Shorts, 3/22.

"After seeing the picture, it's easy to understand why this was [Werner] Herzog's final collaboration with [Klaus Kinski] (reportedly the director afterward claimed that Kinski had 'become uncontrollable') but Kinski's performance nevertheless serves up a potent confusion of documentary and fiction that has long been an essential element of Herzog's filmmaking," writes Ed Halter of Cobra Verde in the Voice. "Kinski's character, however, is far from the film's only serving of astonishing insanity: Herzog depicts the 19th century as an insensibly violent era, with both Africans and Europeans given equal time for maniac brutality."

More from AO Scott in the New York Times: "Werner Herzog's great subject, or rather his dominant preoccupation - what paranoia was to Alfred Hitchcock or violence to Sam Peckinpah - is mania."

Doug Cummings pleas for a home video release of "Leo McCarey's sublime and shattering Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the last film screened in the UCLA film archive's Curated by... Guy Maddin series."

"[P]erhaps European cinema doesn't exist in Europe but it seems to be identifiable in the United States where they'll tell you that Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Pedro Almodóvar, Patrice Chéreau or Emir Kusturiça are 'European' auteurs with a sort of common language that is not necessarily perceptible when viewed from where we are," Cédric Klapisch suggests to Fernando Garcia Acuna and Ariadna Matamoro at Café Babel. Via Ray Pride.

"Looks like Amir Muhammad is on a roll now," writes The Visitor at Twitch. "The Appeals Commmittee of the Malaysian Censorship Board has made its final decision and upholds the ban on Amir's new documentary, Village People Radio Show (Apa Khabar Orang Kampung). This is the second film of his to be banned locally. Last year, The Last Communist was banned by the Home Ministry after it was initially approved for screening by the Censorship Board."

"Any doubts you might have about Amazing Grace - and I had plenty - are dispersed when you meet Youssou N'Dour, the Senegalese musician who makes his acting debut in the film, playing the freed slave Olaudah Equiano," writes Stephen Moss in the Guardian. Related: "Next Sunday marks the bicentenary of the abolition of one of history's greatest crimes - the transatlantic slave trade. The British government must formally apologise for it," demands London Mayor Ken Livingstone. And Josef Braun in the Vue Weekly: "Boldly, bluntly directed by Michael Apted, Amazing Grace should convince just about anybody that slavery was, you know, a goddamned abomination." And Time Out's Chris Tilly talks with Apted.

Also in the Guardian: "No one who ever ventured behind a camera has adopted a more unapologetically bleak view of the relationship between men and women than Ingmar Bergman." Joe Queenan watches the entire oeuvre - in chronological order. "I found the classic movies from the 50s and 60s even better than I remembered, even more arresting now than the first time I saw them two decades ago." But: "To me, everything from Cries and Whispers onward seemed absurdly depressing and monotonous; in many cases I found myself literally cringing in the presence of autumnal work by a once-great director who had simply lost his way and was not going to find it again."

And: Harriet Lane interviews John Hurt and Maxim Jakubowski wonders, "Why has Peter Greenaway gone so out of fashion?"

"With roughly six weeks to go before a certain webslinger signals the start of the summer blockbuster stampede, your multiplex offerings for the rainy season remain a scattered assortment of medium-budgeted odds and ends - movies too small, troubled or just plain sorry to compete with their presold franchise big brothers." Sean Burns dares to peek ahead for the Philadelphia Weekly.

"[I]n the tradition of the finest forms of American entertainment, both Air Guitar Nation and the geekcraft it chronicles go way beyond shtick and self-parody into some meta-meta-ironic zone, where it's never clear from one moment to the next what is a joke and what is deadly earnest, until the two concepts finally merge into a sort of Buddhist singularity," proposes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "I think it hardly needs saying that Homer Simpson would make a brilliant air guitarist (if only he would get off his lard ass and practice)." More from Michelle Orange at the Reeler. Online listening tip: Annie Frisbie talks with director Alexandra Lipsitz for Zoom In Online.

Max Goldberg, writing at SF360, is disappointed to find that "Colour Me Kubrick can't get past its conceit, a ten-minute character sketch dragged into feature length." More from Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Michelle Orange at the Reeler, Felicia Feaster in the New York Press and Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "Conway is a juicy role, and [John] Malkovich gnaws on it with all the gusto you'd expect from Mr Art-Movie Hambone Actor himself."

Back in Slant, Ed Gonzalez finds The Last Mimzy "rather special" (more from Rob Nelson in the Voice, where he riffs on Mimzy's director, New Line head Bob Shaye) and Sacco and Vanzetti [site] rather "dry" but worthwhile, and Jason Clark gives Fay Grim four out of four stars: "After the onslaught of political documentaries produced and released in the wake of the war in Iraq, the last place you'd expect to see possibly the most astute allegory about the US's role in our current war is in America's drollest, most deadpan comic indie director. But Hal Hartley's delirious, delectable sequel to his 1998 triumph Henry Fool is exactly where you'll find it."

Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE on The Page Turner: "Even Chabrol would have leavened the proceedings a bit with a few gags, and plumbed more fully the class stratification lurking around the edges in his revenge play. But [Denis] Dercourt... plugs resolutely, stubbornly forward, convinced that whooshing strings and portentous camera movements offer the potential to cover up for the utter lack of thrills." On the other hand, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir calls it a "fine example of the excellence of French genre film right now: A dark tale of revenge with an inscrutable heart, ice in its veins and an electric undercurrent of eroticism, it also might be the best-photographed picture I've seen so far this year."

