Jumpstart-the-week shorts.

"We've spent five years on it, and we are really close," Milestone Films co-founder Dennis Doros told Sean Axmaker last July. When word got round that Killer of Sheep might well see a theatrical release this spring - 30 years after Charles Burnett made it, mind you - there was little reason to doubt that Milestone would come through. But it sure is nice to see that poster. Gabriel Wardell's got it at his indieWIRE blog.

Murnau, Ford, Brecht. A collage entry of sorts, on war, from Andy Rector.

"[S]lash may represent an important half-way point as countries around the world edge up to the sexual explicitness they associate with Brokeback Mountain," writes Henry Jenkins in an entry on "the rise of Bhaisexuals in Hindi cinema" and more. "We've already seen the influence of anime and manga on American slash fan. What will happen when Bollywood and Singaporean films enter the mix?"

"[A]nyone getting ready to go to Park City next week has a list of about seven films they really want to see." Cinematical editor James Rocchi lists his.

Latest lists:

• John Adair has two lists. The first ranks "the older films I've encountered for the first time"; the second is "a list of new films that came out in 2006. The former is much more difficult in that it includes a much longer starting list. The latter is difficult in being able to find 10 films worthy of listing." #1 on the first: Brief Encounter ("Yeah, I know. I'm kind of surprised too."); #2 on the second: L'Enfant.

• Joe Bowman puts Children of Men at the top of his list.

That Little Round-Headed Boy: "CSA: The Confederate States of America would have easily made my best of 2006 list if I had seen it last year."

"Where do you turn for consolation?" Deborah Solomon asks John Ashbury, who answers, "Probably to a movie, something with Barbara Stanwyck."

Also in the New York Times:

• Other than the fact that the damn thing has sold six million copies, why in the world would you want to make a movie out of Atlas Shrugged? Kimberly Brown follows the adaptation's long and winding road to nowhere, though it does look close to happening this time: Randall Wallace is working on the screenplay, Ray producers Howard and Karen Baldwin are "overseeing the project" and Angelina Jolie, "who has called herself something of a Rand fan," may star.

• An American Crime, starring Catherine Keener as "Gertrude Baniszewski, who provoked and participated in a heinous 1965 slaying that shook the Midwest," premieres at Sundance on Friday. Pat H Broeske talks with Ellen Page, who plays the 16-year-old who was tortured and killed, and with director Tommy O'Haver: "It would have been easy to take this story over the top... My mantra was 'restraint, restraint, restraint.'"

• Lewis Beale checks in on the third adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. This one stars Will Smith and is directed by Francis Lawrence and co-written and co-produced by Akiva Goldsman.

• Will Hermes: "[W]hile [David] Byrne has been busy being a curator, sculpturing, drawing, mounting theatrical pieces about deposed foreign leaders and buying shoes, he has also become, without fanfare or Talking Heads reunion tours, perhaps the single greatest influence on the current generation of indie rockers. Four of the most hotly anticipated CDs of 2007 - by the Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, !!! and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - are coming from bands that, each in its individual way, show a clear stylistic debt to Mr Byrne and his old group."

Metaphilm's running a generous excerpt from Mark T Conard's The Philosophy of Neo-Noir: "Reservoir Dogs: Redemption in a Postmodern World."

For "the first time in its 10-year history," Newsweek's Oscar Roundtable "was held before a live audience, at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theater in Hollywood." That was Saturday. Today, David J Jefferson whets the appetite for its appearance online in a week: "Leonardo DiCaprio was a Romper Room reject. Helen Mirren was a rotten schoolteacher. Penélope Cruz kept running to the bathroom between takes to cry while making her first English-speaking movie. Forest Whitaker nodded off while filming a crucial scene in Bird and didn't realize he was on a movie set when he awoke. Cate Blanchett says she would like to have been Gregory Peck. And Brad Pitt once had a job chauffeuring strippers to bachelor parties."

"Around the world, somehow, women find it a lot easier to make movies than they do here in the US," writes Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter. "Even the most talented women, who usually establish themselves with low-budget indie fare, somehow wind up directing movies for television, lame romantic comedies or studio family films that no self-respecting male would touch." What's going on? She asks a few women directors, both American and not. Also: A talk with Michael Tolkin about The Return of the Player: "I don't think there's much exaggeration in the book. It's not satire."

