Shorts, 9/2.

"Dr Plonk is the story of a zealous inventor, his wife - played by [Magda] Szubanski - his deaf mute assistant and his dog," writes Philippa Hawker in the Age. "It is a tale of time travel, improvisation and the end of the world. It begins in 1907, leaps forward a century, takes a brief wrong turn into the distant past, then hurtles to and fro between centuries. It might be silent but it is undeniably eloquent - expressive and funny, bursting with ideas, visual gags, comic moments, physical energy and absurdity." And she talks with director Rolf de Heer.

"The [Chicago Reader's] online archives, which used to charge for a download, go back to 1987, the year I started writing for the paper," notes Jonathan Rosenbaum. And yes, he wrote "used to." The doors have blown open and the archives are now freely accessible.

"One of the goals of this site is preserving film history one image at a time. In addition to that preserving various other forms of film history." At Cinema is Dope, Blake Ethridge launches a project related to Pretty Maids All in a Row.

"Only in the last few years have I developed the confidence to describe myself as an archivist and historian. For years I was merely a 'collector' - an accurate but not very glamorous term for my passionate obsession with all things related to LGBT movies (posters, pressbooks, movie stills, and, the actual film prints themselves)." Jenni Olson tracks a compulsion for the Turin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

"Proceeding with the same tone of cynical world-weariness that proved a mixed blessing in his debut feature, The Matador, writer-director Richard Shepard fictionalizes a real-life tale of journos recklessly tracking down a Bosnian war criminal in The Hunting Party," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "Alternately glib, superficial and amusing, pic vainly attempts to absorb some degree of Serbian irony into a story that's unavoidably lessened by its privileged American vantage point." He also mentions that Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo is "still the best account of Western correspondents in the war-torn Balkans." More from Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter.

Is sci-fi a dead genre? Ridley Scott evidently said so in Venice ("nothing original... we've seen it all before"), but Paul Howlett begs to differ. His ammunition: Minority Report, Soderbergh's Solaris, Children of Men, Sunshine and Pitch Black. Daniel Martin takes the debate to the Guardian's film blog. By the way, for first impressions of the new, spiffed-up version of Blade Runner, see Mark Salisbury at In the Company of Glenn and Mastidon at AICN.

Also in the Guardian:

• "'It's amazing enough to have one film made about us while most of the principal characters are still alive, but to have two films is quite bizarre,' says Joy Division/New Order drummer Stephen Morris. He adds that a third 'biopic' (a word everyone in the band loathes) was mooted at one point, and that a feature-length documentary, simply called Joy Division, will go on general release just after Control." Paul Lester talks with the "extended Manchester family."

• "With the passing of artists like Bergman and Antonioni, who will be among the great names of world cinema for a new generation?" asks Peter Sellars. "Garin Nugroho is a name that is definitely going to be on that list." Related: Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times on Opera Jawa: "The sets and costumes constitute a virtual rebirth of surrealism. Here, in the tale of a village potter's unfaithful wife and his vengeance against the lover (a petty tyrant fomenting local strife), one sensory epiphany succeeds another."

• Denis Seguin visits the set of Fernando Meirelles's adaptation of José Saramago's Blindness.

• Geoffrey Macnab talks with Brett Morgen about Chicago 10: "[H]is three greatest influences when shooting the film were Bob Fosse, John Ford and Sam Peckinpah.... He first had the idea for the film when he and Graydon Carter were discussing the war in Iraq. Why, they wondered, were there no protesters on the streets? Why was America's youth so apathetic when - a generation before - the kids had been ready to march in their thousands?"

• Clare Birchall finds that "the Edinburgh film festival provided a good opportunity to assess the current state of women's film."

• John Patterson meets Adam Goldberg (so does Stephanie Lysaght, for the Los Angeles Times); also, "there is no more wretched or ephemeral an endeavour than the adaptation of a great novel to celluloid."

• David Thomson on Juliette Binoche.