DK Holm, writing for ScreenGrab, catches four documentaries by the Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay at Portland's Cinema Project.

In the New York Times:

• "A harrowing 20-minute sequence of nighttime combat in Blessed by Fire, a bitter remembrance of the Falklands War in 1982, captures battlefield chaos and confusion with a visceral force you won't forget," writes Stephen Holden. "[T]he film portrays the conflict as a mismanaged, vainglorious spasm of nationalism conceived by a fascistic military junta the year before it was voted out of power."

• Sharon Waxman reports on dueling versions of Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor's and executive producer Joe Roth's. "[W]hy did Roth hire Taymor in the first place?" wonders Nikki Finke. "I'm told everyone began the movie with Taymor expecting trouble.... [U]nlike what the NYT portrayed, the problems with Taymor's version of Across the Universe went far beyond length." On the other hand, Glenn Kenny: "Let Taymor Be Taymor."

• Powell's Books is "planning a new series of short films featuring authors, to be shown at bookstores, movie-premiere style." Julie Bosman reports.

"The saddest thing about Stranger Than Fiction is that it wants us to confess that none of it is real, even as it asks us to pretend it is," writes Nick Rombes of "one of those movies that is more inspired than its reviews suggest."

"To paraphrase Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, I've seen a lot of hard-boiled eggs, but Trapped is 20 minutes!" exclaims That Little Round-Headed Boy.

"In remarks which he himself described as 'high treason,' [Stephen] Fry suggested that Britons could be over-rated in the US because of their accent and the 'brittle contrivances' of their acting style," reports Cahal Milmo for the Independent. Ryan Gilbey comments: "There may be some truth in this, although Fry's argument would be strengthened if viewers of all nationalities weren't in agreement that his own performance in Gosford Park was the one element keeping that film from masterpiece status."

Besides, adds Toby Young in the Guardian, "On first hearing an English accent 50 years ago, Americans might have thought: stately home, private school, good manners. Nowadays, they think: low income, poor diet, alcohol problem."

Somewhat related: AA Gil in Vanity Fair: "The British in New York are not good mixers. We hunker together, forming bitchy old boys' and girls' clubs where we complain about and giggle over Americans like nannies talking about difficult, stupid children. An English girl, newly arrived, has been picked up by the expat coven and asked for tea. And rather nonplussed, she says, 'It's sad and sort of weird. This is the way our grandparents used to behave in Africa and India.'"

And then there's New York's "New York vs London" cover package.

"With Fight Club, whether he intended to or not, [Chuck] Palahniuk has shown us that fascism can be created right before our eyes, almost invisibly, and we won't even see it happening," writes Savannah Schroll Guz at PopMatters. Also: Bill Gibron on The Fallen Idol.

From Andy Spletzer's tales from the set: "It wasn't until well into the shoot that I found out that our lead actress Jessica Rose, was famous. You may be asking why it took me so long. Well, that's because I had heard about the whole Lonelygirl15 phenomenon without ever investigating."

Adam Nayman interviews Bong Joon-ho at Reverse Shot.

Sujewa Ekanayake's fired up yet another one: The Real Indie Film News Blog.

Michael Atkinson for the Philadelphia City Paper: "Daniele Thompson's Avenue Montaigne... is a pop-French movie-movie paradigm, performing like a racehorse at exactly the tasks we've expected French movies to do best since the salade days of Jacques Demy: intimate realism, effervescent romance, sly urban comedy, idealized Gallic savoir-faire."

First Snow is "dark," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press, "but a bright spot in [Guy] Pearce's career, who has needed a rebound since butchering Andy Warhol in Factory Girl." More from Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE and Nick Schager at Cinematical.

"Praise for The Lives of Others, particularly from Germany, comes partly at the expense of Goodbye, Lenin!, a 2003 box office success at home and abroad, which skipped lightly over the dark side of East Germany," writes Steve Crawshaw, author of Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century, in openDemocracy.

Owen Hatherley: "[A]t the risk of this blog tipping over into a general tribute to the aesthetics of a now defunct and sometimes rather questionable country, here's a link to a fascinating piece on Moscow's Kinopanorama." Olga Chernysheva for Artmargins.

Ben Slater keeps learning more and more about Saint Jack.

"This is an exercise in cynicism and meanness," announces Magazine Death Pool. "I am going to show all of you - on the heels of Premiere closing its doors - why the very same thing could happen to Entertainment Weekly." Related: Diego Vasquez in Media Life on the coming shakeout for celebrity magazines.

Via Fimoculous, WTFCNN?; related: "Does CNN really have no shame anymore?" asks Susan J Douglas in In These Times.

At the House Next Door, Ken Cancelosi remembers Calvert DeForest, aka Larry "Bud" Melman, 1921 - 2007.

Online non-film-related reading tip. Bookforum's never put so much of a single issue online before. Apr/May 2007.

Online browsing tip #1. Boris Kachka and Brigitte Lacombe (text and photos, respectively) in New York on The Year of Magical Thinking.

Online browsing tip #2. Suggesting three characters to take on, Howard Schatz adds John Malkovich to his "Actor's Acting" collection.

Posted by dwhudson at March 22, 2007 4:46 PM