Shorts, 11/12.

Flash Art's running Francesco Vezzoli's 2005 interview with Bob Colacello and the very first Q and A is the must-read of the day. If you get a kick out of that anecdote, do read on; if not, don't. Related: The Gore Vidal Trilogy poster.

"A few years ago, [Slavoj] Zizek asserted that 'we should not oppose something just because it was appropriated by the wrong guys; rather, we should think about how to re-appropriate it,'" Jim Cocola reminds us in n+1. "This accurately describes the mission of [The Pervert's Guide to Cinema]: to take back post-code Hollywood's unwritten codes for cultural criticism - even for the left - while turning various independent and international films on their heads in the bargain."

"While canonical critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin, David Bordwell, Dave Kehr, J Hoberman, James Naremore and others have provided a tremendous critical influence on cinephile bloggers, there is also evidence of Gilles Deleuze's theoretical influence on cinephiles in the blogosphere," notes Jason Sperb. "For example, Mirror/Stage's Andy Horbal, Traumdeutung's Amy Konig and The Cinematic Art's Ted Pigeon each reference his work, openly confessing to his influence on their writings."

Meanwhile, Ted Pigeon points to "something that's happening there right now: critical debate." At Jim Emerson's place.

Fred Camper's found a review of Citizen Kane by Erich von Stroheim in the June 1941 issue of Decision, an arts periodical founded and edited by Klaus Mann:

To be truthful, during the first twenty minutes of viewing the film, I, who have been thirty years in this business of making films, did not know what it was all about. I may be dumb, but I have asked at least fifty people who in more or less articulate form described the same experience. I may be hyper-conservative or just plain old fashioned, but I believe in all sincerity that the form of telling the story of Citizen Kane is not the desired or successful form in which to tell a screen story. All of us have been accustomed to hear or to see a story start at the beginning. Welles's way of telling the story may have its place in a novel or on the stage, but I am convinced that in the cinema it is entirely out of place.

Via Wellesnet.

Roman Polanski will direct an adaptation of Robert Harris's new novel, The Ghost, reports Tatiana Siegel for Variety. Via Christopher Campbell at Cinematical. The Guardian notes that the "political thriller... has been read as a thinly veiled attack on the former British prime minister Tony Blair." Meanwhile, the BBC passes along news that film about Polanski's in the works.

More from Tatiana Siegel: "Guillermo del Toro will write, direct and produce the sci-fi actioner Champions," based on the British TV series. Via Peter Smith at ScreenGrab.

Two interviews with Francis Ford Coppola: Bruce Handy for Vanity Fair (via Movie City News) and Rebecca Winters Keegan for Time.

At the AV Club, Keith Phipps talks with Richard Lester about seeing his Beatles movies again. More from Randy Lewis in the Los Angeles Times.

"Eisenstein has suffered from both too much influence and not enough," writes Owen Hatherley for the New Humanist. "In a sense, he wanted to be to cinema what his heroes - Leonardo da Vinci, Marx, Freud - were in their fields, and a vaulting overambitiousness is as evident in his theoretical works as in the end product." Via infinite thøught.

"You can't quite get your hands around The Woman Chaser, and that's all for the good," writes Kim Morgan at Noir of the Week. "Directed by Robinson Devor, whose only credit up to this point was a wonderfully weird 30 minute documentary about Hollywood billboard star Angelyne (he has since directed Police Beat and the infamous horse sex documentary, Zoo. You can't say Devor isn't multi-faceted) The Woman Chaser is something of a lost film.... It's an unnerving, hilarious slice Los Angeles life and wildly unique on top."

The Self-Styled Siren points to Raymond De Felitta's appreciation of Rita Hayworth, parts 1 and 2.

Crispin Glover's "new film and second in the planned It trilogy, It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine, finds Glover not only tightening his skill and artistic vision but also cementing his new identity as a confident and confrontational creator," writes John Constantine at Nerve.

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij sees parallels between Renny Harlin's return to Finland to make the war drama Mannerheim and Paul Verhoeven's return to Holland to make Black Book. Also, a preview of Roberto Faenza's I vicerè (The Viceroys), an adaptation of the fin-de-siècle novel by Federico De Roberto.

Cineuropa's new "Film in Focus": Roy Andersson's You the Living.

For indieWIRE, Jason Guerrasio checks in on five independent films currently in production - good thing they're already written.

Peter Chattaway has found a full version of Hanna Rosin's Atlantic Monthly piece on The Golden Compass, "How Hollywood Saved God."