• Ryan Gilbey interviews John Cusack.

"The cause of the decline of science-fiction cinema over the past decade can be found in the fact that corporate power is longer recognized as dangerous." Charles Mudede opens a review of "Paul Verhoeven's masterpiece," Robocop. Also in the Stranger, Kelly O: "The Devil in Miss Jones is the Friday the 13th of porn."

Kevin Maher and Wendy Ide unleash a fall preview in the London Times, where you'll also find the latest list from Ken Russell: "The actresses who have bewitched me."

"[T]he Danube provides the framework for Nikolaus Geyrhalter's evocative and understated stream of consciousness rumination, Washed Ashore, an interweaving elegy on ritual and obsolescence set against the eternal, yet indelibly transforming modern day, socioeconomic landscape of the river in the face of encroaching urbanization, a collapsed Soviet bloc economy, and globalization," writes acquarello.

Julie Delpy's back in Paris, polishing her screenplay for The Countess and writing about her week for the Observer.

"What happened is, Robert De Niro had always been on Art Linson to adapt his book [about his experiences as a Hollywood producer], What Just Happened? Eventually, Art wrote a draft of it as a screenplay, De Niro read it, and said, 'I really like what this can be,' and suggested to Art that it had sensibilities I would understand." That's Barry Levinson, talking to the Baltimore Sun's Michael Sragow.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Tuesday is Jim Jarmusch day, courtesy of Criterion, which'll be releasing Permanent Vacation, Stranger Than Paradise and Night on Earth. And Paradise, argues Dennis Lim, could be said to have been more pervasive in its influence than any Tarantino film. It invented a sensibility that, for better or worse, has become second nature to successive generations of filmmakers. The movie itself remains too eccentric to have been successfully emulated, but its salient ingredients - character quirks, low-key incident, gentle irony, self-conscious hipness - practically add up to a working definition of indie as we know it." More from Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post.

• "Raúl Ruiz's ambitious but tedious Klimt is likely to disappoint those drawn to it if they attended the recent and much-heralded LACMA exhibit Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings From the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer," supposes Kevin Thomas. "Ruiz is terrific in evoking a heady atmosphere of ornate fin de siecle decadence, and [John] Malkovich is ideally cast as a coolly intellectual, free-thinking, free-living aesthete whose endless pursuit of beautiful women parallels his brilliant experimentation in the pursuit of artistic perfection. The film unfortunately is crammed with garrulous bores engaged in all manner of frivolous debates and intrigues." Related: Jesse Ataide on Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting.

• "Live-in Maid explores the emotional side of the reality of two societies living in very close, often intimate, proximity without dwelling on the politics or resorting to polemic," writes Carina Chocano. "It paints a lovely, intimate portrait of a complex relationship and shows a side of Latin American life we rarely see on American screens. Despite marked socioeconomic differences, on a macro level, everyone is in the same boat."

• "Like a vintage batch of dorm-brewed trash can punch, the potent, merrymaking but also headache-inducing effects of sexual identity politics on young collegians will always be fertile ground for laughs," writes Robert Abele. "It's a minefield the indie comedy Freshman Orientation gamely traverses, serving up a gay/straight mixer of horn-dog humor, Greek cruelty, mistaken identity and late-in-the-game sensitivity that has bursts of spirit, but too often feels more like a tapped-out keg than a provocative romp." Also, the "soft, brisk and generally surface-deep documentary" Summercamp!.

• Kenneth Turan on Manda Bala: Jason Kohn's "sees Brazil as the setting for a Darwinian struggle between the country's enormously rich and powerful elite and its unimaginably poor lower class. The rich exploit the poor or are indifferent to their plight, and the poor try to get their own back by kidnapping and brutalizing the rich. What a system."

• Turan again: Private Property "etches the line between love and hate with a savagery that is almost unprecedented."

