Shorts, 12/18.

"[U]nlike Herzog, who was trying to visualize an historical struggle through the signifiers of romantic mysticism, using the power of parable and allegory, we would suggest that Wenders is more concerned with fascism's absence than its presence, or more precisely, the absence of historical memory of a German past, as well as absence of personal memory too." Via Wim Wenders's December "News Reel," an interview with the director and an evaluation of his career as a single PDF file by Dragana Kitanovic for Prelom. Also: Donata Wenders's Thessaloniki report.

At Reverse Shot, cnw: "[W]ith Kaspar Hauser, Herzog intends on both demystifying and remystifying human experience, to look at the world through the eyes of a man with the mind of a child and to respond with a gasp of wonder and an existential howl."

Herzog's been filming at the site of live volcano in Antarctica in the meantime, and Soraya Roberts reports that he's found it to be a fairly comfortable location.

Also at the Time Out Film Blog:

• Andrew Birkin recalls adapting Perfume. Writing at Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince quite likes the movie.

• Chris Tilly reports that The Queen director Stephen Frears, along with writer Peter Morgan, producer Andy Harries and star Helen Mirren have all been invited to lunch - at Buckingham Palace. Should be a delightful afternoon.

"Some of my professors in school would talk about visiting Heidegger's cabin in Germany and pissing on it. I didn't piss on his cabin, but I did bottle some water from his still functional well as 'Heidegger Spring Water' - a work in progress, art installation of sorts." That's James T Hong, talking to Cheryl Eddy at SF360 about his new film, The Denazification of MH, slated to screen in Rotterdam in January.

Scott Kramer has spent 26 years trying to make the book into a movie, and his odyssey underlines a perennial Hollywood question: Can you adapt a satire without losing your shirt and your mind?" The book is A Confederacy of Dunces, and at Slate, Peter Hyman maps its journey through development hell.

"The novel has had a long, storied journey to the screen. Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep, Isabella Rossellini and Nicole Kidman have been associated with the movie." And now, reports Borys Kit, Brittany Murphy may star in The White Hotel. Also in the Hollywood Reporter: Paul Schrader will be directing Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum in Adam Resurrected.

Leslie Weisman files a longish report on an Orson Welles symposium that took place at Yale a few weeks ago.

What role does passion play in film criticism? Michael Guill�n asks David Thomson.

Among those expounding on the Meaning of Life in the January issue of Esquire: Peter O'Toole, Forest Whitaker, Alan Arkin, Jack Bauer, Penn & Teller and Sarah Silverman & Jimmy Kimmel.

"John Sayles's Honeydripper has wrapped," writes Brendon Connelly. "Now it has to be distributed - and Sayles and the film's producer want our help."

Ray Pride points to Guy Dixon's fun piece in the Globe and Mail on Reg Harkema's Monkey Warfare, with Don McKellar, Tracy Wright, a controversial guerilla marketing campaign and "mixed feelings about the politics it espouses."

Bradford Nordeen sees Another Gay Movie as simply drenched in all the symptoms of what's ailing Queer Cinema these days.

In the Los Angeles Times:

• 40 years since the death of Walt Disney, "neither side has budged much from [an] initial dichotomy of Disney as either the repository of American wholesomeness or as the man who degraded the popular culture, and he remains a convenient symbol for the ongoing debate between those who love and those who detest American popular culture," writes biographer Neal Gabler. "Walt Disney is not either/or - the best or the worst. He is both the best and the worst - not the polarizing center of cultural warfare but a portent of the truce between high and low."

• AS Hamrah on the current torrent of torture porn: "The ingeniously imagineered punishment devices in these movies, along with their chummy torture-chamber repartee and quick recoveries from pain and abuse, aren't so much about the fear of torture as they are about the joy of it - and its necessity. Torture is a duty that filmmakers, like Tom Sawyer painting the fence, have convinced us is a lot of fun."

• Steve Ryfle reviews Joe Eszterhas's The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!, "a rude and sometimes crude manifesto for screenwriters from an ex-icon who wants it known he takes no prisoners in a business where writers are perceived as dispensable cogs."

Curse of the Golden Flower "is compellingly huge, and thrilling in its plot dry-heaves, the ever more grandiose machinations bring increasingly diminishing returns," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Zhang [Yimou] wants the gargantuan, while his script and characters demand intimacy."

"Bold in scope and aptly mimicking the loose structures of kinship, friendship and work most city dwellers make do with these days, Breaking and Entering nonetheless plays out too quiet and too loose for its own good," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. Related: Sarah Lyall talks with Anthony Minghella for the New York Times and the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw has a reading of Minghella's Interflora ad.

