Shorts, 8/12.

If you're following "More on Bergman" and "More on Antonioni," you'll have seen that the New York Times is running pieces on each, one by Woody Allen and one by Martin Scorsese, respectively. What else:

• "The notoriety of Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn from a long-gestating script by David Newman and Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty, who also played Clyde, has long since eclipsed that of its real-life models," writes AO Scott 40 years after the film opened in New York. "The ups and downs of the movie's early fortunes have become a touchstone and a parable, a crucial episode in the entwined histories of Hollywood, American film criticism and postmodern popular culture.... As we endure another phase in the never-ending argument about movie violence — renewed by the recent popularity of extremely brutal horror films like the Saw and Hostel cycles; made momentarily acute by the Virginia Tech massacre last spring; forever hovering around the edges of dinner-table conversations and political campaigns - it's worth re-examining this legend to see if it has anything left to teach us." You may be surprised by where he goes with this.

• Dennis Lim on Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "Originally a 1955 novel by Jack Finney, this paranoid fable has now cloned itself several times over, spawning four movies in five decades. Tapping into themes of individualism and conformity, personal freedom and social control, the idea of soulless 'pod people' has become an all-encompassing metaphor that finds a sociopolitical relevance whatever the period.... Don Siegel's 1956 B-movie, the first and still the most Rorschach-like, emerged from a national climate of Red scare hysteria and from a Hollywood traumatized by the blacklist." Philip Kaufman's 1978 version is set in "a post-utopian San Francisco where summer-of-love idealism had curdled into a Me Decade morass of cultish psychobabble." Abel Ferrara's 1993 take "zeroes in on the domestic sphere." In Oliver Hirschbiegel's Invasion, Nicole Kidman plays a psychiatrist. "That she is a former member of the Church of Scientology, which is skeptical of psychiatry, and the star of the recently remade Body Snatchers mutant The Stepford Wives, adds extra-textual resonance."

• "Yawningly directed by Jim Isaac, Skinwalkers is a slavering mess that buries its clunky addiction metaphor beneath a welter of genre clichés, all delivered in extra-slow motion," writes Jeannette Catsoulis.

• Robert Ito reports on "the lengths that studios will go to in search of their next franchise, at a time when it seems that all the biggest projects have already been done or spoken for."

• Alex Williams goes out on the town with David Wain.

"Adapting Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books was supposedly going to be a dream come true for Hayao Miyazaki. In the end it was a project that, for Miyazaki at least, turned into a disaster when his son Goro was handed the director's chair. The feud between the pair enthralled Japan, highlighting as it did the divide in Japan's manga community between traditionalists and a new generation brought up on anime." Kaleem Aftab tells the story in the Independent. Also: a profile of Paul Schrader.

"One measure of growing disgust and anxiety with the war on Iraq is the news that three movies about returning veterans from that war will be released over the next six months (In the Valley of Elah, September 14; Grace is Gone, October; and Stop Loss, next March), while the war itself shows no signs of ending," writes Charles Bogle at the WSWS, where he looks back to 1946 and the release of The Best Years of Our Lives and argues that the "insuperable contradictions of the veterans' situation, as well as the narrowness and limitations of the filmmaker's - or the American film industry's - answer to these problems, are expressed in their contrived acceptance (with a verbal protest here and there) of their fate."

"[M]ost of what we know about MGM musicals originated with Hugh Fordin and his remarkable book, The World of Entertainment," writes John McElwee. "A few weeks ago, Val Lewton was a Greenbriar subject. Much of what I learned about him was gleaned from Joel Siegel's The Reality of Terror. Both Fordin and Siegel broke ground for a generation of film scholars who'd benefit from research and interviews these two contributed. How many such detailed books were published in the early to mid-seventies? These were historians ahead of their time. Fordin made contact with a staggering number of MGM musical veterans in their twilight years. If you look at reunion footage taken at the 1974 premiere of That's Entertainment, it's startling to note how many of those performers would be gone within a few short years after."

"Italian director Francesca Comencini (Mi piace lavorare / Mobbing) puts contemporary life in the northern Italian metropolis Milan under the microscope in her new feature A casa nostra (Our Country)," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "The film uses the much en vogue intersecting urban stories model (Crash, 21 Grams, the local Non prendere impegni stasera / Don't Make Any Plans for Tonight), but here it seems to work against rather than in favour of her overview of the ills of Italian society, never allowing the quick sketches of her multiple protagonists the time to develop into human beings."

The Shamus finds Kenneth Branaugh's As You Like It to be "the perfect companion piece to his earlier Much Ado About Nothing. It's good to see the old Branagh Bard team back in action - Brian Blessed, Richard Briers and a lilting score by Patrick Doyle - and a splendid cast led by Kevin Kline, Alfred Molina (marvelous as the Motley Fool), Adrian Lester, Janet McTeer and Bryce Dallas Howard in a positively revelatory turn as the gender-hopping Rosalind, so perfect that were this released in theaters here, she'd be laureled with Oscar talk."

"Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Ray Yeung, Cut Sleeve Boys follows the misadventures in love and life of a small circle of Asian gay men in contemporary London," writes Mark Olsen. "Although that sounds like something grounded in a certain specificity, a world with its own particular parameters, the two main characters follow arcs that seem familiar: Melvyn (Steven Lim), the vain party boy who discovers there is more to the world, and Ashley (Chowlee Leow), the shy repressive who learns to open up and accept himself.... The bones of something more interesting are there... but Yeung can never reconcile his impulses toward humor and human conflict, so things tend to sputter about, feeling disconnected and episodic."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Kenneth Turan on 12:08 East of Bucharest, "which carefully builds a sly and unexpected human comedy out of a dispute over whether a revolution would still be a revolution if nobody showed up." Also, Robert Abele talks with writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu.

