Shorts, 10/16.

"The movies made during the studio era - what the cineastes have dubbed 'the classical Hollywood cinema' - are, along with jazz, America's best creative work from the late 1920s to about 1950." And yet, "ny Hollywood history illuminates the dichotomy between those movies that the system most highly prized and those we love now, raising some doubts about the much-vaunted 'genius of the system.'" The Atlantic Monthly's Benjamin Schwarz reviews Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting and The Star Machine.

"The older Funny Face gets, the more mixed feelings it's likely to arouse, but for three things [fans will] say it gets wrong, there'll be one that redeems all of that, for this is a musical filled with moments still hypnotic and evocative of the 50s in ways few others are," writes John McElwee.

"There's a certain kind of twisted logic to it: a novel about the persistence of love has turned, in the hands of a mediocre director, into a a campy, puffed-up piece of rotten Oscar bait, a movie of such boundless badness that it would take somebody with a Nobel Prize in literature to truly fathom the extent of its wretchedness." Jürgen Fauth has seen Love in the Time of Cholera.

Brazil made Girish a cinephile.

For Esquire, Cal Fussman asks Dustin Hoffman what he's learned.

"Why do young men, who have grown up in the safe bosom of Scandinavia, want to sacrifice their lives for Allah?" asks Ivar Ekman in the International Herald Tribune. "That is the question posed by a Swedish documentary that provides a glimpse into the world of young European Muslims who dedicate themselves to jihad, or holy war. The film, Aching Heart, will open in Sweden on Oct 19 but has already gained much attention."

When Yella appeared in German cinemas last month, Christiane Peitz interviewed director Christian Petzold for Der Tagesspiegel. Now Lucy Powell translates that interview for signandsight. Petzold:

German actors are filmed as if they were stars, they make appearances on the red carpet or in Gala magazine, but there are no films surrounding them. How else do you explain the loneliness of Nastassja Kinski? Why weren't 30 films made with Franka Potente after Run Lola Run? And what is Jessica Schwarz up to? And why is Martina Gedeck not permanently surrounded by a culture which she carries, like Isabelle Huppert in France? They are celebrated for a single film, stars for half a year - and then the gazettes move on to the next one.

"'Koreans like dreamers, and [D-War director] Shim [Hyung-rae] is a dreamer,' says Chin Jung-kwon, a prominent South Korean cultural critic who trashed the movie on national TV and was quickly pegged the most villainous dissenter. 'The Korean media turned Shim's going to Hollywood into this great patriotic success story. So if you criticize him, it makes you a public enemy.'" Which is precisely what he's become, as Bruce Wallace reports in the Los Angeles Times.

Sam Fuller "wasn't only a great filmmaker," Geoffrey Macnab reminds us in the Independent. "In his younger years, he was a celebrated New York crime reporter and pulp novelist. Now, more than 60 years after its original publication, his 1944 bestseller The Dark Page is being republished. It is an embroiled Oedipal tale about Carl Chapman, the editor of a New York tabloid, and his young star reporter, Lance McLeary. The reporter is investigating a murder that the editor knows more about than he is letting on. The book works both as a hardboiled thriller and as an evocation of a lost era in US tabloid journalism, when the hard-drinking and endlessly cynical reporters all behaved as if they were on leave from The Front Page."

In the New Yorker, Margeret Talbot profiles the creator of The Wire, David Simon, "a former Baltimore Sun reporter who figured that he'd spend his life at a newspaper, a print journalist who has forged an improbable career in television without ever leaving Baltimore."

"There's an undertone of contemptuous misanthropy to many of [Gene] Kelly's performances, and never moreso than when he's trying to be sympathetic and relatable," blogs Noel Murray at the AV Club. "When he's acting 'human,' part of him is mocking the very idea of humanity, as though he were saying, 'I know how you rubes behave.'"

Doug Block's got a #1 Rule about personal documentary filmmaking, "the rule of rules, the rule every other rule is rolled into."

On Sunday, an explosion "ripped through a crowded cinema, killing six people and injuring dozens more in the northern Indian state of Punjab in what police described as a terrorist attack," reports Randeep Ramesh.

Also in the Guardian:

• "One of the key religious themes of Philip Pullman's award-winning series of children's novels, His Dark Materials, has been watered down to appeal to a wider audience in the new Hollywood film version of the first book," reports Vanessa Thorpe. "The original story's rejection of organised religion, and in particular of the historic abuse of power in the Catholic Church, has been altered to avoid offending followers of the faith in the UK and in America."

• David Smith reports that the Ronald Grant Cinema Museum, one of "Britain's most eccentric museums, a treasure trove of cinema nostalgia collected by one man over 60 years, is facing closure after being told to vacate its premises in six months."

• "The Brave One is far grittier than a standard revenge fantasy with a femme twist, because its subtext is one of the suppression and subsequent explosion of female anger," argues Bidisha. "It can be read as an analysis of what happens when women refuse to accept fear and take on the idea of fighting actively against deliberate macho intimidation."

• "Internet video is no longer a 'new media'; it's an industry standard," blogs Casey McKinnon. But "is Hollywood really creating 'new' media if they bring television to the internet?"

In the New York Times:

• "[N]ow that the Weinsteins have what they want - independence - they can't seem to achieve what they keenly desire - success on their own terms," writes David Carr.

• Michiko Kakutani reviews Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher, "a story similar in tone and setting to his last novel, Little Children." Related: Chris Bolton interviews Perrotta for Powell's.

• Ruth La Ferla talks with media folk and spiritual leaders about the wildly popular Tyler Perry.

• "They are a longtime odd couple, Bill Cosby and Harvard's Dr Alvin Poussaint, and their latest campaign is nothing less than an effort to save the soul of black America," writes Bob Herbert, who welcomes the appearance of "their new book, a cri de coeur against the forces of self-sabotage titled, Come On, People: On the Path From Victims to Victors."

Peet Gelderblom's weekly webcomic Directorama debuts at the House Next Door.

IndieWIRE interviews King Corn director Aaron Woolf.

Online browsing tip. Paintings Alain Delon's putting up for auction. The Spanish media's been snickering at his taste.

Offline viewing tip. For Chicagoans. Jonathan Rosenbaum will be talking about Discovering Orson Welles in an interview for CAN TV that'll include "a silent, five-minute sequence (scroll down article to four paragraphs before the end) from Orson Welles's unfinished Don Quixote that is arguably the greatest sequence he shot for the film, even though it can't be found in the execrable version cobbled together by Jesus Franco in 1992."

Online viewing tip #1. Grand Central, a short film by Jeff Scher.

Online viewing tip #2. "I concur with [Noël] Burch and pretty much everyone else interested in experimental cinema that Robert Breer is a master," writes Zach Campbell.

Posted by dwhudson at October 16, 2007 12:52 PM