Peter Popham reports that the Italian village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema is concerned that Spike Lee "risks doing a grave injustice to history." Part of Miracle at St Anna, based on the novel by James McBride, deals with "the day in August 1944 when four columns of Nazi stormtroopers poured down from the hills and slaughtered everyone in sight, including dozens of women and children.... One scene in the film has convinced some villagers that he is going to depict the massacre as a reprisal for partisan attacks; in fact, the German attack was gratuitous and planned in minute detail." The mayor, though, is trying to reassure his constituents: "I am sure Spike Lee will make a masterpiece."

Also in the Independent, a heart-wrenching piece from Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on the making of Heir to an Execution.

Filmbrain catches the new print of Diva: "Would the film hold up after all these years, or would it feel horribly dated? Would Jules, Gorodish and Alba still seem as cool now that my own mobylette years have long passed? The answer is a resounding... yes."

"Named after one of his albums and built around snippets of audio interviews with Mr Ayler, My Name Is Albert Ayler attempts and often achieves a fresh, playful style that's equally informed by jazz traditions and Mr Ayler's urge to shatter them," writes Matt Zoller Seitz.

Also in the New York Times:

• "Holly is one of several recent films that explore sex trafficking, a phenomenon the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime describes as the world's fastest-growing criminal enterprise," writes John Anderson. "The recent Trade, which starred Kevin Kline, followed human cargo being smuggled from Mexico to New Jersey. Very Young Girls, a new documentary produced for Showtime by David Schisgall, confines itself to New York City but reveals a homegrown world of predatory sex and the legal view that the seller, rather than the buyer, is culpable. Holly, however, exists in a world without borders."

• "Saawariya announces itself as an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's White Nights, but whatever Russian soul may dwell deep within it is pretty well drowned in Bollywood style," writes AO Scott. Scarlet Cheng has background on the film in the Los Angeles Times.

• Cocalero "is a film that feeds the established [Evo] Morales legend: The gregarious, unsophisticated leader of the coca-leaf growers wins the presidency in December 2005 with a combination of unpretentiousness, honesty and grass-roots support," writes Neil Genzlinger. "But pay close enough attention and you may end up a bit skeptical that you're seeing the full Morales picture."

• "Fred Claus is a tacky would-be comedy about family dysfunction that fronts some Scrooge attitude only to dissolve into slobbering sentimentality and canned uplift," writes Manohla Dargis. "Neither here nor there, the film is Elf without the goofy jokes, Will Ferrell or heart, Bad Santa without the smut, Billy Bob Thornton or spleen."

• "Swift and stealthy P2 is a canny exploitation of one of the urban woman's greatest fears: the after-hours parking garage," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "Throw in a car that won't start, a creepy security guard and a filmmaking team with perfect synchronicity, and the result is a minimalist nightmare." More from Andrew Wright in the Stranger: "[T]hink Red Eye with twice the gore and triple the dumb."

• Eventually, The Sacred Family's "dizzying visual style — shaky, fast-moving hand-held camerawork and heavy use of close-ups — settles down enough to reveal elements of absorbing drama, layered with black humor and rare sexual and emotional frankness," writes Laura Kern.

• "An architect who helped raise a bustling new quarter from the industrial mess of southeast Paris will now get his shot at a section of this city best known for its automotive repair shops, tumbledown cottages and slapdash sidewalk posters," writes Michael Cieply in Los Angeles. "At a board meeting on Tuesday night the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose the architect, Christian de Portzamparc, and his Paris-based firm to design the grand movie museum it is planning for a site just south of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood."

• Jon Pareles has a background piece on Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll: the story of the Plastic People of the Universe.

• Jesse Green profiles Edward Albee: "Of the generation of theatrical giants who came to international prominence in the 1950s with plays that not only won Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes but actually seemed to register in the culture as well, he is the only one, with the possible exception of Horton Foote, still going strong. On the heels of excellent Broadway revivals of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Seascape in 2005, the current theater season includes four major New York-area productions of his work."

• "A palate-whetting curtain-raiser to a season plump with plays by Mr Albee, who turns 80 in March, Peter and Jerry twins The Zoo Story, his first play (written in 1958), with Homelife, a companion piece written six years ago, now receiving its New York premiere," writes Ben Brantley. "There are telling differences in inflection and timber between these creations of a man in his 20s and his 70s. But there is no mistaking that they are products of one enduring and consistent voice, a voice unparalleled in American theater for its surgical elegance in exploring the animal in humanity." Related: "What Albee is trying to flush out into the open here is the elusive way in which the unconscious can short-circuit desire," writes John Lahr in the New Yorker. "Jerry's gesture - and Albee's accomplishment - is to force Peter to face his own murderous feelings and the anarchy of desire."

• Jeanine Basinger reviews Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis: "[Ed] Sikov, author of biographies of Peter Sellers and Billy Wilder, is both a respected scholar and a delicious gossip, which makes him perfect to chronicle Davis's bravura life."