Also in the NYT:

• AO Scott on Charlotte's Web: "Gary Winick's film, from a script credited to Susannah Grant and Karey Kirkpatrick, may not be perfect, but it honors its source and captures the key elements - the humor and good sense, as well as the sheer narrative exuberance - that have made [EB] White's book a classic." Slate's Dana Stevens finds it "a scrupulously tasteful rendering.... But the brand of childhood wonder the movie traffics in is just a little sweeter, a little louder, a little busier than White's, and that shade of coarsening makes all the difference." For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, it "always strikes just the right note, honoring the spirit and humor of the novel without oversentimentalizing its delicate themes."

• Stephen Holden: "By the end of Home of the Brave, you may feel as if you have just sat through an earnest made-for-television movie featuring actors who are too pretty to be real people dutifully recycling a formula." More from Vadim Rizov at the Reeler.

• Also, The Secret Life of Words: "[T]he exquisitely coordinated performances elicit an empathy as powerful as anything I can remember feeling in a recent film." More from Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic.

• Jeanette Catsoulis finds Eragon "as lacking in fresh ideas as Tim Allen's manager." More from Tim Robey in the Telegraph.

• Also: "Based on the journal of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber ([Jefferson] Mays) during his turn-of-the-century stay in a Leipzig sanatorium, [Memoirs of My Nervous Illness] documents his clamorous decline in scenes of disturbing potency." Related: indieWIRE interviews director Julian Hobbs.

• And: "Resilience, Paul Bojack's dour examination of unexamined lives, is a slow-burning morality tale simmering with self-interest."

• Neil Genzlinger reviews Reminiscing in Tempo, "a meandering documentary about [Duke] Ellington that mixes the then and the now."

• Also, Danielson: A Family Movie: "Past the one-hour mark, [Danielson's] smugness and pretentious hooey about God using him as an instrument (these songs are the best God could do?) grow more irritating than interesting." Related: Mark Savlov talks with director JL Aronson for the Austin Chronicle.

• Blood Diamond hasn't kept diamond sales from rising, but as Mireya Navarro reports, many potential customers are thinking twice. Will they turn out to be trendsetters? Related: Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "Down to hell Ed Zwick tumbles, over his good intentions."

• John Anderson profiles the screenwriting team of Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (Balls of Fury, Night at the Museum): "If they can be comfortably compared to any other screenwriting pair, it is probably Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, the once-ubiquitous studio comedy team responsible for 90s hits like City Slickers and A League of Their Own. Mr Lennon and Mr Garant, however, push the limits of movie comedy to realms unimagined back then."

• Doug Liman, "his actors and a small crew from the science fiction thriller Jumper - granted unprecedented access even to the amphitheater's labyrinthine guts, where gladiators and doomed beasts once waited - were to shoot their pivotal love scene on a stage that still belongs more to the dead than the living." Peter Kiefer on a rare shoot in Rome's Colosseum.

• Jon Pareles reviews Lou Reed's first staged performance of Berlin in 33 years: "he show, directed by the painter Julian Schnabel with Hal Willner as music producer, gave Berlin what might be called the Next Wave treatment."

• "Today neutral terms describing homosexuality are commonplace, having long since joined the vocabulary list deemed fit and proper to be spoken in front of the footlights," writes Charles Isherwood. "But as The Little Dog Laughed, Regrets Only and Borat have lately shown, old-school mockery, refitted for a new, post-politically-correct era, is making a comeback."

• "The Smithsonian Institution has agreed to develop a system to document and explain its decisions about why television and film producers are granted or denied access to its collections outside of a widely criticized contract the institution entered into with Showtime Networks," reports Edward Wyatt.

• Here come two docs on meerkats, warns Charles Lyons.

Children of Men revs up: Ray Pride talks with Alfonso Cuar�n for the Reeler and Logan Hill interviews Clive Owen for New York.

David Thomson on Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima: "In my opinion, these two films - and they are as linked as The Godfather and The Godfather Part II - are not just the films of this year but the best thing Eastwood has ever done." From there, it's a rambling consideration of the work other filmmakers - many other filmmakers - have done past the age of 70.

Also in the Guardian, another big Guardian/National Film Theatre interview: Mark Lawson talks with Oliver Stone - and Ronald Bergan remembers Leon Niemczyk: 'In one of his last interviews, he said: "I was never a party member and I don't give a damn for all that communism, but I still believe that it was the best time for Poland's movie industry.'"

