Shorts, 5/3.

Jeff GP at the Six-Reel Shuffle on the new one from Joel and Ethan Coen: "No Country for Old Men is a marvelous movie, steadily surprising and thrilling both emotionally and intellectually, with performances, wit, set pieces and visuals that are a glory to behold."

Ferocious and encyclopedic "Criticwatch 2007" from Erik Childress at Hollywood Bitchslap: "Know Your Shit, Period!"

"Can a film shot be amusing in itself?" asks David Bordwell. In other words, "Can camerawork itself provide the gag?"

Among the Time 100: Tina Fey, Sacha Baron Cohen (profile by Roseanne), Leonardo DiCaprio (by Martin Scorsese), Scorsese himself (by Richard Schickel), Cate Blanchett (by Richard Corliss), Alber Elbaz (mentioned because the profile's by Natalie Portman), America Ferrera, Brian Grazer (by Russell Crowe), Rosie O'Donnell (Barbara Walters) and Brad Pitt.

"The notion that 'movies don't kill people, lunatics kill people' is liberating to us screenwriters because it permits us to give life to our most demented fantasies and put them up on the big screen without any anxious hand-wringing," writes Mike White. "The average American teenage boy knows the difference between right and wrong and no twisted, sadistic movie is going to influence him. My own experience as a teenager tells me otherwise." Glenn Kenny and David Poland comment.

Also in the New York Times, Jeanette Catsoulis: "An enigmatic and utterly compelling story of incinerated art, unbridled egos and exotic plants, Missing Victor Pellerin purports to investigate the 1990 disappearance of Mr Pellerin, a painter and supposed star of the Montreal art scene." More from Charles Petersen in the Voice.

Kira Cochrane on torture porn: "The clear logic behind all these films, TV shows and images appears to be that if a young, good-looking, barely-clad woman is sexy while alive, she's even sexier when she's being tortured, or when she's a bloody corpse." Xan Brooks follows up with a brief "history of misogynist violence in film."

Also in the Guardian:

• "How did the Queen get so hot stateside?" asks Tim Dowling. The answer's obvious, but he wonders "how disappointed America will be when the Queen turns out to be nothing like Helen Mirren's Queen."

• As of yesterday, Tony Blair's been the UK Prime Minister for ten years. Peter Bradshaw looks at how the British film industry fared this past decade. Related: At ScreenGrab, Faisal Qureshi runs down a history of various British filmmakers and their party alliances.

• And Darren Aronofsky is "several drafts into a screenplay about Noah," reports Ryan Gilbey. "I hear the narrative has an impressive arc."

More up-n-coming news:

• Time Out's Chris Tilly: "In a fitting piece of casting for a true living legend, Michael Caine has signed up to play God in a new fantasy feature based on Jostein Gaarder's bestselling tome Sophie's World."

• The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein: "John Cusack is attached to star in Jan de Bont's action thriller Stopping Power and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is attached as the romantic lead in producer Darren Star's directorial debut The Frog King."

• Pamela McClintock in Variety: "George Clooney and his Smoke House partner Grant Heslov will co-write a dramedy for Warner Bros Pictures detailing how the CIA, with help from Hollywood, used a fake movie project to smuggle a handful of Americans out of Tehran during the 1979 hostage crisis."

• Tran Anh Hung, who's written the screenplay, will direct Josh Hartnett in I Come with the Rain, reports Variety's Michael Fleming.

• Fleming: "Michael Mann has delivered to studio execs what he hopes will be his next directing effort, a star vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Scripted by John Logan, the project is an untitled noir drama that takes place on the old MGM lot in the 1930s."

• "Cillian Murphy, Sienna Miller, Max Minghella and Emma Booth will star in Hippie Hippie Shake for Universal Pictures and Working Title," report Fleming and Adam Dawtry. "Beeban Kidron will direct the film, which begins lensing in fall."

"Dreamachine and Jaman have joined forces to unveil digital distribution of seminal early works from Jia [Zhang-ke], the Dardenne brothers, Jafar Panahi, Takeshi Kitano, Jacques Rivette, Walter Salles and Tsai Ming-liang." Anthony Kaufman has more.

Are tens of millions of dollars in screenwriters' earnings going to Hollywood studios and producers and the Writers Guild of America West itself? Besides the Department of Labor, Dennis McDougal looks into it for the LA Weekly.

