Shorts, 11/16.

There aren't too many individual blog entries worth bookmarking for keeps, but Chris Cagle's got one. It's a survey of nine "Introduction to Film textbooks," each evaluated for its pros, cons, publishing concerns and a final note on "who should use it." In short, wow. And as if that weren't enough, he's also got a recommendation for "those who are interested in a detailed social history of the movies or in a closer look at film's role in American Culture": Peter Decherney's Hollywood and the Culture Elite.

Neil Gaiman confirms that he's collaborating with Penn Jillette on an adaptation of EH Jones's The Road to Endor, a novel that, as Brendon Connelly describes it, "details oiuja board fakery and mentalist scams on the battlefields of World War I."

Discovered seven years ago, William Faulkner's only un-produced feature-length screenplay turns out to be a vampire movie and, as Jay A Fernandez reports, producer Lee Caplin plans to bring it to the screen. He'll change the setting, though, from Eastern Europe to the American South. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan: "Think of Sweet Land as a gift, the kind of delicate but deeply emotional love story, both sincere and restrained, that, like love itself, is more sought after than found."

Signandsight translates a crucial passage from Roman Pawlowski's piece in the Gazeta Wyborcza: "More historical films have been shot in Poland in 2006 than ever before: from Andrzej Wajda's Post mortem to a Popieluszko biography, various stories about the Polish and Russian secret services to Schlöndorff's 'Solidarity' epic. That doesn't just have to do with a political boom; since the public film subsidies have been increased, historical films, which are more expensive by nature, can be shot in much greater quantity."

Also, Hanns-Georg Rodek in Die Welt on the so-called Berlin School, whose "directors don't make polemical films, they observe. They don't use a magnifying glass to reproduce, ironize or psychologize about reality. Instead they create a certain artificiality with which to sift through reality until it reaches its purest possible form. And their sieve is reduction."

Great news from André Salas at Filmmaker: "Not a second too soon, Christopher Petit's Radio On (1979) finally finds it's way to DVD, courtesy of Plexifilm."

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: "The IT Crowd DVDs have just shipped - with subtitles in leet!"

David Lowery has seven initial thoughts on seeing Sátántangó.

At 24 Lies a Second, Robert C Cumbow writes that David Lynch's "emphasis on the static over the kinetic is not so remarkable in an artist who, after all, began his career in - and remains committed to - the compositional rigors of painting, collage, and sculpture. But to see how it relates to folding space, we must further illuminate this concept of traveling without moving."

"[Peter] Morgan's work suits the sophisticated conservatism of our age," argues Andrew Billen in Prospect on the writer behind The Queen and The Last King of Scotland. "His well-made plays provoke laughter more often than tears, but it is the laughter of affection, not ridicule. We are moved to sympathy for our rulers, not rebellion."

Bilge Ebiri's latest "Forgotten Film" is one that won John Boorman a director award at Cannes: "If it wasn't so damned cinematic, Leo the Last could have probably made for an insane stage musical."

Focusing on Through a Glass Darkly, Chadwick Jenkins follows up on the first part of his study in PopMatters of Bergman's use of Bach.

"Here are advertisements for America that no one could resist." Dave Kehr reviews releases of six Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals from Fox and Flower Drum Song, featuring "I Enjoy Being a Girl," "a showstopper ripe for postfeminist revival," from Universal.

Also in the New York Times:

• Michiko Kakutani reviews Neil Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

• Laura M Holson on Disney's cost-cutting - even Jerry Bruckheimer's feeling the squeeze!

• Louise Story: "Nielsen Media Research is to announce today that it will release video-on-demand ratings, similar to its famous TV ratings, starting in December." Related: Charles Isherwood: "Spend an hour or two trolling through YouTube looking for high art... and you come away amazed at the volume (and sometimes the quality) of material available for instant viewing."

• An AP story on the Weinstein/Blockbuster deal that not only makes no sense for all parties involved, particularly the filmmakers, but also may very well face legal challenges.

Were women neglected in Sunday's comedy issue of the NYT Magazine? Rebecca Traister critiques a critique at Broadsheet.

Anthony Kaufman: "Just weeks after the tragic death of actress-writer-director Adrienne Shelly, her husband Andy Ostroy has set up a foundation in her name and memory to help cultivate women filmmakers."

Think of it as Slate's "Movie Club" revived, in a way, as a weekly column, only at the House Next Door: Sean Burns and Andrew Dignan launch "Navel Gazing" with a discussion of Babel, Stranger Than Fiction and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. Related: In the Philadelphia Weekly, Sean Burns looks ahead to the holiday season.

In the Voice: Jim Ridley on Bobby, "an Airport movie with the assassination of Robert F Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys" (more from Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer) and a four-point review of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her from Nathan Lee. Related online viewing tip. ScreenGrab's got a longish clip from a 1964 interview in which Godard discusses his attitude toward critics.

