Weekend shorts.

"A remarkable feat of concentration, Zodiac is a fully mature triumph," raves Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Talk to [David] Fincher and he'll tell you he just wanted to tell a damn good story. Mission accomplished. Yet it's his very lack of pretense, coupled with a determination to get the facts down with maximum economy and objectivity, that gives Zodiac its hard, bright integrity. As a crime saga, newspaper drama, and period piece, it works just fine. As an allegory of life in the information age, it blew my mind."

More via Jeffrey Wells: James Verniere in the Boston Herald: "This is the GoodFellas of psycho-killer thrillers." Benjamin Svetkey has backgrounder in Entertainment Weekly. More raves: Variety's Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter's Michael Rechtshaffen.

David Poland reports that Francis Ford Coppola invited Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese - you know, a few old friends - to be among the first to see Youth Without Youth on Thursday night: "Word is that the film is 'good, but very difficult.' Works for me."

Eleven years since his last, Raúl Ruiz introduces his new volume, Poetics of Cinema 2:

What I write today is rather more of a consolatio philosophica. However, let no one be mistaken about this, a healthy pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism. 'Light, more light,' were Goethe's last words as he died. 'Less light, less light,' Orson Welles cried repeatedly on a set - the one and only time I saw him. In today's cinema (and in today's world) there is too much light. It is time to return to the shadows. So, about turn! And back to the caverns!

Babel's got David Denby thinking in the New Yorker: "JB Priestley, putting into practice arcane theories about the simultaneity of past, present and future, juggled time frames in his theater work in the 1930s and 40s. Harold Pinter, in Betrayal, his 1978 play about a love affair gone sour, ran time backward, from the bitter present to the happy past. But the current cycle of disordered narratives - in movies, at any rate - began with Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's malevolently funny pop masterwork from 1994." But: "Babel feels like the first example of a new genre - the highbrow globalist tearjerker." On the one hand, Denby prefers the "open form" of L'Avventura: "[I]t didn't play around with time sequences, but it altered our sense of how life works." On the other hand, "Straightforward chronology driven by cross-cutting among parallel actions, a technique that was invented by DW Griffith almost a hundred years ago... still may be the best way of leading us to the paradise of a morally complicated but flawlessly told story."

"But what is tenderness?" asks Emmanuel Burdeau in a review of Lady Chatterley. "On the scale of the entire film, it is conceived rather easily: what could have been a melodrama - love against society - is here not a genre, just an affirmation of life." Also in Cahiers du cinema: Burdeau on "terrible ironist of the possible" Alain Resnais's Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places).

"[I]t's two incongruous movies mushed together - half of a chitlin-circuit drive-in double-bill meets a sympathetic small-town melodrama. You can enjoy the curiosity of the combination, but Black Snake Moan isn't quite a prime specimen of either of its components," writes Nick Pinkerton in Stop Smiling.

Dax-Devlon Ross: "Five Films That Shaped Black America in the 90s." Via Bryan Whitefield at ScreenGrab, where Kent M Beeson reviews Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies: A Critical Guide to Contemporary Horror Films and Bilge Ebiri points to CHOW's list of the ten best food scenes.

Filmmaker Nezar Hussein sends a note from Baghdad. Also: Graydon Carter introduces GOOD's list of the "51 Best Magazines Ever."

Despite the success of the Three Amigos, the Mexican film industry is, to put it mildly, "troubled." Lorenza Muñoz and Reed Johnson report. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Paul Pringle notes that "the Spirit Awards ceremony is subsidized by taxpayers as a charitable service, much like American Red Cross shelters and skid row soup kitchens." And "philanthropy watchdogs" are not happy.

"In Bambi vs Godzilla, a collection of tough-minded essays about the film business, [David Mamet,] the award-winning playwright turned screenwriter and director posits a 'repressive mechanism' to account for our appetite for dramas that have ceased to be dramatic and entertainments that barely entertain," notes Walter Kirn. "'The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring,' he writes, comparing them to the expensive weapons systems whose presence makes us feel secure in other ways. These filmed extravaganzas send the message that 'you are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting $200 million on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.'"

Also in the New York Times:

• AO Scott on The Abandoned: "Slinking into theaters yesterday without critics' screenings or much advance publicity, it is less frightening than puzzling. Through the murk and gloom of its images, a mystery emerges: why didn't this go straight to DVD?" Cinematical's Scott Weinberg finds it "dry, redundant and entirely bereft of cinematically salable components." Robert J Lewis had a different take in September: "Cowritten with Montreal Fantasia cofounder Karim Hussain and the talented - and woefully underemployed - filmmaker Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil), The Abandoned takes its key cues from Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond but to dismiss it as just another homage does a great disservice to the considerable skill of its director, [Nacho Cerdà,] who displays a mastery of his tools that betrays his lean filmography (not to mention commitment: he nursed his debut through eight years of development)."

• Roberta Smith on the works of one of the greatest living photographers, Jeff Wall: "These are outright gorgeous, fully equipped all-terrain visual vehicles, intent on being intensely pleasurable while making a point or two about society, art, history, visual perception, the human animal or all of the above." Trân Dúc Vân attended the opening night party for the MoMA retrospective (tomorrow through May 14) and files a diary entry for Artforum.

• Peter Keepnews reviews Howard Pollack's George Gershwin: His Life and Work and JD Biersdorfer reviews Jennifer Ouellette's The Physics of the Buffyverse.

Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot: "Damnation, which preceded Sátántangó and marks the beginning of the recognizable [Béla] Tarr aesthetic - a world of cinematographer Gábor Medvigy's beautiful blacks and whites, where shots generally equal sequences allowing ample space for composer Mihály Vig's yearning themes to roam and where novelist and screenwriter László Krasznahorkai's words pit melancholy against absurdity for narrative primacy - isn't a bad place to start examining Hungary's most prominent filmmaker. Imagine mating the quotidian impulses of early Jarmusch with Lynch's baroque chiaroscuro in some of kind of post-Communist Double Indemnity, and you'd wind up not far from Damnation, the most narratively rigorous (while still remaining tantalizingly oblique) and least lengthy of Tarr's films that I've seen."

Jeff GP at the Six-Reel Shuffle: "Largely due to the bravura performance of Tomas Milian... The Big Gundown stakes its place as arguably the greatest non-Sergio Leone spaghetti western (Lee Van Cleef's strongest performance, a glorious score from Ennio Morricone, no-nonsense direction from Sergio Sollima and the intellectually complicated subject matter may also contribute)."

Bill Gibron announces the first annual SEALS, i.e., the best films of the year according to Short Ends and Leader at PopMatters. Best Film: The Prestige.

Online listening tip #1. The Observer's Philip French talks with Clint Eastwood.

Online listening tip #2. Michael Kress interviews Billy Bob Thornton and Virginia Madsen for beliefnet.

Online viewing tip #1. Ryan Wu's found a machinima reenactment of the first part of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times.

Online viewing tip #2. Terry Gilliam talks about Brazil. Via wood s lot.

Online viewing tips #3 and #4. Steve Kurtz Waiting. Via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing, where Cory Doctorow points to an amazing little short by Jarratt Moody and to the latest from Save the Internet.

Online viewing tip #5. Phil Morehart at Facets Features: "Start the weekend off right with the crazy-insane footwork of the Nicholas Brothers in the 1943 classic, Stormy Weather."

Online viewing tips. Like trailer mash-ups? CineFile Video's got a few. The highlight: Something Blue.

Posted by dwhudson at February 24, 2007 1:46 PM