Shorts, 9/23.

"Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer - sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly - in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen," writes John Wray in a profile of Michael Haneke for the New York Times Magazine. "This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema's most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month.... Funny Games is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film's story in the slightest." In an accompanying audio slide show, AO Scott talks about Haneke's "sado-masochistic approach to filmmaking."

In the paper:

• Dave Itzkoff traces Bill Hader's rapid rise from "a backyard in Van Nuys" to SNL and Superbad.

• Anthony Minghella has just directed an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's novel The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Michael Wines has visited the set and talked with him and the lead, Jill Scott, about her role: "'You have to love Botswana, because that's how she feels,' she continued. 'And if you see it more than one day, you'll see why she loves it.'"

• Dan Barry meets Jeff Frank, who's been running the Drexel movie theater in Bexley, Ohio for 26 years. In an accompanying audio slide show, we see how other theaters have been turned into storefronts or medical centers.

And in the Book Review, Dale Peck looks back on SE Hinton's The Outsiders, 40 years on.

"Initially I was dead against visiting the set of Control, the film about my father's life directed by photographer Anton Corbijn," writes Natalie Curtis in the Guardian. But she did go, met Sam Riley, who plays her father, and hung with Samantha Morton, who plays her mother, and stayed around long enough to be an extra in a few scenes, too. Related: Brian Brooks profiles Riley for indieWIRE and Craig Mclean interviews Morton for the Independent.

"After the worst summer of movies on record, in which my usually enjoyable stint standing in for Philip French as this paper's film columnist had seen me groaning through Hostel Part II, Shrek the Third, Die Hard 4.0 and other such bores, the Observer demanded that I finally put my anti-television snobbery to the test," writes Mark Kermode. "The mission: to shut me in a room with a truckload of DVD box sets representing 'a cross-section of modern TV' and see whether, at the end, I could still sensibly claim that cinema had the upper hand."

Also:

• Caspar Llewellyn Smith introduces an annotated list of the ten best concert movies. Related online viewing: trailers for the current batch of musician biopics and docs from Kimberly Lindbergs at Cinebeats.

• Peter Conrad profiles Tom Hardy.

• Eva Wiseman reviews Helen Mirren's In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures.

• More books: Kate Kellaway: Roddy Doyle's The Deportees and Wilderness, the first a collection of stories for adults, the second a novel aimed at children, show him writing at the top of his form." For Will Hutton, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is "a lost opportunity." Francesca Segal on The Late Hector Kipling: "[David] Thewlis has taken the turn-of-the-millennium London art scene and eviscerated it and the resulting gore makes for wonderful entertainment."

• Jay Rayner recommends Ratatouille, "the first big-budget Hollywood picture to put the food right at the heart of the action and to give a realistic portrait of what stove life is like."

For the Lumière Reader, Alexander Bisley talks with Noland Walker about his documentary, Citizen King: "People forget that [Martin Luther King] was actually very controversial and unpopular at the time of his death. And the ideas and reasons why were important to get on film, and to get a record from the people who participated at the time, many of whom are still alive today."

Alternet's Don Hazen introduces an excerpt from Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity: "In his new book, Robert Jensen forces the reader to face the music about the effects of a porn industry gone gonzo and the need to reassess the trappings of masculinity as the source of increased violence against and degradation of women."

Another excerpt: Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture: "Movie-making and war-making would now be intertwined. The location of this production would be Iraq. The director would be the Pentagon. The production staff would be situated at that quarter-million-dollar set for war briefings at centcom headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and Americans would see our troops advance in triumph just the way they were supposed to, just the way they had on-screen all those long, glorious years ago."

Also at Alternet: "As they pack into theaters to watch the blockbuster Resident Evil: Extinction this weekend, moviegoers may first want to play one of the many blockbuster video games on which the film is based," suggests Roberto Lovato. "[I]n what looks like it could be a training video for a white supremacist race war or another US military adventure in one of the increasing numbers of deserts on the planet, players of the soon-to-be-released Resident Evil 5 video game are placed in what could be an African country or Haiti as they blow up armies of black zombies." Related: Rob Humanick at Slant on the movie.

Blog-a-Thon reminders: Buñuel at Flickhead's place, starting tomorrow; Film + Faith at Strange Culture, November 7 through 9; It's a Wonderful Life at Cinemathematics, December 16.

Posted by dwhudson at September 23, 2007 10:51 AM