Shorts, 4/18.

"In his debut feature Rules of Dating, director Han Jae-rim transformed a relationship drama into something unexpectedly real and frank, while also exploring issues of power, gender and sexual harassment," writes Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org. "There was an underlying tension in that film - sexual, moral, aesthetic - that propelled it forward. In the gangster film The Show Must Go On, it's not so much tension as a sense of irony." Also, Cruel Winter Blues: "Director/screenwriter Lee Jeong-beom's debut feature, like the now-classic Korean melodrama Failan, drags us deep into the psyche of an emotionally shattered gangster in the hopes of uncovering a hint - but perhaps only a hint - of human warmth."

Jeannette Catsoulis: "Wang Bing's epic, three-part documentary, Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks, is an astonishingly intimate record of China's painful transition from state-run industry to a free market."

Also in the New York Times:

• Julia Moskin has a piece in the Dining & Wine section on the pies in Adrienne Shelly's Waitress. Jenna, played by Keri Russell, "invents an I Hate My Husband Pie (bitter chocolate drowned in caramel), then Baby Screaming Its Head Off in the Middle of the Night and Ruining My Life Pie (cheesecake, brandied pecans, nutmeg), and finally Earl Murders Me Because I'm Having an Affair Pie (juicy crushed berries in a dark chocolate crust)." As you watch, keep this in mind: "All the pies on the set were edible."

• Alan Riding talks with Julie Christie about growing older, shunning celebrity and why she agreed to play Fiona in Sarah Polley's debut feature, Away From Her.

• Matt Zoller Seitz has a brief review of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, "a dazzling, rambling, often incoherent satire on consumerism, militarism and the exploitation of third world cultures by the West."

"This is not a biography at all. It is a fiction," Milos Forman tells Geoffrey Macnab for a piece in the Independent on Goya's Ghosts.

Christopher Orr in the New Republic: "Curse of the Golden Flower (now out on DVD), does not kowtow to tyranny as explicitly as Hero, but the similarities are difficult to miss: another murderous emperor, another rebellious hero, another devious conspiracy - and another concluding moral that is, at best, morally dubious."

"Anyone's who's seen a Michael Haneke film will know where Benny's Video is headed from its opening VHS images of a pig's slaughter," writes Nick Schager. He's none too happy with The Seventh Continent, either.

"Why has everyone written about Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen's film Zelig, but no-one has written about Eudora Fletcher?" asks Irene Dobson at Flickhead. "The film is a tribute to her." (Side to Ray: Is that the actual poster? I seem to remember that it is. Regardless, just brilliant.)

Over at the Siffblog, E Steven Fried seems to have had a horrible time - but an intriguingly horrible time - watching the 1969 doc A Married Couple (more).

Peter Nellhaus on Who's Camus Anyway?: "Unlike the name-dropping in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, [Mitsuo] Yanagimachi's dialogue is smarter in its references, more interesting to listen to, and organic to the narrative." It "begins as a cheerful celebration of films and filmmaking, but concludes as an inquiry into how art and reality collide, affecting our selves and each other."

Everyone's pointing to Josh Horowitz's interview for MTV with writer and director Frank Darabont, who tells him, "I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about [the screenplay for Indy 4], working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I and he felt was terrific. He wanted to direct it as his next movie, and then suddenly the whole thing goes down in flames because George Lucas doesn't like the script... I said, 'You have a fantastic script. I think you're insane, George.' You can say things like that to George, and he doesn't even blink. He's one of the most stubborn men I know."

Hillary Frey explains the difference between It Girls, Is Girls - and the Wuz Girls on the cover of the New York Observer this week: Claire Danes, Chloë Sevigny and Parker Posey. "A Wuz Girl has talent - talent enough to keep herself in front, talked about. She will never be a mega-star, but she will always be an original. No media concoction, her self-possession and character carry her through." Also: Andrew Sarris on Johnnie To's Election and Triad Election.

A list from the AV Club: "13 Films With Wildly Mismatched Romantic Pairings."

Because his blog is about literature, Ed Champion has had more of an "in" when it comes to speaking about the unspeakable - the shootings at Virginia Tech. Of course, movies have come to mind while watching and reading news in the past couple of days, but at the moment, it is still to early for that sort of doodling. For a "within the context of this actually rather unrelated blog" sort of post, I was most moved by this post from Time art critic Richard Lacayo. Today, Richard Lacayo has this to say about that post:

So when I started to think yesterday about ways to mark the moment, or even whether to mark it, I thought of Rothko. The work of his mature years was dedicated to finding a way to express the unfathomable, and more than that, to express tragedy in a century that either denied it with all the noisemakers at its disposal - you've heard of pop culture? - or contended with it by way of religious consolations that did not speak to him.

Online viewing tip #1. Brendon Connelly will get you the trailer for Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It, noting, "the cast is delicious: Bryce Dallas Howard, Janet McTeer, Alfred Molina, Adrian Lester, Kevin Kline.... Watching Dead Again the other evening, I was impressed, as I always am, how much Branagh enjoys film and filmmaking."

Online viewing tip #2. Interplast releases the Academy Award-winning A Story of Healing "under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivatives license (by-nc-nd)." In other words, you may now watch it for free.

Update: Actually, one addendum on a political note. Because I just caught up with Timothy Noah's piece in Slate: "Are we sorry that 32 people, most of them no older than 22, were killed? Of course. But we aren't so sorry that we intend to do anything to prevent such a tragedy from happening again."

Posted by dwhudson at April 18, 2007 3:01 PM