Jason Solomons has a longish piece in the Observer on how Oscar may favor women over 40 this year; it's followed by Philip French's and Mark Kermode's Oscar wishlists. Also: Oprah's "tendency to declare which films and actors are most deserving could swing votes in one of the tightest awards races in years, according to some members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences." At least that's what David Smith's heard.

And:

• Philip French remembers Andi Engel: "In 1989, he wrote and directed his only movie, the aptly named Melancholia, the best picture shown in Cannes that year. It's a taut, quasi-autobiographical thriller in which Jeroen Krabbé plays a hard-drinking German art critic and disillusioned former political activist lured out of his London retirement to assassinate a notorious Chilean torturer."

• Also: "When Buñuel's Tristana was nominated as Best Foreign Language film in 1970, the old Spanish anarchist told Variety: 'Nothing would disgust me more morally than receiving an Oscar... I wouldn't have it in my house.'" And a review of The Last King of Scotland.

• Lynn Barber meets David Attenborough, whose latest doc is, "for once, is not about animals, but about a human being, Tom Harrisson. Harrisson is mainly known as the founder of Mass Observation, a nationwide survey he started in 1937 to find out how the different classes in Britain really lived."

• Stephanie Merritt talks with Bill Bailey and Sean Foley about putting together Pinter's People, an evening of comic shorts by Harold Pinter. Foley: "These are classic comedy sketches, some of them written for revues and cabaret nights, and there's this strain of surrealism - he got there 12 years before Monty Python." Also: A review of Ricky Gervais's Fame.

• Chrissy Iley interviews Joseph Fiennes.

Somehow missed this one earlier: "[T]he decline of American cinema began in 1976 when Rocky emerged as the surprise hit of the season, beating out Taxi Driver, All The President's Men, Bound For Glory and Network for Best Picture at the Academy Awards ceremony the following spring," writes Joe Queenan in the Guardian. "Thirty years later, Stallone's merry abuse of African-Americans continues unabated."

Related: In the Los Angeles Times, Queenan considers The Interpreter, The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond: "In each of these movies, beleaguered black folks marooned in forlorn, blood-drenched African nations get to see justice done because of the heroic efforts of some truly fabulous white people. 'White Folks to the Rescue!' is a glorious tradition that stretches back at least as far as the Tarzan movies."

Acquarello sees aspects of Robert Bresson, Manoel de Oliveira and Raúl Ruiz in Eugène Green's Le Pont des arts.

Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org: "An unusual mix of politics and melodrama that ranges from 1980 up until the present day, The Old Garden represents a collaboration between two generations of anti-authoritarian artists: young director Im Sang-soo, known for his filmmaking talent and taste for controversy; and novelist Hwang Seok-young, a prizewinning author who spent the 1980s in exile and then served five years in prison in the 1990s for an unauthorized visit to North Korea."

David Lowery describes the moment he "fell in love with Rossellini."

"[T]here's something compelling about people who truly believed they were making the world a better place," writes J Robert Parks in a review of Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. "That makes the film's conclusion especially heartbreaking.... The abstract idea of Jonestown is transformed into something deeply personal and profoundly moving."

Nick Davis: "My friend Bob on Curse of the Golden Flower: 'It's a slog, man. Very beautiful colors, but if I wanted to see a bunch of people just walking through a palace, I'd watch The West Wing.' Does anyone still need a review?" Of course, he's got one - slaps it with a "D+," too.

"Forget Astro Boy!" shouts Jerry at Cartoon Brew. "Digital Meme has announced an upcoming release of a new DVD collection of vintage Japanese anime that predates Tezuka's classic by thirty years!" Due in April - and not cheap.

Kristin Thompson sorts out the Hobbit mess as best as any outsider can at this point.

Online viewing tip. Rebecca Conroy "has amassed an incredibly impressive selection of shorts in various genres," writes Mike at Bad Lit. He reviews seven and points to six of those viewable on YouTube.

Posted by dwhudson at January 14, 2007 3:31 PM