Mike remembers costume designer and make-up artist Van Smith at Bad Lit: "Ever since pairing up for [John] Waters's breakthrough hit Pink Flamingos, the two always worked together, having made more movies together than even Waters and his superstar Divine."

Dennis Cozzalio remembers Shirley Walker, "a pioneer who opened doors for women in the role of film scoring and composing."

Candy has Dennis Harvey reviewing the history of heroin addiction movies at SF360.

"We've done a seven-part, nearly 15-hour film on the history of the American experience in the second World War," Ken Burns tells the LA CityBeat's David Davin. And now, Burns and PBS are bracing themselves "for a showdown with the FCC over the language."

"I wasn't quite prepared for Counsellor at Law, which, unlike so many other studio dramas of the 20s and 30s, is shockingly contemporary in tone, characterization, and mise-en-scene," writes Darren Hughes. "It is also the perfect introduction to the films of William Wyler."

In Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich "correctly depicts LA primarily as a locus of the scientific military-industrial complex," writes Alex at motion picture, it's called. "There is a diminution within the movie of 'old' LA industries (film, entertainment, media, tourism) in favor of the newly dominant military industries." Via Zach Campbell.

"The Siren thinks of [Michael] Curtiz's signal virtue as pacing. His films move, often at breakneck speed. Something like Mandalay, with a complicated plot fully teased out over 65 minutes, stands in pleasant contrast to a modern genre movie like X-Men, in which half an hour of exposition is combined with almost zero actual character development.... Mandalay is tosh, but it is enjoyable tosh, and nine-tenths of the pleasure is definitely Kay [Francis]."

Jeff at Cinema Strikes Back: "King Hu's Raining in the Mountain is a meticulously composed, beautifully crafted film. It should be required viewing for any film fan who wrongly looks down upon 'old school' martial arts films as shoddy, lowest-common denominator fare."

Chrissy Iley interviews Denzel Washington for the Observer. Also, Philip French on It's Winter.

Lesley O'Toole interviews Val Kilmer. Also in the Independent, Robin Knox-Johnston on Deep Water and James Rampton on "a potent, yet bleak new BBC1 drama": "Boasting an unusually stellar cast for television - movie stars Colin Firth and Robert Carlyle rub shoulders with Emilia Fox, Anne-Marie Duff, David Oyelowo and Julia Davis - Born Equal explores the gulf between rich and poor."

For the New York Press, Jennifer Merin talks with James Ponsoldt about Off the Black.

Richard Young has a brief talk with The US vs John Lennon co-director David Leaf for openDemocracy.

"Shut Up and Sing is less a political statement than an analysis of the music industry itself," notes Chuck Tryon (and there's more on that one from Ken Morefield at Looking Closer). Also: how Fast Food Nation "manages to be self-critical, questioning its own premise as an activist movie."

"Get ready for The Devil Wears Prada - the original," writes Denise Martin for Variety. "A&E IndieFilms and RJ Cutler are bringing fashion dynamo Anna Wintour to the bigscreen in a feature-length documentary chronicling the making of Vogue's September issue."

"[Y]es, watching The Cave of the Yellow Dog does sometimes feel like eating your vegetables," admits Jonathan Kiefer in the Sacramento News and Review. "But if that sounds entirely insufferable, you may need to work on transcending your desire to skip right to dessert."

The Swedes are up in arms over a Turkish documentary that "depicts Sweden as a barbarian land responsible for the genocide of Sami and Roma peoples." Paul O'Mahony reports for the Local.

"The Mahabharata could have been a truly great comic work if the role of Krishna were to be played by Groucho Marx," suggests Jai Arjun Singh. Via Alan Vanneman at Bright Lights After Dark.

"[C]ome next Spring, there will be no fewer than eight new Tim Lucas audio commentaries on the market."

Online browsing tip #1. Videodokument: Video Art in Slovenia, 1969 - 1998.

Online browsing tip #2. A few movie interiors and a lot of Chlo� Sevigny at House and Garden.

Online calendar-marker tip. 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a ten-DVD series coming out over the next two years, beginning with Robert Rauschenberg: Open Score on February 27. At the very least, click to watch Rauschenberg's trailer.

Online viewing tip #1. Bilge Ebiri has wkw/tk/1996@7'55"hk.net, a commercial short by Wong Kar-wai.

Online viewing tip #2. More commercial work, this time from Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. At Twitch, Todd's found Total Bangkok.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Grady Hendrix has found a new (and frustratingly ill-cut) trailer for Tears of the Black Tiger and a (far better) Japanese trailer for Election.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The best of November at no fat clips!!!.

Posted by dwhudson at December 18, 2006 10:17 AM