Shorts, 11/5.

George Ducker introduces his interview with David Gordon Green in the Believer: "When we spoke, Green had just finished the sound mixes for Snow Angels, his adaptation of the novel by Stewart O'Nan. Financed independently and featuring Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale, and Amy Sedaris, the film is the story of a young man's disintegrating family, his old babysitter, and a murder set against the brittle winter of a suburb of Pittsburgh. We met on a conspicuously cloudy Saturday morning in West Los Angeles, early enough to avoid competition with the serious brunchers."

"'Do you know what the essence of movie-making is?' Stanley asked me. 'It's buying lots of things.'" Coudal Partners have found a full version of Ian Watson's recollections, a memoir that bounced around editorial offices for a while before, eventually, a shortened version appeared in Playboy. "[I]t's evident to me that I regarded the episode of working with Stanley as a surreal comedy - for which I surely had the very best director."

Joe Eszterhas to screenwriters: "In musical terms, you are the composer; the director conducts the orchestra." David Bordwell responds: "This idea poses a lot of problems." Somewhat related: Chris Cagle recommends Kristin Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction.

On Five: "Unofficial information about the Criterion Collection from the people who are officially in charge." Via Sujewa Ekanayake, who's seeding an "Agricultural Theory of Film Distribution."

The Diatribe, "a Los Angeles-based military officer who enjoys science fiction and military films, and works in the entertainment industry in an undisclosed location," writes at the House Next Door, "Unfortunately, sci-fi is written in our time. Our gender stereotypes continue to influence how our futuristic counterparts behave, even in a setting where you'd think women might finally have a shot." Related: Asghar Qadir in AmeriQuests: "Science Fiction and Popular Science from Ancient to Modern Times: Scientists Versus Laymen." Via wood s lot.

Also, Matt Zoller Seitz asks, "When did you first realize that movies were directed?"

"[F]or all his appearance as the very model of conservative respectability, his merciless lampooning of the heartless constraints of laws and etiquette reveal him, underneath it all, to have been a genuine free spirit and a true anarchist," writes Mike Leigh of Gilbert. "Sullivan's frustration was that he never had time to write proper music: he was convinced that he frittered away his life and his talents on the trivia of the Savoy Operas. How wrong he was."

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• David Lodge: "The Fallen Idol was a model of what the development of a movie should be, but very seldom is: a close collaboration between a writer and a director who enjoyed complete rapport, supported by a producer (Alexander Korda) who did not interfere with the creative process."

• Notes on the under-appreciated art of dubbing from Claudia Motta ("Mexico's Kirsten Dunst"), Françoise Cadol ("France's Angelina Jolie"), Giuppy Izzo ("Italy's Renée Zellweger"), Ren Wei ("China's Tom Cruise"), Daniella Hoffmann ("Germany's Julia Roberts") and Pawan Kalra ("India's Arnold Schwarzenegger").

• Iain Sinclair tells the rousing (and exhausting) tale of filmmaker Andrew Kötting and his crew setting off to swim across the Channel.

• Peter Bradshaw reviews "deliciously elegant and very French psychological thriller," The Page Turner.

• Mark Kermode: "For those with a weakness for the beautiful monsters of modern cinema, Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro has earned a deserved reputation as the finest living exponent of fabulist film."

• Philip French admires Little Children. Related: Jackie Earle Haley's comeback.

• For David Thomson, Christopher Nolan "seems to be a nearly fatal case of intellectual superiority... he doesn't yet do story, pleasure, or acting. Three modest obstacles for the young filmmaker."

• Maddy Costa interviews Helena Bonham-Carter and Barbara Ellen talks with Stephen Merchant.

Jim Emerson revives the Opening Shots Project with a look at The Girl Can't Help It.

It's almost as if, as the days grow shorter, Death has decided to get to work on filmmakers. It's "one of those times when 'these things come in threes' feels more like three dozens, and makes me want to go back to bed and wake up on a different day," writes Tim Lucas. All the more reason to "make an effort to acknowledge reasons for joy where they can be found."

Matt Mazur, blogging at PopMatters on Country: "It is a somewhat straightforward story by cinematic means, but the subversive ideas are epic in scope." More "Forgotten Gems": The Emigrants, Mary Queen of Scots (amen!) and Elizabeth.

"I've watched the movie with my father, now 80, and my son, who is 14; both were on the floor gasping for breath." Christopher Buckley reviews Chris Miller's The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie (first chapter): "His book is sophomoric, disgusting, tasteless, vile, misogynist, chauvinist, debased and at times so unspeakably revolting that any person of decent sensibility would hurl it into the nearest Dumpster. I couldn't put it down. I make this self-indicting admission with all due trepidation, but there it is. For better or worse, this an utterly hilarious book."

Also in the New York Times:

• "[T]his is an experience no passionate theatergoer should miss," proclaims Ben Brantley. Grey Gardens "opened last night like a full-blown, petal-dropping peony," and as for Christine Ebersole, "Watching this performance is the best argument I can think of for the survival of the American musical."

