Shorts, 6/5.

Robin Wood has stepped down from the editorial board of CineACTION! and, in general, is now officially a retired film critic. Again, as DK Holm notes in an engaging and informative appreciation for ScreenGrab.

"More than half a century has not proved sufficient to solve the mystery of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, nor to diminish their appeal," writes Dave Kehr, reviewing the second volume of Paramount's Collection for the New York Times. One theory: "If Martin was what America wanted to be - the young country suddenly pushed to the world stage, matching the Europeans and the Soviets with a manner and cunning of its own, a John F Kennedy before the fact - then Mr Lewis was what 50s America was afraid it was, still a klutzy naïf, an overgrown child playing with dangerous toys."

Sharon Waxman has announced she's leaving the NYT to write a book - and won't be back. Variety's Anne Thompson reflects on what it takes to stay on the Hollywood beat.

Laura M Holson, who's been covering the business end of Hollywood for the paper, is exiting, too. David Poland argues that neither reporter was right for their respective beats.

Up-n-coming:

• "Spike Lee has said he will return to New Orleans to film a follow-up to his documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina." The BBC reports.

• "Fay Weldon, who wrote the first episode of Upstairs Downstairs in 1971, will write the script of the new movie version," reports Adam Dawtrey for Variety, adding that Julian Fellowes is writing the screenplay for Emma and Nelson, "the story of Emma Hamilton, the mistress of the 19th century admiral Lord Nelson"; "Harry Potter producer David Heyman is developing The Thirteenth Tale, based on the modern gothic novel by Diane Setterfield"; Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) is writing The Choir"; and Brian Fillis is writing Thatcher.

• And Michael Fleming reports on Blindness: Fernando Meirelles will direct Don McKellar's adaptation of Jose Saramago's novel, starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

Michael Guillén talks with Jennifer Baichwal and the subject of her documentary, Edward Burtynsky, about Manufactured Landscapes.

Shohei Imamura's A Man Vanishes is "an ingeniously constructed, provocative, and subversively intellectual, yet captivating and understatedly elegant rumination on the malleability, inexactness, and ephemerality of truth and reality," writes acquarello.

"Longing is a Michael Haneke-lite wank job," argues Keith Uhlich. Heavens. Also at Slant, Robert Keser on Ghosts of Cité Soleil: "No travelogue, it's not even a cry for action and seems ultimately extraneous except as a vivid document of a nation pushed into hell. Haiti's despair demands a Buñuel, but here gets a Ridley Scott." And Ed Gonzalez on Surf's Up: "[E]ven if one were to ignore the film's laziness, then turn a blind eye to its superficially clever mockumentary design, cute critter animation, and one or two funny gags..., we're essentially being asked to swallow an animated version of The Karate Kid. That, dude, is so not cool."

"When [Adrian] Shergold strays from this marital focus," writes Chris Wisniewski, Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman "begins to feel like an over-directed, broadly written social problem picture." Also at indieWIRE, blurbing the festivals of June alone, Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks fill one long scroll of a page.

"[W]atching Paris, Texas on a steamy afternoon in Michigan and discovering yourself is entirely that feeling, articulated in every line on Travis's face, every empty desert road leading to God knows where," writes Tom Hall, inspired by the New Yorker's "Summer Movies" package.

Michael Atkinson reviews Tears of a Black Tiger, "as rabidly earnest and drolly ironic as any film by Douglas Sirk, RW Fassbinder or Guy Maddin," and a set of features by Fernando Arrabal: "Along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, Arrabal was a founding member of the neo-Surrealist 'Panic Movement' in 1960s Paris, which manifested, as these kinds of things used to, in theater performances, movies, books and heaps of public outrage. Arrabal's films are even more 'Panicky,' or subversively profane, than Jodorowsky's much more famous El Topo and The Holy Mountain."

Also at IFC News, an annotated list from Matt Singer and Alison Willmore: "[Manoel] De Oliveira's impressive late career output got us thinking about how other directors fared in the autumn of their years."

"Clive Owen and Angelina Jolie used the backdrop of dying African children to fuel their passion in Beyond Borders, and although The Situation isn't quite as howlingly terrible, it too falls victim to the vampiric impulse to use the real suffering of people as a form of strange entertainment," writes Dorothy Woodend at Alternet. "Real war, real death, real carnage become fictionalized stories, merely something to watch. This is not just in bad taste or exploitative, it's parasitic."

Girish: "I happened to remember the other day that there were two large and interesting Best Films Of The 90's polls conducted at the end of that decade, one by Cinematheque Ontario and the other by Cinema Scope magazine, and neither is available on the Internet. This might be a way to put some of the poll results out there, within reach of future googlers of the world."

Non-film-related item: Anne Applebaum in Slate on how Bush has lost even "New Europe." Seriously, the man's propensity for striking out when thrown the softest pitches is almost supernatural. Related: Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books on "Bush's Amazing Achievement."

Ok, one more, different subject entirely. In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones goes out on a limb, arguing not only that For the Love of God "redeems" Damien Hirst but also that it may be the first truly great work of the 21st century. Update: In an excellent entry, Greg Allen does a little math, then comments: "If there's any significance at all to Hirst's skull, it's as a symbol of a far-reaching, manipulative cartel of dubious ethics at the center of an elaborately collusive web of mutually beneficial delusion. Which, for a subject, is not all that bad."

DVD roundups: The Film Experience and DVD Talk.

Online bidding tip. Vintage Film Posters, on the block at Christie's on Thursday. Via Looker.

Online listening tip #1. Joel Heller talks with Ido Haar about 9 Star Hotel, a documentary on "a group of Palestinian teenagers who have been hiding in the forest outside the Israeli town of Modi'in.... In this podcast, Ido shares how he developed trust with the young subjects, and how he approached shooting and editing a film in a language he didn't speak."

Online listening tip #2. A visit to a bar in Sibiu for a sampling of Manele, "Romanian Gangsta Rap," as Spiegel reporters Antje Blinda and Jörg Pfeiffer classify it.

Online viewing tips. "Directors of the 80s" at Daily Film Dose, via Reel Pop.

Posted by dwhudson at June 5, 2007 8:46 AM