Shorts, 10/31.

Just up at the Mother Jones site is the feature-length interviewer's extended cut of Rob Nelson's conversation with Richard Linklater, three times longer than what you may have already seen in print. Related: Matt Dentler on what's in store for the Austin premiere of Fast Food Nation.

David Lynch's self-distributed Inland Empire is slated for a two-week run at the IFC Center in New York starting December 6. "That was quick," notes Anthony Kaufman.

The Rules of the Game. There it sits at #3 in the most recent Sight & Sound Critics' Poll, #9 for the Directors'. And now that it's been restored from a master print, it's seeing a rerelease. J Hoberman: "It is required viewing, if only to understand the ideal that filmmakers from Robert Altman to Woody Allen have been after. And even if you think you know it, see it again for its newly rediscovered depth of field, and even more, for its infinite wellsprings of character and empathy."

Also in the Voice, Wondrous Oblivion "not only vacillates between innocuous fancy and real menace, sometimes awkwardly, but also maintains a rather nervy balance between a light coming- of-age drama for children and a darker, more adult story of deferred passions," writes Jim Ridley.

One of the projects Stanley Kubrick never got around to making was Lunatic at Large, based on a treatment he commissioned in the late 50s from Jim Thompson. Charles McGrath reports that not only have Kubrick's widow and son-in-law found the manuscript but producer Edward R Pressman and director Chris Palmer plan to realize the film. The story? "It's a dark and surprising mystery of sorts, in which the greatest puzzle is who, among several plausible candidates, is the true escapee from a nearby mental hospital."

Also, Dave Kehr on a collection from Paramount: "Audiences loved the Freudian conflict between [Dean] Martin's slicked-back, self-assured embodiment of adult sexuality and the explosive id of [Jerry] Lewis's little-boy character, as artfully uncontrolled as Mr Martin's polished charm was the product of self-conscious calculation." Related news from the BBC: "EMI Music have signed a deal with the estate of late singer Dean Martin to use his name, image and likeness."

Variety's Michael Fleming reports that Steven Soderbergh is set to shoot not one but two films with Benicio Del Toro as Che Guevara. The Argentine "begins as Che and a band of Cuban exiles (led by Fidel Castro) reach the Cuban shore from Mexico in 1956. Within two years, they mobilized popular support and an army and toppled the U.S.-friendly regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The second film, Guerrilla, begins with Che's trip to New York, where he spoke at the United Nations in 1964 and was celebrated in society circles."

Production Weekly: "Brian De Palma is set to direct The Untouchables: Capone Rising, a prequel to his 1987 hit film about lawman Eliot Ness' takedown of Al Capone."

Robert Keser on the new Will Ferrell movie: "This certainly counts as director [Marc] Forster's best work yet, as he deftly achieves and sustains all the fanciful notions with a much lighter hand than he used in Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland, but in the end Stranger Than Fiction suggests far too many other films for its own good."

Also in Slant:

• Jason Clark on The History Boys: "A fine stage craftsman, [Nicholas Hytner's] films range from choppy (The Crucible) to dull (The Madness of King George, also penned by [Alan] Bennett) to downright insipid (The Object of My Affection). It's quite amazing, then, how this translation still manages to hold up, most likely because Bennett's marvelously subversive writing remains intact." Earlier: "Plays, 10/13."

• Nick Schager: "Shottas regurgitates worn-out gangsta tropes in telling the story of two hoods trying to make it big in both Jamaica and Miami's crime worlds."

• Ed Gonzalez: "[T]he tenor of The Magic Gloves reveals a certain kinship to the deadpan cinema of Aki Kaurismäki and Jim Jarmusch."

"Few experiences are stranger than sitting in a cinema and seeing an almost exact recreation of your teenage bedroom." David Nicholls watches the adaptation of his novel, Starter for Ten. "I'm also struck, frequently and painfully, by the realisation that things I experienced as a young adult now constitute a period movie. Many of the film's cast can't remember a time when Nelson Mandela wasn't free, and I'm still processing the fact that the Smiths bear the same relation to 2006 as Gerry and the Pacemakers did to 1986."

Also in the Guardian: "Jackie Chan and Jet Li, the two biggest stars of Hong Kong action cinema, are to face off in a film." More from Wolf at Twitch. So, with all that talk about retiring from martial arts after Fearless, Li must have been referring specifically to Wu Shu after all.

Owen Hatherley has a suggestion as to why Daniel Frampton's Filmosophy "falls short."

Since the purge of arts writers at the Village Voice, Michael Atkinson has appeared in the Stranger, at TCM and now has a new DVD column at IFC News to boot. This week, he reviews Down to the Bone and Hands Over the City.

"A number of influential film critics, including the <Ford scholar Tag Gallagher and Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, consider 7 Women to be one of the director's finest films.... Why, then, the widespread indifference to 7 Women?" asks Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab. "Perhaps because it seems, on its surface, such a departure from the prototypical Ford film." Related: An Anne Bancroft recollection from David Ehrenstein.

"In Hombre Kabuki, a short film directed by Leo Age, some dude tries to convince his significant other that her wearing a Mexican wrestling mask may spice up their dull sex life," writes Mike Everleth at Bad Lit. The film "subverts the notion of fetish sex by shifting the power from one partner to the other."

"Hollywood is always being accused of having a pernicious influence on our personal values, of preferring to promote sex, violence, moral equivalency and other horrible perversities," writes Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "Yet two of the fall's best films - Flags of Our Fathers and The Queen honor an especially timely traditional value: people who choose reticence over shameless exhibitionism."

Chris Tilly: "The TOMB attended the Breaking and Entering Blackberry gala screening and after party on Friday, both of which were rather lacklustre affairs."

Erin Torneo sends a dispatch into indieWIRE from the Hawaii International Film Festival.

Online viewing tip #1. Via Coudal Partners, Peter Greenaway harrumphs.

Online viewing tips #2 and #3. Moscow 1908, via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing, where he's also pointing to John Kricfalusi's NSFW video for Tenacious D.

Posted by dwhudson at October 31, 2006 3:23 PM