Stephen Armstrong talks with Spike Lee for the New Statesman: "'You get older and realise you can't rant and rave 24/7,' he says, smiling, when we meet at a New York hotel. 'You have to pick and choose what you rant and rave about.'"

Ed Gonzalez at Slant on Salvador Allende: "[Patricio] Guzmán clearly sympathizes with Allende's socialist chutzpah, mingling new talking-head interviews with his archival treasures, telling Allende's story in a snappy, cinematic manner."

Caryn James's profile of the irresistibly watchable Clive Owen is, of course, timed to rouse awareness of Shoot 'Em Up and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but opens with the suggestion that his appearance in Wong Kar-wai's 20-second commercial for Lancôme offers a key or two to grokking his appeal. Maybe; for more on what Wong may be up to these days with his commercial work, though, turn to Chris Anthony Diaz, who focuses on There's Only One Sun, which Wong's made for Phillips - no Clive Owen in this one, unfortunately.

Also in the New York Times:

• Seth Randal and Alan Virta comment on Larry Craig's sudden shift in strategy (not that it helped, of course). Randal wrote and directed The Fall of '55, a documentary about a gay sex scandal that broke on Halloween 1955 in Boise, and Virta is the archivist at Boise State University and historical consultant for the film." Via Michael Guillén.

• Will Hollywood's writers strike? Michael Cieply reports on the state of the negotiations: "Writers scoffed at a plan that would scrap the current residuals system - which makes additional payments for the reissues of movies and television shows on DVDs and elsewhere - and replace it with an approach that would pay a bonus only when a property becomes profitable. Producers, meanwhile, brushed off the writers' demand for expanded residuals." Also, background on "a real if little-noticed shift in the once notoriously deadly business culture of Hollywood. In brief, studio chiefs are a lot safer than they used to be."

• Bob Tedeschi reports on "a new and vigorous outcry from parents, flight attendants and children's advocacy groups who say that in-flight entertainment has become anything but family-friendly." Robert Cashill comments.

• And a few NYT quickies: Jeannette Catsoulis on 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama and Self-Medicated and Laura Kern on Vanaja, "a coming-of-age tale that is engrossing, if slightly overlong, and absolutely timeless, unfolding against an antiquated class system that sadly stands firm in rural areas of India to this day." Dan Sallitt recommends it.

Jason Morehead indexes his "Scenes I Go Back To" project.

IndieWIRE interviews Kamp Katrina directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon.

In the Hungarian Népszabadság, Jirí Menzel reflects on the Czech New Wave and euro|topics translates: "As far as the present is concerned, I agree with Věra Chytilová who said you could play clever games with the Bolsheviks if you knew how to outsmart them. You can't do anything about today's financing problems. This is a much tougher regime than back then."

Peter Nellhaus watches Muerte de un Ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) and decides that director Juan Antonio Bardem "may be, as Andrew Sarris would put it, a subject for further research."

For the Telegraph, Will Lawrence talks with David Schwimmer about Run, Fat Boy, Run.

Pitchfork reports on two upcoming releases from Brian Eno. 77 Million Paintings is a "DVD-ROM containing special software that overlaps and combines images to create somewhere near the titular number of digitized paintings. Plus the whole snazzy thing is set to original, Eno-composed music." Stop the War Coalition Benefit Concert features Eno, Imogen Heap, the Rachid Taha Band, Nitin Sawhney and special guest Mick Jones.

Online viewing tip #1. At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth's got the trailer for Random Lunacy: "You almost can't believe these people accomplished all of these things and if it weren't captured on videotape first-hand, nobody probably would."

Online viewing tip #2. "Alexandre Alexeieff was a Russian illustrator and animator who met Claire Parker, an American art student, in Paris in 1930," writes John Coulthart. "The pair formed a life-long partnership and together developed a new style of animation using a pinscreen, a white board containing thousands of pins whose shadows when pushed out of the board provide the grey tones required to create a picture."

Posted by dwhudson at September 2, 2007 3:40 PM