Shorts, 12/27.

"Spike Lee has signed on to direct a feature on the life of James Brown for Paramount and Imagine Entertainment," reports Michael Fleming in Variety. "Brian Grazer is producing, and the pic could be in production by late next year, though 2008 is more likely."

In the Los Angeles Times, Jay A Fernandez previews Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow's music biopic parody, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, to star John C Reilly.

"The reputations of both Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller are secure among today's more serious film buffs - and even among some not-so-serious ones, thanks to high-profile homages from the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Todd Haynes," writes Bilge Ebiri at ScreenGrab. "So it's a bit of a surprise that 1949's frazzled noir Shockproof, directed by Sirk from a screenplay co-written by Fuller, is so little known."

"Magic realism leavened with moral seriousness, Pan's Labyrinth belongs with a handful of classic movie fantasies: Cocteau's Orphée, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves," suggests J Hoberman. (Related: Mark Olsen profiles Ivana Baquero in the LAT.) Also: "Revived for a week at the IFC, Jack Garfein's Something Wild, an independent production first released during the Kennedy administration, is an urban fairy tale in several senses."

And also in the Voice:

• Jim Ridley: "It's easy to overpraise a movie like the showily acted, arty Dead Girl because it offers an antidote to Turistas' zipless bloodletting - just as it's easy to cop a knee-jerk pose of moral superiority to the torture-porn genre, which can fiddle with our sympathies and taboos in illuminating ways. But [Karen] Moncrieff's glum, somber film is something of a needed corrective at the moment, when horror movies are turning into weightless exercises in morally sanctioned sadism." But for Slant's Ed Gonzalez, it's a "ousy traffic jam of a movie." Related: It's Mark Olsen again, this time profiling Moncrieff for the LAT.

• "Haven't the people of Iraq suffered enough?" asks Ed Halter. "Nearly four years of destruction, torture and chaos, a monumentally botched occupation and reconstruction, and now a new indignity: serving as collective straight man to spasmodic Italian actor-director Roberto Benigni in his bafflingly obtuse The Tiger and the Snow."

• Ella Taylor: "Blackness may have lurked within the Potter heart, but you'd never know it from Miss Potter, which shifts the burden of ill humor onto the lady author's petit bourgeois mother (the excellent Barbara Flynn), thus freeing Renée Zellweger to perk up Beatrix into a chipper cross between Bridget Jones and Mary Poppins." For Jason Clark, writing at Slant, it's "dreadful... Perhaps the most pointless film bio of all time." Related: Vadim Rizov talks with the cast and director Chris Noonan for the Reeler.

"Luc Besson's Arthur and the Invisibles clears the smog left behind by the year's dubious family entertainments," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. Also: "Ellen Bruno has spent almost 20 years making films about chaos and renewal in Southeast Asia, all rarely seen. Playing for one week at New York City's Film Forum, a program of three films by the documentary filmmaker lays bare her ballsy humanitarianism but exposes her sketchy lyricism."

Clara Rose Thornton talks with Edward Norton about The Painted Veil for Stop Smiling. Related: Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Manhattan Murder Mystery has "a surprisingly sturdy plot; though it moves along via wild coincidences and slapdash logic gaps, it's full of enough twists and turns and has so many virtuoso surprises up its sleeve that it could have stood on its own without having to go all mega-meta hall of mirrors-ish in that Lady from Shanghai climax," finds Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling.

"[T]he reality of Italian politics goes way beyond the most fertile imagination," writes Richard Phillips in a WSWS piece on Nanni Moretti's The Caiman.

Mark Schilling in Variety: "Japanese pics will grab a majority share of the local B.O. in 2006 - the first such victory in 21 years - according to figures released by the Motion Picture Producers Assn of Japan, also known as Eiren."

Online browsing tip. "Today's Pictures" at Slate: "The Miraculous Marlene Dietrich."

Posted by dwhudson at December 27, 2006 9:56 AM