Also, Judith Lewis talks with Jane Fonda about Georgia Rule - and sex, which she's evidently enjoying with gusto these days. "She does not front," writes Lewis. "She wears the canned rap of film-junket interviews uneasily. But she talks politics with gusto." And Scott Foundas calls up Charles Grodin to talk about The Ex, "a one-off, a favor of sorts to his son," and not a full-fledged return to acting.

At indieWIRE, Jason Guerrasio checks in on five independent projects in production.

"Five decades later, filmmakers and audiences are still trying to catch up with the master on the politics of peeping," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "In search of moral and cultural clarity, or at least audience appeal, recent films have looked back to Rear Window, a movie epitomizing the essentials of cinema and civilization: voyeurism, paranoia, and repression. Impulses which, if anything, are more urgent now than ever."

The "ex-wife in Flannel Pajamas was pretty obviously inspired by my former boss," Bob Westal realizes. So he interviews Jeff Lipsky and "we started off with some of the obvious questions: Had a lot of people like me come out of the woodwork?"

Jeremiah Kipp at Slant on Flandres: "Filmmaker Bruno Dumont offers another spare existentialist portrait of modern man, once again insisting we are animals driven by primal hungers. He observes from a distance, and when characters are very small within a much larger landscape it creates the impression of gazing at behavior through a microscope - and often that behavior is depicted as brutal."

Also: "Even in its super-tiny niche, ShowBusiness is mild fun, never really reaching the heights of, say, DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus's marvelous Moon Over Broadway, which had the warts-and-all coverage this documentary sometimes lacks," writes Jason Clark. And Nick Schager on Brooklyn Rules, "a blatant Scorsese knock-off with a few Godfather and A Bronx Tale flourishes thrown in for good measure."

Cheryl Eddy talks with Andrea Arnold about Red Road. Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Max Goldberg on Disappearances: "[T]he film was many years in the making, and it shows in the uneven pacing, tone, and performances."

In the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams recommends The Wind That Shakes the Barley: "Seen not as a tale from the past but one whose lessons reflect on the present, its message is perfectly clear."

There are at least three different Last Tangos in Paris. Flickhead explains.

David Lowery finds Tideland "interesting enough to watch twice, not good enough to love."

Glenn McDonald dreams up TV ads as directed by David Mamet, John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, David O Russell and David Lynch. Also in PopMatters, Farisa Khalid's guide to India's leading men and Bill Gibron on Sweetie.

Ryan Stewart talks with the team behind The Shark is Still Working for Cinematical.

Joe O'Connell meets "the most unlikely of VIPs," Dan Eggleston, founder of the Yahoo! group AustinFilmCasting. "His indie roles have included long-haired partygoer, bum, corpse, and, of course, teacher." Eggleston happens to be a "card-carrying Mensa member," too. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Josh Rosenblatt on Army of Shadows.

Laura Boyes in the Independent Weekly: "Car racing is an unusual subject for a Bollywood movie, but in Ta Ra Rum Pum, the track scenes filmed at the NC Speedway in Rockingham crackle, especially the vroomy duels between RV [Saif Ali Khan] and his nemesis, the Man in Black, Rusty Finkelstein."

"In the time it takes many indie auteurs to complain they just can't find any funding, Jon Russell Cring will have premiered his third completed feature in less than four months," notes Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene.

Volume 7 of the Journal of Short Film is out.

Joe Leydon remembers Dabbs Greer, Tom Poston and Gordon Scott. More from Tim Lucas: "Hollywood rise and fall stories are a dime a dozen. If the story of Gordon Scott seems especially tragic, it is because he achieved such incredible heights of heroism on the silver screen and left us with such indelible memories of intelligent virility and confidence. He was a Tarzan that Edgar Rice Burroughs would have recognized as his own, and been proud of."

Head-mounted displays "aren't just for cyberpunk novels and failing urban strip malls anymore," notes Justin Peters at Slate. "But will they become an integral part of our home entertainment systems?"

Online bidding tip. Northwest Film Forum's online auction. Through tomorrow.

Online browsing and viewing tip. OH! Das Videomagazin.

Online viewing tip #1. A trailer for Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching, via european-films.net.

Online viewing tip #2. Jonas & François's video for Justice's "D.A.N.C.E."

Online viewing tips, round 1. Ray Pride embeds clips from Once.

Online viewing tips. The finalists in Discover's "String Theory in Two Minutes or Less" contest, via Fimoculous.

Posted by dwhudson at May 3, 2007 11:54 AM