Shorts, 6/25.

"Anyone tempted to dip a toe into dramatic silent waters might profitably begin with America." At Greenbriar Picture Shows, John McElwee tells the remarkable story behind DW Griffith's take on the Revolutionary War and comments:

People today imagine silent viewers were better satisfied with less. In fact, the opposite was true. If we could sit for presentations the equal of what they had in 1924, I've no doubt a lot of us would find emotions turned loose in ways unexpected. My own (admittedly limited) experience with silent films and live orchestras are among my best remembered in theatres. Ben-Hur with seventy musicians once brought tears to these jaded eyes. Could I have stood such pounding on a weekly basis in palaces seating thousands, with dynamic accompaniment a commonplace? Likely I'd have sought treatment for an excess of bliss, for that is the only word I can summon for the movie going encounters those lucky people routinely had.

"Bantsuma: The Life of Tsumasaburo Bando is obligatory viewing for everyone interested in Japanese cinema," writes David Bordwell. "Not only does it handily trace Bando's remarkable career through stills, interviews, and surviving footage. It also supports something I've tried to show for some time: that the Japanese action cinema of the 1920s and 1930s was one of the most powerful and creative trends in world filmmaking."

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij asks film critic, writer and visual artist Alex Leo Serban to recommend a recent Romanian film and suggest which upcoming Romanian project he's most looking forward to.

Girish: "I've read quite a bit of [James] Naremore over the last few months, and thought I'd draw up a little guide of reading recommendations from a range of his work."

"God, piety, fear and malevolence have made the stew of politics bitter, unironic and pleasureless, in government and in the cultural crockpot," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "It was not always so - Criterion's completely uncalled-for double-trouble DVD release of Serbian barn-burner Dusan Makavejev's two most notorious films, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974), reminds us how the lava-hot mid-Cold War years fueled an almost limitless variety of untamable flames." Also: Obie Benz's Heavy Petting (1989), "a fond look back at the American mid-century's teen and his/her discovery of sex in the postwar years."

"25 years ago, the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner became an instant science fiction classic," writes Adam Savage for Popular Mechanics. "Set in a sodden, squalid Los Angeles of 2019, the neo-noir masterpiece influenced a generation of filmmakers and video-game designers. Long before I teamed up with Jamie Hyneman to form the MythBusters, I was a special-effects modelmaker, and Scott's cyberpunk gem almost instantly became the most important film in the canon of movies I love." Via Xeni Jardin, who's got more related linkage at Boing Boing. Related: Phillip Martin.

"Frank Oz transplants his sitcom sensibilities to the UK drawing-room comedy with Death at a Funeral, a strained farce in which lots of one-dimensional Brits converge at the memorial service for their family's patriarch and proceed to act like buffoons." Nick Schager at Slant.

"With her feral magnetism, [Asia] Argento, 31, is indeed sexy and, for some, undoubtedly scary," writes Dennis Lim. "But her taste for the outré, easy to dismiss as provocation, hints at a deeper fearlessness, apparent in her headlong performances as well as in her willful career choices.... Ms Argento's latest films, which prompted festivalgoers to crown her the 'queen of Cannes, are the most generous showcases yet of her charms. An Old Mistress and Boarding Gate feature the trademarks that have made her an all-purpose mystery lady - her salacious scowl, her damaged-goods vulnerability, her unplaceable exoticism, her many tattoos - while also throwing fresh challenges in her path."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Existentialism long ago went out of fashion," writes Adam Cohen. "But [Woody] Allen remains, in his way, one of its most prominent exponents. He has not let the increased religiosity of the times, or his own advancing years, shake his firmly held uncertainty." More from Scott Eyman in the New York Observer.

• Dave Itzkoff meets Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the screenwriting team behind Mission: Impossible III, Transformers and a projected Star Trek prequel. Kurtzman: "'It doesn't matter if people think what you're doing is camp,' he said. 'You have to take your genre seriously. If you write it tongue-in-cheek, the audience will see it, and they'll feel they're being talked down to. And,' he added, 'they'll kill you.'"

• "National Lampoon is trying to escape its doldrums," reports Andrew Adam Newman, and now "plans to release four of its own movies annually and acquire up to eight more for distribution."