• Kevin Thomas on Pierrot le Fou, "which could just as easily be unfolding now instead of 42 years ago. It is best remembered for an appearance by director Samuel Fuller, playing himself as a party guest and famously defining cinema thus: 'The film is a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death - in one word, emotion.' Pierrot le Fou is all that plus intellect." More from Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "I have frequently suggested that Richard Lester was the one who brought Godard's style into English-language cinema. Only now do I realize that the influence may have worked both ways: Pierrot was made about a year after the release of A Hard Day's Night, and its combination of shattered narrative and sheer energy - the way in which it is, first and foremost, a romp - seems a step beyond Godard's prior work."

• "Though New Line made a big fuss celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the studio has been mired in a horrific slump," writes Patrick Goldstein. "The real question facing New Line, with the contracts of its co-chairmen [Bob] Shaye and Michael Lynne up next September, is whether the studio can be turned around in time to save it."

• "[R]eports of the movie musical's death were premature," announces James C Taylor.

"Soo firmly roots itself as a film noir from its opening scene," writes Filmbrain of "one of the most original genre films to come out of Korea this year."

"[W]ith The Bourne Ultimatum, we can see that it took five years for the producers and distributors to establish this franchise and bring it into something like real time," writes Stuart Klawans in the Nation. "The new film finally abandons the scandals of the Church Committee report era and the evasions of the rogue-organization theory in favor of a fully contemporary plot - one in which a few figures of probity (one of them, admittedly, slightly nuts) struggle against government officials who share Dick Cheney's low opinion of due process. A small achievement, you might say. But the movies are a novelty business. It's good for a thriller to be of its time, and amazing (considering the length of production schedules) for it to allude to something as recently exposed as the government's data-mining program." Also, a fun take on The Simpsons Movie.

More on Bourne from Daniel Kasman (plus a few jokes cracked by Armando Iannucci in the Observer) and on Simpsons from Dennis Cozzalio, who also offers his take on Hairspray.

"Raging Bull is not about boxing, or even the isolating power of male terrors," writes David Thomson. "It's about a failure to get through the layered bravado and dishonesty of male companionship to discover the tenderness of a life with women. Jake would kill any man who called him gay, or touched him. But he cannot find a way to touch or be touched by a woman."

Also in the Guardian:

• "Firefighters battled flames 40 metres high early yesterday as fire raged through Rome's Cinecitta film studios," reports Tom Kington. Pix. "Fellini made most of his movies there, and it became the home to work by Visconti, Antonioni, Rossellini, Pasolini and De Sica," Peter Bradshaw reminds us. "When the studios were rubble for a few years after 1943, filmmakers were forced out into the streets and compelled to use locations and amateur actors from gritty real life, so movies such as Rossellini's Rome Open City and the whole neo-realist genre were born. It would be nice to imagine some unexpected creative bonus to the Cinecitta fire. Sadly, I think it just means a few charred togas."

• "I've now adapted novels by Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and [Ian] McEwan, and there is definitely something to be said for having the writer there to consult with," blogs Christopher Hampton. "[I]t was an arduous task, adapting Atonement. Not least because I had to do it twice."

• Ronald Bergan considers (and tends to favor) Truffaut's argument that the realism of color is no help at all to films before presenting a list of "20 of the relatively few films in the history of cinema, in my opinion, in which color has been used intrinsically and creatively."

• "The Iraq war has yet to yield up its latter-day version of Emile de Antonio's landmark Vietnam documentary In the Year of the Pig, but Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight will suffice for now," writes John Patterson. Also: "Surely there's something stupider and emptier than kiddie toys upon which we can base our next generation of moronic tween-robbing blockbusters? Of course there is: Porno."

• Steven Goldman talks with Matt Damon.

• Killian Fox profiles Judd Apatow.

"[W]e need to discuss the treatment of food and drink and meals!" Zach Campbell on Cassavetes.

Flickhead's been revisiting the "art of the double bill."

At his Video WatchBlog, Tim Lucas reviews A Year of Fear: A Day-By-Day Guide to 366 Horror Films, "commendable for providing a welcome structured curriculum for studying a well-considered cross-section of genre fare," and notes the upcoming release of Blur, a collection of reviews by Stephen R Bissette: "Literate, informative, well worth reading, and well worth having."

At SF360, Claire Faggioli offers a list "of what I've personally found to be the most interesting or important moments in the visualization of blood, from sheer abundance to aesthetic appreciation." Also: Irina Leimbacher and Konrad Steiner, who worked at the SF Cinematheque for four years, have a new project, kino21. Max Goldberg asks them about it.

"It's frightening to set out to make a piece of science fiction and then see it become science prediction before your very eyes," Flood director Tony Mitchell tells Kevin Maher. Also in the London Times, Stephen Dalton talks with John Waters.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Cinebeats.

Michael Guillén talks with Uwe Boll about Postal.

Jason Kellett for McSweeney's: "Suggested Edits to the Movie 300 for the DVD Release of 300: The Definitive, Historically Accurate Cut. Via Movie City News.

Recent pinch hitters at the Reeler: Bennett Marcus and Lewis Beale.

Online listening tip. Spout's FilmCouch 32.

Online viewing tip. "Walk It Out." Via Michael Sippey.

Posted by dwhudson at August 12, 2007 2:27 PM