"It's cult-movie week here at Beyond the Multiplex world HQ." Salon's Andrew O'Hehir reviews The Aura, Candy, Flannel Pajamas and 2 or 3 Things.

Back to the NYO for a moment. "Having experienced their own youth, Gen Xers keep selling us - and themselves - a secondhand version of it," writes Christine Smallwood. "They've successfully packaged what it means to be young, and we keep buying - even when what we're buying is a ticket to the awful, treacly, terrifically annoying X-trickle-down Garden State." In other words, they're the new Boomers. Meanwhile, Suzy Hansen remembers Ellen Willis.

Dave Shulman spends quite a while with Tenacious D for a cover story for the LA Weekly. Jack Black on Hollywood: "[T]here's no real club or industry, or any rhyme or reason. Everyone's just floatin' around, doin' weird jobs, and it's a very fuckin' random, Nietzschean universe of fuckin' endless, empty, mindless destruction. Sometimes there's good shit in there too. There're some rainbows."

Also: Paul Malcolm on The Fallen Idol; more from Josh Rosenblatt in the Austin Chronicle. And then, not film-related, really, but it should be noted that the LAW is running Dave Eggers's introduction to a new 10th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

Anne Thompson: "The Good German is as experimental in its way as Soderbergh's Schizopolis, Kafka, Solaris, Full Frontal or The Limey." Meanwhile, Soderbergh's project prompts more thoughts from David Bordwell, these on "editing technique in classic and contemporary film."

Peter Nellhaus: "Children of Men makes for an interesting bookend to V for Vendetta. Both are big budget films from major studios that as slightly disguised science fiction attack the politics of George Bush and Tony Blair."

Jon Pais at Twitch: "Kim Jong-il, North Korea's Stalinist leader who once threatened to turn the United States into a 'sea of fire', gave his seal of approval to The Host on Thursday, praising the blockbuster's critical stance toward US troops stationed in South Korea and dubbing them the 'monster of the Han River.'"

In My Friend & His Wife, Shin Dong-il raises questions as to "how to survive extreme moral tragedy, pondering if forgiveness is indeed ever possible considering the nature of certain humanly-wrought calamities," writes Adam Hartzell at Koreanfilm.org.

Boyd van Hoeij reviews Marvin D'Lugo's Pedro Almodóvar, "an insightful look at the parallel trajectories of Almodóvar's cinematic output and the cultivation of the Almodóvar persona."

Steve Rose meets Isabelle Huppert and Lindesay Irvine talks with Romanzo Criminale director Michele Placido.

Also in the Guardian:

• Dan Glaister: "A study by the University of California Los Angeles shows the film and television industry to be the second largest polluter in the Los Angeles area."

• Josh Appignanesi: "Speaking as a director, I'd prefer to make films for a huge silver screen watched communally, rather than for a tiny pixelated one watched alone, probably in small interrupted bits."

• Jean-Baptiste Andrea on switching from horror (Dead End) to comedy (Big Nothing).

• "[F]ew are the comedy careers that don't one day take a detour into serious drama." Brian Logan is sure that's always a good idea.

Today's Crispin Glover interview: Capone at AICN.

Jim Emerson offers "a few relatively obscure, underappreciated or, at least, off-the-beaten-path comedies that I think are hysterically funny" and invites more suggestions.

In Slate, Sean Cooper presents four solid reasons why both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are already dead.

David Pescovitz at Boing Boing: "This year, the Webby Awards are holding a separate ceremony to honor outstanding film and video that's made for the Internet. The nominees and winners will become part of the Museum of Moving Image's collection of artifacts."

Online browsing tip. The site for Confession of Pain, the new film from Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (Infernal Affairs) and starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro. Via Grady Hendrix, who'll also point you to a slew of reviews of new films from Asia.

Online feed subscription tips. Lunchfilm. Via Mike at Bad Lit. And via Matt Dentler, Janet Pierson's Friends Are My Artform and Dana Harris's The Knife.

Online listening tip #1. Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing as they prep the DVD for Jesus Camp.

Online listening tip #2. DVD Talk editor Geoffrey Klein gets Kevin Smith on the phone.

Online listening tip #3. Time Out talks with Jack Black and Kyle Gass.

Online listening tips. Recent guests on the Leonard Lopate Show: George Miller talking about Happy Feet, David Hare talking about The Vertical Hour and James Sanders, talking about his book, Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York.

Online viewing tip #1. Malcolm McDowell presents an interactive history of British Free Cinema at Screen Online. For the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab asks him about it - and about Lindsay Anderson.

Online viewing tip #2. At Cinema Strikes Back, Blake's got a clip from Pom Pom and Hot Hot.

Online viewing tips. The shorts in KQED's weekly series, Truly CA, written up by Justin Juul at SF360.

Posted by dwhudson at November 16, 2006 1:26 PM