Shorts, 12/29.

Delightful holiday reading: David Rakoff has been watching the Essentially Woody series and writing marvelous entries about what all these films conjure for Nextbook. Related: cnw at Reverse Shot on Bullets Over Broadway.

Not at all delightful: "Kyoko Kishida, who starred in the landmark film Woman in the Dunes as a young widow consigned to a life of isolation and Sisyphean labor at the bottom of a sand pit, died on Dec 17 in Tokyo. She was 76," reports Stuart Lavietes for the New York Times.

So the Chicago Reader's had a film blog since mid-November and I've only found it just now? A mention here might not be a bad idea.

"It's a shame that Ciao! Manhattan!, which incorporates [Edie] Sedgwick's passing into its action, is better known today than her Warhol efforts," writes David Ehrenstein in the LA Weekly. "But as hapless as it is, it's still preferable to Factory Girl, a film whose current notoriety stems from Bob Dylan threatening to sue its makers. He has a point. Maybe even a case."

Mrs Waggish presents her "best effort at making sense of" Inland Empire and points to three more "compelling interpretations": Brian Holcomb at Beyond Hollywood, Patrick's Thoughts on Stuff and Dan Eisenberg at Cinemathematics.

"Now that three and half years of futile war and repudiation at the polls have punctured most of the administration's neo-con fantasies, Hollywood feels safe enough to deal with realities the government and media have been spinning fairy tales about for so long," writes Peter Keough, opening a preview of what'll be on offer in early 2007 for the Boston Phoenix.

Darcy Paquet has a few predictions for the year in Korean cinema at Koreanfilm.org.

"Running Wild is more proof that some of the most stylish action films are currently made in Korea," writes Peter Nellhaus.

Joe Leydon wishes cinema a happy birthday.

Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE on The Dead Girl: "As with her first feature, Blue Car, [Karen] Moncrieff exhibits an admirable sensitivity in her earnest regard of her subjects and textural feel for images; she has a way of visualizing the female form - especially when nude - in a manner that attributes rather than strips personhood, as so often happens in American film. But this thoughtfulness is often undone by a disappointing narrative predictability." More from Stephen Holden in the NYT: "If the concentrated bile is bracing to a point, I don't totally buy it." And from Justin Ravitz in the New York Press.

Also in the NYP: "It would be callously simple-minded to reject We Are Marshall as just another piece of Jock Uplift," writes Armond White. "This movie does something special: It confronts the problem of America attempting to heal itself." And: "The Painted Veil fails largely because modern filmmakers have lost faith in how stories convey emotional longing and are powered by erotic impulses (the Sternberg secret)."

Andy Klein on Arthur and the Invisibles: "It may not all be derivative, but it feels that way."

"A film gives the broad sweep; but accumulated detail is what makes a biography." Miss Potter gets Valerie Grove ruminating in the London Times. More from Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "[T]he picture skips along with surefooted grace; there are times when it seems headed straight for a sticky saccharine trap, but [director Chris] Noonan and his actors always manage to swerve out of danger."

"Luckily, moral lessons are largely irrelevant in an action thriller, and when Children of Men gets going, about halfway through, you'll be more concerned about catching your breath than figuring things out," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger, where she also talks with director Alfonso Cuar�n. More from Kurt at Twitch: "It is fair to say that Cuar�n has possibly made the best directed film of 2006." Related: Caryn James in the NYT: "[W]hile this Alfonso Cuar�n film is inspired by the 1992 [PD] James novel, the movie is so purely cinematic, and its plot departs so widely from the book's, that the screen version may obscure how wonderfully rich and unlikely that novel is."

Josh Rosenblatt reviews City of Men, "a 19-episode series about two young men growing up in one of Brazil's most notorious slums" produced by Fernando Meirelles; also in the Austin Chronicle: Joe O'Connell's local news roundup.

Peter Daniels at the WSWS on Fast Food Nation: "It's not every day that a major American film depicts 'illegal' immigrant workers sympathetically, with dialogue about the worthlessness of the Democratic and Republican parties and 'the machine that's taken over the country.'"

Casino Royale "takes considerable pains to suggest that this womanizing and shrewd, instrumentalizing persona is a rational response to - or escape from - his dehumanizing line of work," notes Brian Cook at In These Times, but: the film "may attempt a meaningful pursuit of what makes Bond tick, but in the end, it's all too willing to accept being a mere disposable pleasure."

Matt Zoller Seitz: "To say that the new film version of Charlotte's Web doesn't dishonor its source sounds like a backhanded compliment, but it's actually the highest praise."

Joan Dupont profiles Grbavica director Jasmila Zbanic for the International Herald Tribune.

Back in the NYT: If Savion Glover hadn't agreed to dance for Mumble, there'd have been no Happy Feet. Maybe. John Rockwell looks into it; and Roberto Benigni's The Tiger and the Snow is "a scorching affront to Italians, Iraqis and the intelligence of movie audiences everywhere," declares Jeannette Catsoulis. More from Vadim Rizov at the Reeler.

Online browsing tip. "Magnum photographers at the movies at Slate.

Online listening tip. New Yorker Films founders Daniel and Toby Talbot on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at December 29, 2006 7:04 AM