• "Comparative courses in how Al Jazeera, CNN, the BBC and US networks portray the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be taught in all U.S. high schools and colleges," argues Roger Cohen.

Tom Kalin's Savage Grace has Paul Burston looking back at the origins of "New Queer Cinema" and asking, "where exactly did it go?"

Also in the Guardian, Xan Brooks talks with Wes Anderson about The Darjeeling Limited and Owen Wilson - so does Jonathan Romney for the Independent - and Damon Wise interviews Rose McGowan.

"Roger Deakins refers to the Coen Brothers, charmingly, as 'the boys.' When you've worked with the Coens for as long as he has, though, you're permitted to be a little familiar." And Paul Matwychuk has a chat with the cinematographer.

For Time Out, Mark Salisbury talks with Andrew Dominik about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - which Deakins shot as well. Also via Movie City News, Colin Covert of the Twin Cities' Star Tribune talks with the Coens about "their enduring ties to their home state and the comedy-drama they will make here." That'd be A Serious Man, an "upper Midwestern comedy of manners. This is a Minnesota story, the Coens insisted, born out of specific memories of their youth."

Twitch's Todd Brown exchanges email with Adam Mason. The subject line: Blood River.

"The conflict between policies that support national security and those that protect civil liberties are embodied in the bizarre, terrifying story of Steve Kurtz, an artist, activist and State University of New York at Buffalo professor for whom a personal tragedy led to a Kafkaesque nightmare courtesy of the War on Terror," writes Carina Chocano, opening her review of Strange Culture.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Rafer Guzmán: "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song could have been called Pete Seeger: The First Punk."

"Anton Corbijn's Control, about the life and death of Ian Curtis, the singer for Joy Division, is a film that is fully worthy of its subject," writes Steven Shaviro. "Control is beautiful and bleak, affectively compelling because of (rather than in spite of) its reticence and downbeat everydayness."

Thailand's National Legislative Assembly is on the verge of passing a Film Act that would forbid anyone under 25 years old from seeing certain films, reports Kong Rithdee in the Bangkok Post. "No country in the world (except some Taliban-ruled badland) takes away the right to choose to go to a movie from its 24-year-old citizens." Thanks, Peter!

In the Observer, Chrissy Iley meets Sam Rockwell and Elizabeth Day honors an appointment with Paula Wagner, "so frequently described as the most powerful woman in Hollywood that it is hard not to be utterly terrified at the prospect of meeting her."

"American Gangster is a big, brash and brilliant cinema tour de force," writes Earl Ofari Hutchinson in New American Media. "But it also reinforces a glaring stereotype - one of America's most enduring stereotypes - that the drug problem and drug kingpins come with a black face." Via Alternet. More on the film from Hiram Lee at the WSWS and from Neil Young.

Joe Bob Briggs is the "the head Online Doorkeeper" for the Wittenburg Door, "the pretty much only magazine of religious satire, nailing the church since 1517."

ST VanAirsdale extends the deadline for the Totally Unrelated Blog-a-Thon.

The latest list from Richard T Kelly: "Ten Great Movie Walks."

Online grinning tip. Design Sponge steps into Amy Sedaris's home. Via Coudal Partners.

Online browsing tip. John Coulthart remembers poster artist Richard Amsel.

Online listening tip. For the BBC, "Paul Gambaccini explores how stage works have been adapted for the cinema." Specifically, in this edition, Ken Russell's adaptation of Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend. That's a tip from Jerry Lentz, who also passes along news that Russell's working on a movie at Swansea Institute's Dynevor Centre for Art, Design and Media. No word there as to what the movie might be, though.

Online viewing tip #1. At Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder points to Joshua Glenn's excellent slide show at the Boston Globe on Winsor McCay's far-reaching influence on cinema as demonstrated by Ulrich Merkl's book, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. For more on the book and accompanying DVD, see John Adcock's review.

Online viewing tip #2. The Washington Post's Desson Thompson's "Top 10 Tear-Jerkers."

Online viewing tip #3. Designboom interviews Bill Viola. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #4. In the Independent, Claire Beale goes wild over an ad: "The Walkman is going for a superior sound-sell, and Fallon's work captures it beautifully."

Online viewing tips, round 1. From Daniel Murphy for Esquire: "The Five Worst Fight Scenes Ever Filmed."

Online viewing tips, round 2. "Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film" at ScreenGrab, parts 1 and 2.

Online viewing tips, round 3. "With the online video revolution in full swing, it's high time for a field guide," insists New York. "Here's our take on the best comedy, cartoons, dramas, and vintage YouTube classics on offer." It's a lot, but Logan Hill and Bilge Ebiri have taken it a step further, creating a "highlight reel of more than 100 vintage New York videos, [in which] CBGB never closed, James Brown never died, and Madonna is still learning how to vogue."

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2007 6:22 AM