Shorts, 11/29.

"He was a friend, a brother, a father. I owe everything to him." Bertrand Tavernier remembers Philippe Noiret in the LA Weekly. Via Movie City News.

As many of you reading this will have already heard by now, the Village Voice's annual "Take" polls - surely the most valuable best-of list each year - will live on. Just not at the Voice. The Reeler has details.

"It's theirs to lose,' declared a veteran industry insider, of a Best Picture contest that is fast shaping up to be yet another battle between the elites of Los Angeles and New York (like Crash versus Brokeback Mountain last year): big fistfuls of Dreamgirls stardust flung against the gangster grit of Martin Scorsese's The Departed," writes Sara Vilkomerson in a cover story for the New York Observer. "But even jaded New Yorkers, judging from the unabashed applause that followed The Song last week [Jennifer Hudson's rendition of 'And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going'], seem to be in a receptive mood for a little old-school, feel-good Hollywood bada-bing. It is wartime, after all."

At indieWIRE, Jonny Leahan finds Oscar's shortlist of 15 docs to be "a timely snapshot of where we are as a country, mirrored in both the subject matter of the films and in who directed them. Remarkably, of the 20 directors represented (due to co-director titles), 15 are female - signaling that it wasn't just Congress that was ready to see women better represented."

"Technically, [Steven Soderbergh's] latest cinematic experiment is some kind of minor triumph, authentically capturing the smoky, shadowy look and feel of the period's noir-ish melodramas," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Yet there also isn't a moment when The Good German's artifice - so self-consciously 'faithful' that it borders on stilted, suffocating parody - isn't as depressingly hollow as a spent bullet casing."

At Twitch, Jon Pais translates Aur�lien Dirler's interview with Bong Joon-ho for Cinemasie in which the directors talks about The Host, of course, but also about Park Chan-wook and Kim Jee-woon; Kim Ki-duk; Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang; and about preferring Japanese directors these days, such as Shohei Imamura and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Also: Mack reviews Tsui Hark's We're Going to Eat You.

Brendon Connelly: "[T]ipsters are telling me that Criterion are to reissue Salo: 120 Days of Sodom in 2007." Related: Joe Bowman looks ahead to some of the most promising future releases.

Greg Allen on David Ng's review of Christine Vachon's A Killer Life: "Not that the Voice is the fount of filmic credibility lately, and I'm not one to begrudge someone's weariness of artistic suffering, but for some reason, I did kind of hope Vachon would always be a scrappy pioneer. Or that she'd keep fighting for new generations of filmmakers not her own, which seems to be the root of the sellout issue."

"Believe it or not, Paul Newman's directorial debut, while hardly ever mentioned today, was a hit back in the day." And now, Rachel, Rachel is one of Bilge Ebiri's "Forgotten Films."

George Saunders knows to fight fire with fire; David Walsh, writing at the WSWS, doesn't: "This is the irony: a film purportedly dedicated to mocking stereotypes largely ends up confirming and reinforcing them."

By the way, ever heard of "Self-Borating"? Ron Rosenbaum explains the concept in the NYO. Also:

• John Heilpern: "It's a surprise to find that, at two and a half hours in length, part one of The Coast of Utopia is shorter than Mary Poppins. I expected it to be longer and weightier. My reluctant disappointment in the opening Voyage, however, has as much to do with my own excited expectations as with Mr Stoppard's strangely un-Stoppardian play."

• Andrew Sarris recommends Flannel Pajamas.

• Sean Howe: "If [Warren] Beatty's reputedly leftist Reds is a voice of dissent, it is - surprisingly - dissent from the idea that personal travails are secondary to collective struggles."

Marcel Berlins rails against the "essential cruelty" of Borat.

Also in the Guardian:

• Randeep Ramesh: "One of Bollywood's biggest stars, Sanjay Dutt, was convicted yesterday of illegally possessing weapons" - and here's the news - "but is unlikely to be sent to prison for a long period - sending a sigh of relief through the film industry, which has more than 1,500bn rupees (�20m) riding on his return."

• Ryan Gilbey: "For an industry that bangs on about the importance of satisfying your inner child, Hollywood is becoming scandalously neglectful of actual children."

• A Christmas movie quiz.

Peter Jackson vs New Line: Sharon Waxman sums up the rift so far. Also in the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis on Invisible, "a moody thriller with more emphasis on mood than thrills."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

• Johnny Ray Huston: "Broken Sky might very well be a four-way chain of pas de deux pieces, tracing the gradual breakup of a first love. At its very best, the movie creates something hauntingly, intuitively perceptive from these portraits of everyday urban movement."

• Sara Schieron recommends Adrian Belic's documentary Beyond the Call.

• Michelle Devereaux reviews 3 Needles, "a wet, crimson slap in the face of global apathy."

C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark: "Bobby, surprisingly, works."

"[I]nstead of the easily mockable surface idiocies, let's burrow down to the deep and offensive idiocies at its core." Reverse Shot's brevitytheenemy tears into The Fountain.

"His inventiveness came in a big burst and dissipated pretty quickly, but he made an indelible mark on his era, leaving behind a tricky trail of movie movies, stylized, unrealistic, yet always managing to allude to the problems of real life that will resume when the double feature is finished." Dan Callahan on Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker's Collection. Also at Slant, Ed Gonzalez reviews Verdict on Auschwitz and Forgiveness.

How to avoid a sequel to Valley of the Wolves Iraq? At Harper's, Ken Silverstein and Sebastian Sosman wonder: "Did Special Envoy [Joe] Ralston lobby on behalf of Lockheed Martin during his encounters with Turkish officials?... It's hard to understand how the Bush Administration could appoint a special envoy with so many conflicts of interest, but Lockheed's corporate slogan says it all: 'We never forget who we�re working for.' Neither, it seems, does General Ralston."

"When The American set out to choose the ten best business movies of all time, we looked for three qualities: (1) a great movie, (2) a relatively realistic picture of business, and (3) an attitude not openly hostile to capitalism as we know and love it." Which makes for a few surprising choices. Via Fimoculous.

Chris Dahlen's got a list at the AV Club: "9 Recent Attempts to Save the Romantic Comedy."

Online viewing tip #1. More. Via Metaphilm.

Online viewing tip #2. Karina Longworth's got a Clara Bow clip reel.

Posted by dwhudson at November 29, 2006 8:20 AM