• Michael Cieply: "Having already provoked parents, women's groups and the ratings board with explicit ads for the coming torture movie Captivity, [Courtney] Solomon and his After Dark Films now intend to introduce the film, set for release July 13, with a party that may set a new standard for the politically incorrect."

• Maria Aspan reports on how Fox realized how stupid it was to knock a Die Hard fan video off YouTube; they've now paid its makers to repost it - as well as a new version, naturally, featuring clips from Live Free or Die Hard.

• The iPhone arrives on Friday and, "in Hollywood," reports Laura M Holson, "where [Steve] Jobs's convention-defying tactics are all too familiar, media executives are eagerly preparing for a new era as they hope to position more content where consumers want it: in their hands."

• Allison Hope Weiner: "TMZ.com has become the celebrity handler's worst nightmare."

"[Werner] Herzog's new film is something of an event, being his first widely distributed feature since the early 1980s. Due out July 4, Rescue Dawn is another one of his fables about the dark recesses of human nature." Patrick Goldstein talks with him for the Los Angeles Times. Related: In New York, Logan Hill talks with Herzog, too, and David Edelstein finds Rescue Dawn "so good it makes you wish that Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career."

Also in the LAT, John Clark profiles Dennis Farina and Susan King watches Cult Camp Classics.

"[P]erhaps we should rightfully consider Brueghel, Bosch, Fuseli, Munch, Goya, Dore, Rembrandt and Dalí as vital forgers of horror culture," suggests Marco Lanzagorta at PopMatters.

The Guardian launches an annotated list of "1000 Films to See Before You Die," 200 a day for five days - and of course, a quiz. Andrew Pulver, blogging on how the list was put together, insists it's not about "great" films: "if it is moving, funny, clever, beautiful to look at, then it at least deserved consideration for our list."

Also:

• Robert McKee's Story "could only have come out of America, birthplace of Fordism," writes Mark Ravenhill.

• John Patterson: "I like to think of myself as a veteran of the gore-wars of the last 30 years, but I may finally have hit my tolerance threshold."

• "Earlier reports had suggested it could be 15 years before Tarantino got round to making sequels to Kill Bill, but [producer Bennett] Walsh's comments, if confirmed, suggest the process might begin somewhat earlier than that."

• Gavin Gaughan remembers Herman Stein: "As a staff composer at Universal Studios, he contributed to more than 200 films."

A touching tribute: Richard Harland Smith wishes his friend, Adrienne Shelly a happy birthday.

Sujewa Ekanayake talks with Jennifer Fox about Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, a "six-part documentary that explores the life of Fox and her female friends around the world as they deal with major issues as well as minor challenges and interesting details that come their way. Among other situations, the movie deals with Fox's own debate regarding getting married and also regarding having children, her romantic relationships, a major illness of a friend, and a divorce of another friend."

Paul Matwychuk: "I talked with Guy Maddin last week about Brand Upon the Brain!, the chronic unreliability of Lou Reed and the universal evilness of children - and in the process he more than lived up to his reputation as one of the most entertaining interviewees in cinema today."

For Stop Smiling, Mark Asch reports on a recent screening of Killer of Sheep with Charles Burnett in attendance.

The latest from the Film Panel Notetaker: a Q&A with Revolution '67 filmmakers Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno and Jerome Bongiorno.

IndieWIRE interviews Taggart Siegel, director of The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

Shane Danielson talks with Eli Roth for the Independent.

Jason Whyte's list at Hollywood Bitchslap: "The Best Films of 2007 - So Far, Anyway..."

Nick Schager: "Bug is William Friedkin's best film in at least two decades, a compliment that must be tempered by the disclaimer that, after its first thirty minutes, this adaptation of Tracy Letts's stage play (written by Letts) begins to lose its sure-footing."

Online purchasing tip. From Tim Lucas: "I recommend the Twisted Sex compilations, and also another equally fascinating comp called The Late Late Show, because - at their best - they are like archaeological digs into a buried world of lost, or nearly lost, cinema. No one who truly loves movies can fail to become absorbed in the revelations they have to show and tell us."

Online viewing tip. The Manny's not nearly as good as the story behind it, as told by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker. Much funnier than that video is Jack Handey's treatment: "My Nature Documentary."

Posted by dwhudson at June 25, 2007 1:33 PM