Shorts, 10/10.

"Last week, Chris Marker released a new minute-long small movie to the Internet, which can be viewed here at the Cahiers du cinéma website," writes Craig Keller. "Accompanying the video at the same place is a new essay by Marker that provides a little bit of context to this latest work. I've translated his remarks into English," and you can read the translation at Cinemasparagus.

"We all know that genius director and New Wave godfather Jean-Pierre Melville makes a hugely memorable appearance in Jean-Luc Godard's neither particularly good nor influential (...psych!) 1959 debut feature Breathless... but do we all know that Melville based his mandarin novelist character Parvulesco on none other than Vladimir Nabokov? It's true!" And Glenn Kenny can prove it, too.

"Not to take anything away from the achievements of the Romanian New Wave, but the fact that these sublime, modest, inconclusive, off-the-cuff, on-the-shoulder movies are currently considered the global-fest cat's meow is, I think, indicative of how far mainstream cinema has strayed from anything substantive, engaging, convincing or resonant," blogs Michael Atkinson.

An adapatation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars from... Pixar? Perhaps even a trilogy? Peter Chattaway gathers newsbits.

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij gets a kick out of Michael Radford's Flawless: "Michael Caine and Demi Moore clearly enjoy themselves as two unlikely allies who conspire to rob the fictional London Diamond Corporation of £2 million worth of diamonds ('a small quantity like that, they won't even notice') before things spiral out of control in the clever screenplay from newcomer Edward A Anderson."

David Carr lists a slew of music docs and biopics just out or in the works and wonders what's up; part of the answer lies in the technology that makes a "kind of audio-visual spectacle" possible, as NYFF program director Richard Peña puts it. Another part of the answer: "When pop culture became the culture, stars of the two forms interacted and blended, inspiring desire for all sorts of crossover projects," James Toback tells him.

On a related note in Slate, Jessica Winter notes that Control and I'm Not There "are worlds apart in their tone and approach, but they share an aversion to the usual checklist of biopic signifiers. And though both films feature some ace mimicry, they're more interested in their subjects as screens for projecting our own desires, interpretations, and educated guesses.... Though the title of Deborah Curtis's book, Touching From a Distance, is a line from a Joy Division song that sums up the failed Curtis marriage, it also happens to describe the methodology of the best music biopics."

Back in the New York Times:

• Joe Drape talks with Aaron Woolf and Curt Ellis about their documentary, King Corn, which "takes the position that America's most valuable crop is overproduced and looks at the toll it takes on the environment, public health and family farms." More from Robert Wilonsky in the Voice: "A worthy companion piece to Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation (more the book than the movie), King Corn will put you off corn for a long, long time, but this is as much a thoughtful meditation on the plight of the American farmer as it is a rant against our expanding waistlines."

• "Brian Springer's bizarre documentary The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity, which crams a surplus of ideas into 70 brief, often head-scratching minutes, is, among many things, a treatise on how history is passed along, altered and sometimes lost through archaeological findings," writes Laura Kern. More from Nathan Lee in the Voice: "Singer patterns his ideas with such daunting complexity it's easy to get lost. But The Disappointment doesn't - it's amazing to explore."

• Jeannette Catsoulis finds Golda's Balcony "inert yet strangely compelling." In the Voice, Ella Taylor praises Valerie Harper, who "superbly serves up Israel's least photogenic and (next to Yitzhak Rabin) best-loved prime minister... in Jeremy Kagan's excellent adaptation of William Gibson's stage play." At Slant, finds it "breathless yet stylistically disconnected" and "one of many recent works that represent the ripples cast outward from the dialogue begun in Steven Spielberg's masterful Munich."

