Shorts, 9/21.

Michael Atkinson Flickipedia: Perfect Films for Every Occasion, Holiday, Mood, Ordeal and Whim "is not a crazy, sophisticated filmhead enterprise," writes co-author Michael Atkinson. "It is instead something devised for the average filmgoer... Hardcore cine-nuts can take no prisoners in their love for Godard and Hou and Antonioni and their disdain for anyone who'd pass up a chance to see Out 1 and would instead attend their child's soccer game or go fishing or read poetry. This book is not for them (my next book, Exile Cinema: Filmmakers At Work Beyond Hollywood, coming in 2008 from SUNY Press, kinda is). Flickipedia is about movies and life - how they intersect, interact, cross-pollinate."

Belá Tarr couldn't stay as long in Chicago as originally planned but a discussion of his work at Facets Multimedia carried on without him last weekend. Besides the audience, participants were Facets' Susan Doll, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Scott Foundas and David Borwell, who writes, "I do agree with my fellow panelists that the later films have a significantly different look and feel, and it's on them that Tarr's place in world film history will chiefly rest. As I indicated at the end of Figures Traced in Light, he stands out as a distinctive creator in a contemporary tradition of ensemble staging. Like Tarkovsky, he shifts our attention from human action toward the touch and smells of the physical world. Like Antonioni and Angelopoulos, he employs 'dead time' and landscapes to create a palpable sense of duration and distance. Like Sokurov in Whispering Pages (1993), he takes us into an eerie, Dostoevskian realm where characters are cruel, possessed, mesmerized, humiliated, and prey to false prophets."

Apropos of 3:10 to Yuma, The Assassination..., and yes, Sukiyaki Western Django, Richard Corliss offers a history of the Western for Time.

"Since his triumph in 1990 with The Civil War, [Ken] Burns has a made an art out of wringing tears and sighs from a nation whose lack of interest in history ranks among its most salient characteristics," writes Beverly Gage at Slate. "Now, 17 years to the day since PBS broadcast The Civil War, he returns this Sunday night with The War, a sprawling account of the American experience in World War II. At 14 and a half hours, The War is a whopper of a film, and often revelatory. It is also manipulative, nostalgic, and nationalistic. Imagine that Burns had narrated The Civil War solely from the Union perspective, and you'll have a sense of both what's right and what's wrong with this latest epic: It's rousing and meaningful and not technically inaccurate, but not exactly the whole truth." And in the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley asks, "The war was necessary, but is this approach?"

Also in the NYT:

• "[T]he world of Thelma and Louise, I think it's fair now to say, is not the one that we inhabit psychologically or physically today," writes Judith Warner.

• "By inserting a gay man into a heterosexual milieu familiar from countless French depictions of the bourgeoisie at play, The Man of My Life wants to rejuvenate the Gallic genre I call déjeuner sur l'herbe with contemporary themes," writes Stephen Holden. More from Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "[T]hough occasionally its strength is sapped by heavy-handed symbolic gestures, The Man of My Life is a surprisingly unsentimental take on somewhat dubious character types. Just when it seems like [director Zabou] Breitman's made another case study in how much the free-spirited homo can teach the sheltered hetero, the director actually manages to free her two main men from the burden of most cliches." Earlier: James van Maanen.

• "A bold Brazilian melodrama that moves to the rhythm of the streets, Antonia traces a year in the lives of four young women who form a rap group and fend off tragedy," writes Jeannette Catsoulis of a film that "pulses with color and movement.... When the group sings an a cappella version of 'Killing Me Softly,' you may forget to breathe." Related: indieWIRE's interview with director Tata Amaral.

• Matt Zoller Seitz on Honor de Cavalleria, "a virtual definition of the phrase 'acquired taste.' But if you invest yourself in [Albert] Serra's vision, the film's emotional payoffs are devastating." Related: "Lensed by Christophe Farnarier and Eduard Grau, Quixotic uses entirely natural light for its photography, and Serra's images feel loose and happenstance: avoiding precision in composition, strict or dramatic blocking, and picturesque motivations, Serra lets his scenes play out visually, and if, on the off chance, a moment of movement on the part of the actors is evocative, a particular focal length of the camera catches a grass or flower in the foreground, or the angle and light of sun or moon are just right, Quixotic becomes momentarily beautiful," writes Daniel Kasman. "But there is just as much visual banality in the knight's life: one lengthy shot at night is so dark that the screen literally appears black for a minute, while in another instance Quixote and Sancho's slumped, exhausted bodies are immobile in a lovely but almost as obscured image where the only on-camera motion is the arcing, and very slow movement of the moon behind them."

