Shorts, 12/4.

Todd at Twitch: "Website and Trailer for David Lynch's Inland Empire!" Related: David Edelstein in New York: "As much as I thrilled to every minute of Mulholland Drive, I remembered, watching Inland Empire, why Twin Peaks began to hemorrhage viewers in its second season.... And yet... And yet..." A bit more from Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Update: "Lynch's first-time use of DV conveys both the ardor and waywardness of a kid toying with his first camera and the measured skill of an old pro," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Inland Empire can be a trial, but it's worth sticking out: some moments are the most penetrating and rich of his entire career." Another update: Matt Singer and Alison Willmore's podcast for IFC News, where the team discusses their favorite Lynchian characters.

Thanks to "Thom Andersen, still one of the great torch bearers of modern cinema/history in Los Angeles," Andy Rector has been able to see Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth. "If there were only a way to amplify from Andersen's cinema pickups 30 miles out to the the public of Los Angeles! If this were done regularly I'm convinced it would reduce traffic, if perhaps increase loitering, as any good film screenings should. Anyhow 'all great civilizations are based on loitering.'"

"Marty and Paul Schrader and I were trying to do a thing with Travis - this is about 15 years ago - where would he be at this point? But it just never seemed to happen," Robert De Niro tells Time's Belinda Luscombe. On directing Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd: "So I'd say, You don't have to look at the person. You don't have to react. You can do nothing. And that will have more impact and power than anything you could do." Related: Daniel Eagan talks with screenwriter Eric Roth.

Variety's Pamela McClintock reports that Scorsese "will develop with an eye to direct the bigscreen adaptation of Eric Jager's historical tome "The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal and Trial by Combat in Medieval France."

"A Brief History of Chinese Movie Theaters in America." Great, swift piece from Grady Hendrix.

Monkey Peaches is reporting that Tsai Ming-Liang's next project will be Face, featuring Maggie Cheung, Lee Kang-Sheng and Jean-Pierre Léaud.

"As 2006 continues its quest for a great, definitive movie well into the final month of the year, why not flip back a half-century to 1954 and remember how a real, thorough-going masterpiece is supposed to look, sound, feel, and resonate?" Nick Davis on Kenji Mizoguchi's Sanshô the Bailiff.

New feature at Midnight Eye: Roland Domenig's "A History of Sex Education Films in Japan. Part 1: The Pre-War Years."

"In a word, it stinks out there for screenwriters, worse even than the fetid stench of the usual shit flung at them in previous years." Nikki Finke explains at the LA Weekly. "These aren't wannabes, either. These are some of the top names in the biz."

In the New York Times:

• Thom Powers "is among the countless - or, rather, uncounted - independent documentary filmmakers who have been forced to shelve one project or another," writes Paul Vandercarr. "These unrealized visions linger like ghosts in the minds of their originators, whose lives are often consumed by a strenuous cycle of fund-raising, filming, dreaming, more fund-raising, editing, cajoling, resting and returning to one's muse."

• "After a hiatus of nearly 50 years, Walt Disney Studios is getting back into the business of producing short cartoons, starting with a Goofy vehicle next year," writes Charles Solomon. Related: Laura M Holson reports on the company's plans to "cut about 160 of the 800 jobs at its Disney animation unit, suggesting that it would make fewer movies as it focuses on improving quality." And: USC's Disneyland Beginnings, via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

• Craig Modderno: "Talk about [Eddie] Murphy's Oscar potential has stirred Hollywood in recent weeks, as members of the press and film industry insiders got their first glimpses of his performance as James Early, the James Brown-like singer who dominates the first part of Dreamgirls." Related: In Newsweek, Sean Smith profiles Jennifer Hudson, whose "rendition of the wrenching, defiant ballad 'And I Am Telling You (I'm Not Going)' is one of the most thrilling film moments of this, or any, year," and David Ansen agrees: "Dreamgirls would be worth the price of admission for this one number, but it has plenty of other pleasures."

• AO Scott: "Brad Silberling's 10 Items or Less is a lovely antidote to the bloated, self-important movies that tend to dominate the season. This is a picture with nothing to prove, and not all that much to say, but its modesty and good humor make it hard to resist." More from Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, Aaron Hillis for the Reeler, Kristi Mitsuda for indieWIRE and from Marcy Dermansky.

• "George WS Trow, a writer and media critic known for his biting lamentations over what he saw as the twilight of culture in late-20th-century America, was found dead on Nov 24 in his apartment in Naples, Italy," writes Margalit Fox. "As a result of Mr Trow's work, 'the context of no context' - his pithy indictment of the emptiness of modern discourse - became an enduring catchphrase in intellectual circles." This one's via Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay, who writes, "In a time when our ability to choose when to view, download, buy or rent the latest blockbuster is a major topic of debate, I'm going to be a bit old school and remember Trow and his finally melancholic work," and points to an excerpt from the classic essay in the New Yorker.