"[W]hile passably adopting several familiar modes of art-house style - the minimalism of figures in a gaping landscape, excruciatingly paced anomie, vague apocalyptica, monumentalist spectacle - Khadak doesn't exhibit full, dynamic fluency in any of them," writes Nick Pinkerton. Also in the Voice, Aaron Hillis: "[Director Joseph] Greco's sincerity is so palpable that the frequent uplift feels deserved, but with just-passable filmmaking and the demeaning score, Canvas falls somewhere between powerful indie and made-for-TV diversion." More from Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

Cineuropa's new "Film in Focus" is Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven.

The New Republic's Christopher Orr on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: "[I]t is the thematic richness of [Andrew] Dominik's film that makes it not only the best film of the year so far but a strong contender for the greatest Western since Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West nearly 40 years ago."

In the London Review of Books, Michael Wood watches the 1957 and 2007 versions of 3:10 to Yuma: "[B]eneath all the differences, the contours and issues of both films remain the same, and both are faithful in their way to the Elmore Leonard story where they started, which means the new work also has its share of moral suspense and complexity."

"In many ways SpongeBob reincarnates some of the most distinctive traits of the slapstick characters of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin," writes frieze contributing editor Jan Verwoert. "A subversive quality of their performances always lies in the way in which they set their protagonist up against the hostile reality of capitalist America - shaped by poverty, exploitation and random police brutality - and make them triumph over these realities through the resilience of a simple mind and flexible body."

"[Jim] Jarmusch's hipness offers its own distinct pleasures - how could an encounter between Bill Murray and the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and GZA (in 2003's Coffee and Cigarettes) fail to amuse? But there's also something distracting about this aspect of his work—it tends to obscure the qualities that distinguish him as one of the great American filmmakers of his generation," argues Nathaniel Rich. Also in Slate, Ann Hulbert asks, "[W]hy is it that the [Up] series remains, quite literally, irresistible - to [Michael] Apted, his audience, and his participants themselves?" Somewhat related: Ed Champion quotes "moment of wisdom from Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs (another book I'm tempted to include among the best of the year)."

At indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman assesses the race for the foreign-language Oscar.

"[T]he dynamic, dexterous Oswald's Ghost isn't trying to solve a murder mystery," writes Cheryl Eddy. "Instead, it compiles the perspectives of those who were there (including Dan Rather and, naturally, Abraham Zapruder) with a broader look at the aftereffects of John F Kennedy's death, from the still-brisk conspiracy-theory book trade to the Vietnam War and beyond."

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Maria Komodore: "At first glance, For the Bible Tells Me So comes across as a fairly conservative film.... In terms of content, Daniel G Karslake's first feature is anything but unchallenging."

And Dennis Harvey: "If you watch many documentaries these days, you're sick of filmmakers putting their mugs and ruminations on camera, whether germane to the subject or not. But there's a real intensity to [Amir] Bar-Lev's soul-searching in My Kid Could Paint That."

"Gone is the requirement for a 14-city theatrical roll-out. In its place, a complete reversal of the direction the Academy's Documentary Branch has been headed for the past several years - instituting stricter rules in an attempt to guarantee that nominees were in fact theatrical films." AJ Schnack comments on the new rules of the game.

"All the action in contract talks between screenwriters and Hollywood studios has taken place behind closed doors," writes Peter Sanders in the Wall Street Journal. "But as the negotiations continue, and a possible strike looms next month, a pair of writers who belong to the union have emerged as influential public voices in the debate via a closely watched blog. The blog, www.artfulwriter.com, is showing the ways in which the Internet can become an important public sounding board in union negotiations that largely take place in private."

Online listening tip #1. The Drive-In Speaker Box.

Online listening tip #2. Peter Bogdanovich's Saturday Morning Pictures on BBC 4. Thanks, Jerry!

Online viewing tip. There's a man in the habit of hitting me on the head with an umbrella at Subtitles to Cinema.

Online viewing tip #2. The trailer for Jumper's at the site. Via Movie City News.

Online viewing tip #3. Kimberly Lindbergs introduces Henry Miller - Asleep & Awake.

Online viewing tips. Promos for Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief, via Todd Brown at Twitch.

Posted by dwhudson at October 10, 2007 3:50 PM