• Again, Jeannette Catsoulis: "Incubated at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Adrift in Manhattan is an all-too-familiar wallow in urban woe and artfully photographed isolation."

• AO Scott on Good Luck Chuck: "The intended viewership seems to consist of guys who fantasize about sleeping with [Jessica] Alba, which may represent a reasonably large share of the population. The actual paying audience, however, will more likely be those poor, deluded souls — they've Hi-lited all the relevant passages of that notorious pickup manual The Game - who think they might really have a shot."

• Laura Kern on Sydney White: "[T]here's nothing sophisticated about the comedy in this peppy, ultra-PC variation on Snow White."

• Michael Cieply reports on friction between DreamWorks and its corporate parent, Paramount, that's led to speculation that Steven Spielberg and David Geffen would leave the company when their contracts expire at the end of next year.

• "Jay-Z, the rap superstar and president of Def Jam Records, has quietly returned to the studio to record an album of new songs inspired by the forthcoming movie American Gangster, his first 'concept' album and second CD in less than a year," report David M Halbfinger and Jeff Leeds.

The Telegraph's John Hiscock comes to Berlin to talk with Tom Cruise about Valkyrie: "It is the first time Cruise has talked publicly about the film [well, in the English-language press; he's been all over the German papers - dwh], and, as far he is concerned, everything is going superbly well, despite being having initially been banned by the government from filming at one important historic site."

Glenn Kenny responds to Richard Kelly's "bitching and moaning about the people who didn't 'get' his overbaked would-be magnum opus," noting he's "now pulling an ageist card."

In a piece on the new Russian blockbusters, Phil Hoad jumps around in time a bit, appropriately enough, from his raucous visit to the Day Watch set in 2005 to the present and back again. "[N]o one is sure what the third film, Twilight Watch, is going to be. [Producer Konstantin] Ernst says the vampires and psychics will move beyond their Moscow stomping ground to spread the franchise to the likes of New York and Tokyo. There's talk of the whole thing being in English, and Hollywood stars climbing on board.... If it feels like there's no one behind the wheel of the Russian film juggernaut, it's enormously exciting."

Also in the Guardian, John Patterson: "If Sally Field at the Emmys wasn't enough, and you want more evidence of how entertaining, ridiculous and excruciating it can be to watch actors getting involved in politics, you need only cast your eyes over the tempestuous struggle now going on for the presidency of the Screen Actors' Guild, where it's actors-in-charge-of-everything, all day, every day." And Charlotte Higgins talks with Tilda Swinton.

"A love triangle set in the late 1940s, as Mao Zedong's People's Army is about to sweep the old order of China away, Ann Hu's Beauty Remains is distinguished by a ghostly, intimate atmosphere that will linger with you long after the plot has faded," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, and on that same pages, he notes of Honor de Cavalleria, "Some commenter on IMDB has dubbed this movie as 'Beckett meets Cervantes,' and that about captures it."

"The Jammed is an effective and at times harrowing low-budget drama written and directed by Dee McLachlan about sex trafficking in Australia," writes Richard Phillips at the WSWS. "While there have been numerous local movies made about Australian immigration, none investigates the plight of women sold into prostitution. The Jammed - a social-realist style thriller - is the first." Also, a talk with McLachlan.

"Winona Ryder and Mickey Rourke have joined the ensemble cast of Gregor Jordan's The Informers, an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel." Carly Mayberry has more in the Hollywood Reporter.

A "lot of recent writing and posting shows a strange resentment in the air which writers are constantly, compulsively confessing and describing and concerning themselves with their process rather than that of filmmaking, and it's a strange breed of writing, too meta to ever become meaty." Ray Pride on the state of media, old and new, for New City Chicago.

The San Diego Reader's Duncan Shepherd returns from a 4-month sabbatical.

"By this time of year, I've usually seen twelve to fifteen films that were really worth recommending, without reservations; but in 2007, it's a struggle to come up with ten," writes Noah Forrest at Movie City News.

"So what's the 'best' comedy in the last five years?" asks Pat Graham at the Chicago Reader. "My own vote goes to - whoa, credibility alert! - Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy."

For Radio Prague, Ian Willoughby reports on the revival of Kinoautomat, a system that allowed for an "interactive" cinema that was invented 40 years ago in the then-Czechoslovakian capital. Hollywood studios actually expressed interest in licensing it, but the socialists were having none of that. Via Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing.

Online viewing tip. The Shamus has found "nice two-part documentary on how a young Tom Waits came to write his soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola's One From The Heart. Enjoy."

Online viewing tips. Blu at SiouxWIRE.

Posted by dwhudson at September 21, 2007 1:44 PM