• "To anyone who takes Jewishness seriously, David Mamet's 1991 film, Homicide, was confusing. On the one hand, it was refreshing, even exhilarating, to see how openly Mamet dealt with issues like Jewish identity and anti-Semitism.... But there was a slight problem with Mamet's Jews: They were unrecognizable." David Margolick reviews Mamet's The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews.

• Frédéric van Coppernolle, now executive chef at the French Consulate in NYC: "For one tempestuous, sometimes baffling summer, I worked for Brigitte Bardot in St Tropez." Recipes follow.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Form and content fight to the death in Wondrous Oblivion, Paul Morrison's defiantly gauzy tale of racial friction in 1960s England."

• Andy Webster on Umrao Jaan: "The whims of men can be terrible to live by, but too many scenes exploit [Aishwarya] Rai's tearful, screen-engulfing eyes. Bathos and weak dubbing don't help."

• AO Scott: "[I]t strikes me as unlikely that any British action picture released this year will surpass Flushed Away." More from Fernando F Croce in Slant.

• Can something good be found to say about The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause? Here's what Manohla Dargis came up up with: "[Martin] Short is the kind of Christmas ham everyone can enjoy." More from Rob Humanick in Slant.

Kelly O: "I saw a work-in-progress version of What Is It? eight years ago and it is still absolutely the most uncompromising and original thing I've seen."

Also in the Stranger: Annie Wagner on Babel: "The filmmakers don't argue much of anything, in fact, except look here, look there. It's a movie about images and textures and film grain; the acting, while strong, is merely an infrastructure for beauty and feeling.... It isn't an intellectual film, but it will make you dissolve under the weight of its simple, ineffable ideas." Plus, a talk with Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Michael Guillén introduces an Evening Class roundtable discussion with Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and co-writer on the screenplay for the film.

Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE on Columbian director Simon Brand's English-language feature debut: "While one would like to report that Unknown has some veiled political message to impart about the blurred line between good and evil, victim and criminal, first-time screenwriter Matthew Waynee is too consumed with tough-talking dialogue, testosterone-filled strutting and one-too-many plot twists that are not only derivative of, but inferior to Unknown's most obvious precursor, Reservoir Dogs." More from Laura Kern in the NYT.

That Little Round-Headed Boy: "I watched Eric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse last night and I was struck by a question: Is Eric Rohmer porn?"

Liz Hoggard attends a screening of Mischief Night, "a new race-based comedy set in Leeds" - in Leeds. "The audience was encouragingly mixed (white and Asian, young and old), the feedback essentially positive." Also in the Independent, Kaleem Aftab interviews Juliette Binoche and five "intrepid reporters" survive Saw III.

J Robert Parks, a pair of reviews that pair movies: "49 Up and Old Joy are not only designed for an older audience, they're also about the process of growing older." And: "The Queen, from director Stephen Frears, is the more polished of the two, but both it and The Last King of Scotland offer fascinating, almost voyeuristic portraits of rulers in the midst of crisis."

Interviews in the Telegraph: Tom Charity with Anthony Minghella, Sheila Johnston with Isabelle Huppert and Jasper Rees with Benedict Cumberbatch.

Mack at Twitch hears that Ryuhei Kitamura will be directing an adaptation of Clive Barker's story, "The Midnight Meat Train."

Stuart Kemp in the Hollywood Reporter: "Lindsay Lohan, Chris Evans, Ellen Burstyn, David Strathairn and Ann-Margret are attached to bring a long-forgotten Tennessee Williams screenplay, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, to the big screen." Also, producers Elizabeth Stanley and Joe Dante have acquired the rights to an English-language remake of Alante Kavaite's Ecoute Le Temps (Listen to Time).

Production Weekly: "Rodrigo Santoro, Paz Vega and Shakira will star in Alfonso Arau's romantic epic Dare to Love Me, set in 1930s Paris about the life of Argentinean tango legend Carlos Gardel." The entry's outfitted with online viewing.

Online browsing tip. The work of poster designer Jeremy Saunders. More than just posters; see, for example, the case study for Little Fish. Via Matt Riviera.

Online listening tip #1. Michael Tolkin is Michael Silverblatt's guest on Bookworm.

Online listening tip #2. For NPR, "Andrea Shea explores the history and influence of Janus Films from where it was born - the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass."

Online viewing tip #1. Ajit at ticklebooth explains what moves him about his favorite scene in Raging Bull.

Online viewing tip #2. "I don't know why I find this simple, two minute 1957 short by Roman Polanski, made presumably when he was a student, so unsettling... but I do." Bilge Ebiri's got Teeth Smile at ScreenGrab.

Online viewing tip #3. "Until some ballsy distributor decides to wage a 'fair use' battle against studio copyright holders, it may be that the Sophie Fiennes doc The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, in which the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek discourses about film, politics, desire and theory, will be little seen in the U.S," writes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "Here is Zizek talking about Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds."

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2006 2:09 PM