• McG may be "an unlikely choice for a tear-jerker about the people who were left behind when a West Virginia college football team was wiped out in a plane crash 36 years ago," but he's won over We Are Marshall screenwriter Jamie Linden. Mark Olsen talks to the players.

• Ben Brantley on David Hare's The Vertical Hour, at the Music Box Theatre, with Bill Nighy and Julianne Moore, directed by Sam Mendes: "Mr Nighy, to put it bluntly, mops the floor with Ms Moore. You could even say that with his irresistibly mannered performance, he mops the floor with Mr Hare's play. Under the circumstances this can only be counted as a blessing." More from John Heilpern in the Observer. Related: Amy Lennard Goehner talks with Moore for Time.

• AO Scott on The Nativity Story: "Rather than trying to reinterpret or modernize a well-known, cherished story, the filmmakers have rendered it with a quiet, unassuming professionalism." More from Hannah Patterson in the Guardian, Stephanie Zacharek for Salon, Mike Russell for the Oregonian and Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Related: Gill Pringle reports in the Independent on the hoopla kicked up by Keisha Castle-Hughes's pregnancy. And via Movie City News, a making-of backgrounder from Liam Lacey in the Globe and Mail.

• For Stephen Holden, The Architect "deteriorates from a potentially enlightening exploration of urban development and class conflict into a preposterous melodrama." Also: 3 Needles.

• Laura Kern reviews Four Eyed Monsters, an "innovative chronicle of a truly modern romance also conveys, in a painful, darkly humorous way, a variety of ultra-identifiable truths, including the loneliness often suffered by big-city inhabitants and the complexities of sexual intimacy." Related: indieWIRE's interview with Susan Buice and Arin Crumley.

• Manohla Dargis: "If stupidity were a crime, the nitwits in the cheap horror flick Turistas would be doing time in Attica."

• Jeannette Catsoulis: Highway Courtesans "reveals the tangle of a culture where sex and economics are inextricably intertwined and Bollywood movies perpetuate images that glamorize prostitution. It's a world where children, no matter their provenance, are always a blessing - especially if they're girls."

• Sewell Chan: "Alarmed by New York City's status as a global center of film and video piracy, Mayor Michael R Bloomberg has embraced a proposal that would criminalize unauthorized recording in movie theaters."

Besides the Book Review's choices for the "10 Best Books of 2006," the "Holiday Books" issue features:

• Liz Brown's quick takes on Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins's A Star is Found: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood's Biggest Movies, Stephen Baldwin's The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the New Hardcore Movement of Faith, Marc Eliot's Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, Ellen Burstyn's Lessons in Becoming Myself and John Carlyle's Under the Rainbow: An Intimate Memoir of Judy Garland, Rock Hudson and My Life in Old Hollywood.

• Richard Schickel: "As Simon Louvish writes in Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, his demonically researched biography, 'the main, supreme object of the adoration and love of Mae West was herself' and as West herself admitted, 'I never loved another person the way I loved myself.' In short, it was her narcissism - her inability to relate to anyone in any intimately persuasive way - that so quickly destroyed her screen career."

• And Bruce Handy reviews Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. First chapter.

"With little in the way of money, with a partly non-professional cast and with plenty of chutzpah, the young British filmmaker Paul Andrew Williams has written and directed a cracking debut feature with enough clout to kick the door in," announces Peter Bradshaw. "It's a cold-sweat gangland thriller with a twist of social realism, which pays intelligent homage to Mike Hodges and Ken Loach. By accident or design, traces of both Get Carter and Cathy Come Home are discernible." London to Brighton, he concludes, is "the best British film of the year." More from Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman: "To say that this film hits the ground running is to understate its urgency." Related: Wendy Ide interviews director Williams for the London Times.

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• "Buoyed by some outstanding films - The Last King of Scotland, This Is England, The Queen and London to Brighton are all world-class and, curiously, trace a line through British life during the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and into the Noughties - this was one of the strongest years of the BIFAs," writes Jason Solomons, who opens with a great story and closes with this: "Harmony Korine... was there in a very ordinary shirt and V-neck jumper but could barely contain his excitement about having last week finished editing his new film Mister Lonely. 'It's pretty weird but it's the best thing I've ever done, by a long, long way,' he told me. It stars Samantha Morton (as Marilyn Monroe), Anita Pallenberg, Werner Herzog and Diego Luna as Michael Jackson."

• Stephen Bayley on the "compelling pornography of hardware" in the work of Michael Mann: "[H]e is with Machiavelli, who insisted that appearances are real. Things matter."

• Mark Salisbury asks Cate Blanchett why she'll be taking a three-year break from the movies. Related: Liz Hoggard marvels at Judi Dench's performance in Notes on a Scandal, asking nonetheless, "But is the female grotesque really so subversive - or just a reductionist scapegoat?"

• William Faulkner's soon-to-be-realized screenplay for a vampire movie has Edward Helmore looking back on the ugly relations between writers and Hollywood in the mid-20th century.

• Nick Laird on The Dead: "Using a screenplay written by his son Tony, [John] Huston managed to create something worthy of Joyce's masterwork, and not simply by being faithful."

