Shorts, 4/30.

"I've been on a Welles kick the last couple of weeks," writes Girish as he revisits the films and a few books about them. "All these years I didn't quite realize just how formally daring - transgressive, even! - his movies can be." He also points to, among other things, Jonathan Rosenbaum's entry at the Chicago Reader, gathering "recent finds... especially worthy of notice," including a 9-minute trailer for F for Fake. And, if you buy the same sort of books I do, you'll also have heard from your friendly bookseller that Rosenbaum's Discovering Orson Welles is out tomorrow.

"[Slavoj] Zizek is typically, and willfully, perverse in his praise of 300 (found via Dejan)," writes Steven Shaviro. "[E]veryone else on the Left has denounced the film as a fascist spectacle, allegorically praising militarism and the American war in Iraq, so of course Zizek must instead praise the film as a revolutionary allegory of struggle against the American evil empire." Shaviro then pinpoints where he feels Zizek's gone wrong, adding that "the denunciation of 'hedonist permissivity' is certainly not the way to go - Zizek's loathing for this, like the similar loathings on the part of fundamentalist Christians and Jihadist Muslims, is a false response, based upon a misrecognition of the basic problem."

Stuart Klawans is "the best film critic in America." Looker lays out the evidence for his argument.

Matt Riviera on The Witnesses: "Revisiting the rise of the AIDS epidemic with the wisdom of distance and hindsight enables [André] Téchiné to use the disease as a narrative device, a tool to explore the dual subject of honesty and activism. Doing so with the same urgency as if the film had been made back in 1985 gives the film the seductive aura of a great political thriller."

Paul Harris reports in the Observer on Jodie Foster's Leni Riefenstahl biopic: "The on-again, off-again project has been in the works for at least seven years, but now a script is being written - by British writer Rupert Walters - and a director is being negotiated." Related: Taylor Downing on Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl.

Also in the Observer:

• What do we really know about the child soldiers of Africa? "His ubiquity is a manifestation of how far Africa, with its wars, post-colonial dilemmas and ethnic rivalries but also its hope, vibrancy, cultural and linguistic diversity, has moved from the margins to the centre of western consciousness; of how Africa has become the cause celeb, as it were, of our new globalisation," writes Jason Cowley, who considers the films Blood Diamond and God Grew Tired of Us; the novels Beasts of No Nation and Allah is Not Obliged; and first-person accounts A Long Way Gone and What Is the What.

• "Sharman Macdonald is an established playwright and screenwriter, and her relationship with her Oscar-nominated daughter is about to become even closer," writes David Smith. "Macdonald's new film, The Best Time of Our Lives, inspired by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, will feature [Keira] Knightley in a leading role."

• "Despite fast approaching his 80th birthday, [Ken] Russell still has the air of an enfant terrible." Mark Kermode listens to a few stories.

• Oliver Marre profiles Hugh Grant.

• Kelly Grovier finds The Children of Hurin to be "a worthy addition to one of the most cherished mythologies in English literature."

Cathy Pryor profiles John Sayles for the Independent: "Though he's often thought of as an old leftie beating the drum of social concern, that idealism coexists with a supreme pragmatism. There are possibly few directors as resourceful or as capable of matching their ambitions to their budget as he is."

At Cinematical, Ryan Stewart previews The Shark is Still Working, "an epic documentary about all things Jaws - the making of, the fan community, the legacy, the whole damn thing."

In the Los Angeles Times, Chuck Culpepper tells the story of how Danny Boyle and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo found each other and how the Spaniard ended up directing the sequel to 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later.

In the New York Times:

• Jesse Green profiles Angela Lansbury, "one of the few actors it makes sense to call beloved."

• Focusing on Hostel: Part II, Michael Cieply looks into the question of whether audiences will still have a taste for torture porn in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings. Related: Matt Singer and Alison Willmore's annotated list at IFC NEWS of movies that "have used the contrivance of the death-tournament as a vehicle for commentary on our violence- and voyeurism-obsessed culture, as its own excuse for copious violence and voyeurism, or, sometimes, both."

• Caryn James: "Autism has become to disorders what Africa is to social issues, the celebrity cause du jour."

• Jon Pareles talks with Björk about Volta, "a 21st-century assemblage of the computerized and the handmade, the personal and the global." More from Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker. Both pieces feature audio clippage.

• Brad Stone: "Vudu, if all goes as planned, hopes to turn America's televisions into limitless multiplexes, providing instant gratification for movie buffs."

• Richard Siklos: "Sony is, curiously, the land of the rising stock."

• Two Russians, remembered: Daniel J Wakin on Mstislav Rostropovich and Bill Clinton on Boris Yeltsin.

At DVD Panache, Adam Ross has ten questions for Dennis Cozzalio. Sample: "On the worst day of your life, what movie will you put in?"

Gautaman Bhaskaran sends another "Bollywood Dispatch" to the Lumière Reader.

"[Hilary] Brougher has shaped Stephanie Daley in a way that asks viewers to look into themselves and consider how they might handle a situation infused with such moral ambiguity," writes Gary Dretzka at Movie City News. More from Kenneth Turan in the LAT.

Also in the LAT, Michael Ordoña profiles Margarita Levieva (The Invisible) and Charles McNulty reviews System Wonderland, "David Wiener's new play about a young screenwriter's entanglement with a successful middle-aged writer-director whose career has stalled and his fading-actress wife."

Online viewing tip. Interviewing Hollywood.

Posted by dwhudson at April 30, 2007 2:30 PM