mean, perhaps it's only me, but there's just something fundamentally American about troubled individuals in a vast urban setting gathering together in a falling-apart movie theatre originally designed to look like La Scala and watching Cannibal Holocaust on a screen the size of a midwestern liquor store."

Up-n-coming:

• "Sacha Baron Cohen is set to join Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's forthcoming screen version of Sweeney Todd."

• "Sam Shepard is attached to star in Descending From Heaven: The Strange and Extraordinary Tale of Claude Eatherly, A-Bomb Pilot for director Sandy Smolan and producer Marcia Nasatir."

"What has happened that has made images (and by image we mean any sign, work of art, inscription, or picture that acts as a mediation to access something else) the focus of so much passion? To the point that destroying them, erasing them, defacing them, has been taken as the ultimate touchstone to prove the validity of one's faith, of one's science, of one's critical acumen, of one's artistic creativity? To the point where being an iconoclast seems the highest virtue, the highest piety, in intellectual circles?" Bruno Latour on the "Iconoclash." Also via wood s lot, Kurt Easterwood makes a personal recommendation: My Country, My Country. The recommendation is recommended.

Adam Hartzell profiles Indian-Canadian documentary filmmaker Ali Kazimi at Hell on Frisco Bay.

"Certainly the most hardened New Zealand film to emerge since Once Were Warriors, Out of the Blue is signposted by a series of innocuous coastal panoramas that belie its underlying trauma," writes Tim Wong for the Lumière Reader.

"Which other great American director has reached a point in his career where we’re this damn grateful for a half-decent movie?" Tim Robey explains why he doesn't get The Departed.

Michael Helke for Stop Smiling: "In The Sacrifice, we see the lasting benefit Tarkovsky got out of his tentative collaboration with the West in the form of his working relationship with many of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's own associates: cameraman Sven Nykvist (who died last month at the age of 83); the actor Erland Josephson, who portrays Alexander; and designer Anna Asp, responsible for the film's interior sets. The film itself, perhaps as a consequence, is in many respects Bergmanesque."

"The Clay Bird, [Tareque] Masud's memoir of 1960s Bangladesh—a land about to be torn apart by civil war—is an engrossing and at times touching film. But its sensibility has more in common with Richard Attenborough's epics than classical cinema," writes Nelhydrea Paupér at Flickhead.

"[I]t is tempting to assert that Herzog's theses in Aguirre are completely realized in the film's opening and closing scenes," suggests Dan Jardine at the House Next Door. "Of course, to do so would be to underestimate the power, magnificence and importance of the film's intervening 90 minutes, but still, the temptation remains. As I am, like Oscar Wilde, able to resist everything except temptation, why not explore it?" More from Martha Fischer, who's back at Cinematical.

Blondie of the Follies "has been overshadowed by [Edmund] Goulding's other film of 1932, Grand Hotel (and Blondie contains a sequence in which Jimmy Durante sings a song of Goulding's composition, 'Don't Take Your Girl to "Grand Hotel"' and [Marion] Davies offers a deadly Greta Garbo impersonation)," writes Dave Kehr, "but it's a far livelier picture than that overcrowded star vehicle."

"With a DVD viewing of Mr Klein last night, I think I'm finally starting to get Joseph Losey," writes Zach Campbell.

Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "Scream proved a number of things about [Wes] Craven to critics and audiences alike: that he knew a great deal about horror films, and how and why they work; that he knew how to manipulate and recycle generic mainstays and to use them to great effect in spite of their conventionality; and that all of this can be highly profitable and can spawn a seemingly endless chain of sequels. But in fact, Craven had already proved this with A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that, when viewed today, may strike one as among the most originally unoriginal films ever made."

Time Out's Geoff Andrew talks with Nuri Bilge Ceylan about Climates.

Grant Rosenberg talks with Rachid Bouchareb about Indigènes (Days of Glory) for Time Europe. Via Propagndin at Twitch.

James Christopher of the London Times talks with Christiane Kubrick about her husband and about Dr Strangelove.

In the Independent, James Mottram talks with Paul McGann about Withnail and I and his new one, Gypo, which sees generally positive reviews from Anthony Quinn and the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

For Twitch, Jon Pais translates a generous swatch of a DVDrama interview with Satoshi Kon.

Michael Guillén talks with Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob about Al Franken: And God Spoke.

Arianna Huffington notes that Democrats are incorporating Robert Greenwald's Iraq for Sale into their campaigns.

Chuck Tryon: "Anytown, USA offers an important, refreshing, and sometimes humorous glimpse into local political campaigns and their implications for the communities where they take place."

For the Telegraph, Andrew Perry talks with Stewart Copeland about Everyone Stares - and about Sting.

Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins, authors of Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital, talk with Paul Rachman and Steven Blush, the director and writer, respectively, of American Hardcore, for the Washington City Paper.. Via Sujewa Ekanayake, who, as it happens, has been talking with GreenCine's Jonathan Marlow about the future of VOD.

Ray Pride: "The world's stroppiest actors."

Reid Rosefelt at Zoom In Online: "The best performance I have seen by an actor so far this year is Jackie Earle Haley as the child predator in Todd Field's Little Children."

"Sid Adilman, Sid Adilman, the long-time Toronto Star entertainment writer widely regarded as one of the greatest champions of Canadian movies, music, books and television, died yesterday," wrote Isabel Teotonio in the Star on Sunday. Moving remembrances come from Joe Leydon and Leonard Klady.

"Nina Saxon. Main title and title designer for feature films and television. She also designs company logos." Susan King profiles her for the LAT. Also, Valerie J Nelson remembers Spoony Singh, who built the Hollywood Wax Museum.

Online browsing tip #1. "Last month we asked you to choose 10 artists from the web for a unique reader-curated exhibition," writes the Guardian. "As it opens, Jonathan Jones introduces the finalists."

Online browsing tip #2. Do You Want Lies With That?

Online browsing tip #3. Flickr photoset for Amid Amidi's Cartoon Modern.

Online listening tip #1. An excerpt (accompanying a full transcript) of Geoff Andrews's conversation with Gael García Bernal at the National Film Theatre.

Online listening tip #2. The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #11 at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

Online viewing tip #1. Rick Silva's trailer for Recap, "a remix of the cult classic graffiti movie Wild Style (1982) where every piece of graffiti in the original film has been digitally crossed out and tagged over with the Recap tag." Via Michael Szpakowski at DVblog.

Online viewing tip #2. Various people talking at the New Yorker Festival.

Online viewing tip #3. Borat's Friday press conference. Via Anne Thompson.

Online viewing tip #4. Michel Gondry's video for Beck's "Cell Phone's Dead." Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tip #5. "Sean Smith, the Guardian's award-winning war photographer, spent nearly six weeks with the 101st Division of the US army in Iraq. Watch his haunting observational film that explodes the myth around the claims that the Iraqis are preparing to take control of their own country."

Online viewing tip #6. Frontline: The Lost Year in Iraq.

Posted by dwhudson at October 21, 2006 2:34 PM