• "If you can judge a man by the quality of his political enemies, then Lennon was a titan." John Patterson on The US vs John Lennon.

• David Patrick Stearns: "Though his name was memorable mainly because of his considerably more famous son, the actor Robert Earl Jones, who has died aged 96, had a face that, once seen, was never forgotten."

Filmbrain: "Well deserving of its four Goya Awards (including best film, best director, and best screenplay), The Secret Life of Words is without question a political film, but one that transcends its subject matter to address something far more universal... This is a deeply humanist work, and its optimistic ending (a sticking point with some) reveals a rare and genuine sense of hope, free from maudlin sentimentality."

Richard Corliss on Michael Apted's Up series: "'There are many things that might have happened in my life that haven't happened,' Neil says, 'and there is little point in being regretful and angry about it.' To which an American viewer might respond, Why the hell not? And the answer, I think, is: because they're English."

"The summer blockbuster may not qualify as an endangered species just yet, but more than 30 years after Jaws, it is at least an embattled one, struggling to stay relevant in an altered and fragmented media landscape," writes Dennis Lim. The occasion is the release on DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Miami Vice: "The point of both films seems to be that narrative is beside the point."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Richard Schickel on Gerald Horne's The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten: "[O]ne suspects the author of a selectivity that is, to borrow a phrase, unfortunate and tragic. This, one is also bound to say, is how history was once written in the Soviet Union - with all the inconvenient parts left out."

• Kenneth Turan on The Lives of Others: "A potent narrative about the transformative effect of involvement in other people's stories, Lives turns its own story into a python-tight embrace of nuanced tension and emotional connection. It convincingly demonstrates that when done right, moral and political quandaries can be the most intensely dramatic dilemmas of all." Related: Cineuropa's "Film in Focus."

• Mark Olsen meets Stephen and Timothy Quay and Kristine McKenna reviews their "mesmerizing new film, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes." More from Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

• Rachel Abramowitz profiles Peter O'Toole. Related: Dan Callahan at Slant: "Venus is notable mainly because no one has ever thought to cast O'Toole and [Vanessa] Redgrave in a film together. They're a perfect match-up."

• Geoff Boucher talks with Jack Black.

For Stop Smiling, Josh Tyson exchanges email with Pontus Alv whose debut feature is Strongest of the Strange.

Sujewa Ekanayake has a good long talk with James Ponsoldt about Off the Black.

Sheila Johnston in the Telegraph: "So what did [Alan] Parker want to say in [Bugsy Malone]? Something, perhaps, about the childishness of violence, and the deadly underlying seriousness of children's games? He laughs heartily. 'That's a brilliant line - I think I'll pinch it,' he says. 'No: what I wanted to say was, "I can make movies - will you give me money for the next one?"'"

"Donald Sutherland's Buttocks." In the Independent, Roger Clarke tells the story behind that scene in Don't Look Now.

"Has there ever really been a movie like Reds?" wonders That Little Round-Headed Boy. "[I]t's that thin wire that [Warren] Beatty walks between soapy and serious that makes me admire the movie even more."

"[I]n this day and age where even the smallest display of martial arts on the silver screen quickly becomes a CGI and wire-assisted spectacle, there's something quite refreshing, and even affecting, about the lo-fi approach that Geochilmaru takes," writes Jason Morehead.

Paul Harrill talks with James Longley about Iraq in Fragments.

Via Ray Pride: Ariel Leve interviews Dustin Hoffman for the London Times.

Michael Guillén talks with Stephen Frears about The Queen.

At Cinematical, Christopher Campbell remembers Perry Henzell, 1936 - 2006: "Having grown up listening to Jamaican music and performing in a ska/reggae band, I have to wonder if my life would have been different had The Harder They Come never been made."

Media Matters is tracking the right-wingers' war on penguins.

"How different the history of the LAPD might look, if YouTube had existed half a century ago," begins a piece from Andrew Gumbel in the LA CityBeat. "LA is as good a place as any to observe the radical change in our culture. This is, after all, a city where visual imagery has always held a rare power - whether as a check on reality or as a way of creating a mythological alternative to it."

Deutsche Welle: "Over 100 of Germany's most prominent filmmakers have protested against the government's new copyright laws which they claim infringe on their artistic property rights."

"Bass on Titles provides a rare opportunity to hear Saul Bass' own words, as he describes his most notable work." Via Fimoculous.

"COMPILER.02: From Here to the Ocean is proud to present a group of outstanding films and clips about the never ending longing for the great, deep, violent and mysterious ocean."

Online browsing tip #1. The Visual Telling of Stories. Via popnutten.

Online browsing tip #2. The photography of Simon Norfolk, via wood s lot. Related: Geoff Manaugh interviews Norfolk for his BLDGBLOG.

Online browsing and viewing tip. AtomFilms relaunches.

Online desktop tip. The December Wong Kar-wai calendar.

Online to-do tip. Leslie Harpold's "Advent Calendar 2006."

Posted by dwhudson at December 4, 2006 12:46 PM