Shorts, 12/3.

"Wilder, a Viennese Jew, used Lubitsch, a Jew born in Berlin, as a major reference point throughout his filmmaking career, and to what degree he succeeded as well as failed in emulating his master is the main issue I'd like to address here," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum for Stop Smiling. "I'd like to propose a somewhat different definition of the Lubitsch touch - one that helps to account for why Wilder was able to adopt some of its aspects on his best pictures while other aspects eluded him." Beyond that three-part definition is a discussion of what gave both men "naughty" reputations as comic directors in their respective eras, plus two questions: "Was Lubitsch really inimitable?" and "Is it possible to speak of a Wilder touch?"

"By 1954 Mizoguchi had surely seen The Little Foxes. Had he decided to redo Wyler's virtuoso staging in his own manner?" wonders David Bordwell in an entry on A Woman of Rumor. "Wyler's handling is brisk, tense, and remarkably nuanced within the Hollywood tradition. Mizoguchi gives us his scene more sedately, wringing just-noticeable differences out of unassertive performances and simple elements of setting.... Am I fussing over minutiae? No; Wyler and Mizoguchi did."

"There's a very interesting, wide-ranging debate going on over at the Korean Film Discussion Board about where Korean cinema stands now after ten years of growth and commercial development," notes Koreanfilm.org's Darcy Paquet. "Have commercial pressures overwhelmed the industry? Creatively, does Korean cinema provide any meaningful alternative to Hollywood at this point? What can we expect going forward?"

Over the weekend, both Billy Stevenson and Erich Kuersten were wowed by Charles Laughton in Ruggles of Red Gap.

"It was my Zionist mother who first encouraged me to look at films from Iran." For Peter Nellhaus, neither Nader T Homayoun's doc Iran: A Cimemagraphic Revolution and Hamid Reza Sadr's book Iranian Cinema: A Political History "give a complete picture of the history of Iranian Cinema, but to a limited extent they do compliment each other in providing a basic overview of the films and conditions under which those films were made. Sadr provides most of the substance regarding film and political history which in turn make Homayoun's excerpts from the various films more meaningful."

With an annotated "5 for the Day," Sheila O'Malley writes up an appreciation of Dean Stockwell at the House Next Door.

"[Y]ou're looking here at the faces of independent British cinema, the actors who have fronted the cream of home-grown, non-studio-bound, commercial movie-making over the past 10 years." John Walsh introduces 18 photographs by Rankin.

Also in the Independent, James Mottram talks with Richard Gere.

A mind-prickler: Joel Schlemowitz at Invisible Cinema on nearly 20 one-minute films.

On Saturday, the Guardian saluted Woody Allen on his 72nd birthday.

Also: "Steam, coal, levers, pistons, the bright-lit faces of British working men: no film better expresses the concerns and ambitions of the British documentary movement of the 1930s than Night Mail," writes Blake Morrison. And, in 1936, it was a big hit for the GPO Film Unit, established three years before by John Grierson:

When WH Auden was taken on, he was paid "starvation wages" of £3 a week - less than he'd been getting as a schoolteacher... Auden's job wasn't just to write poetry to accompany soundtracks, as he did for the 1935 film Coal Face, but to gain experience as an assistant director. For Night Mail, he was briefly in charge of the second camera unit as they shot mail bags being moved at Broad Street station. [Co-director] Basil Wright thought it "one of the most beautifully organised shots in the film"....

As well as using Auden, Grierson brought in the composer Benjamin Britten, who, at 22 - shy, blond and good-looking - was also on the GPO Film Unit's payroll. "Now I don't want any bloody highbrow stuff," [co-director Harry] Watt told him, urging him to make the music jazzy.

With seven other stowaways, Kingsley Ofosu slipped onto a cargo ship in Cameroon. When the crew found them, they decided to kill them. Only Ofosu escaped. His story was told first in the Guardian, then in Deadly Voyage. Nick Davies describes how he's gone from poverty to whirlwind tour of the US via private jet and limo to poverty again.

And John Patterson: "For better or worse, perhaps Richard Kelly is writing the future of the movies." His Southland Tales "will wear you out, but six or seven sequences will drill their way into your brain forever and the movie as a whole will ring in your ears for days."

Michael Guillén talks with Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski about their widely feted animated short, Madame Tutli-Putli.

Karina Longworth talks with Joe Swanberg about his upcoming series, Butterknife.

At the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz begins a series of columns on this year's notable releases. Considered in the first round are American Gangster, Mr Untouchable and We Own the Night.

"Danish filmmaker Morten Hartz Kaplers seems to have no moral inhibitions whatsoever," writes Maria Katsounaki in i kathimerini. "Not only has he made a mockumentary about the political scene in his country today and cast the real prime minister in the lead, but he also shows [Anders Fogh] Rasmussen indulging in a passionate and fatal love affair with a young artist, which he ultimately pays for with his life." The piece on AFR comes via euro|topics.

"Twenty-seven years and 16 features after they began their mutual career with Return of the Secaucus Seven in 1980, [John] Sayles and [Maggie] Renzi - still enthusiastic despite the demanding life of independent filmmakers - are prepping for the public consumption of Honeydripper, which features a virtually all-black cast and is set around an Alabama juke joint (in about 1950) that Danny Glover's character tries to keep in business," writes John Anderson. "While the movie takes place in the past, its marketing campaign involves a forward-looking synthesis of digital projection, colleges, blues bars, underserved movie houses and the Internet."

Also in the New York Times:

• "The Kite Runner boys are safely out of Kabul," reports David M Halbfinger. "After months of worrying and diplomatic wrangling from half a world away, the movie studio that is releasing the tale of childhood betrayal, ethnic tension and sexual predation in Afghanistan has whisked to safety four young actors. They were feared to be vulnerable to reprisal because of the film's depiction of a culturally inflammatory rape scene."

• Luis Mandoki's new film, Fraud, Mexico 2006, "lays out in detail the arguments of leftists who say the combination of a smear campaign and fraud at polling places swung the election to President Calderón," writes James C McKinley. "The large number of people going to see the film - more than 300,000 in the first two weeks - showed that the controversy has not been put to rest and that a good part of the population still feels something went awry in the balloting."

• Denise Caruso reports on how "the command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network."

• Michael Cieply: "The nearly month-old strike by screenwriters has entered a new and perhaps uglier phase, revealing the conflict for what it has been all along: not so much a tiff over industry economics as a struggle for power over Hollywood's perceived digital future."

• Holland Cotter considers a production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, in "the Gentilly section, a gutted, storm-ruined house," by Paul Chan, "who is well known to the international art world for his video animations of paradises embattled and lost, and to law enforcement officials for his activist politics." More from Tim Griffin in Artforum: "Godot is... unique for the relationship with context it establishes. As previously demonstrated by its staging in prisons from Wuppertal, Germany, to San Quentin, California - as well as in the war zone of Sarajevo, notably directed by Susan Sontag - the play brings the nothing within it to bear on everything around it. Or, speaking more richly, the nothing of the play is inevitably inscribed by the everything around it, such that the work has the portable acuity of allegory." Related: Robin Pogrebin in the NYT on the architecture firms commissioned by Brad Pitt to help rebuild the city's Lower Ninth Ward.

• "Einstein on the Beach changed my life," writes Bernard Holland. "Everything I thought musical theater was, abruptly wasn't. St Paul had his road to Damascus; mine was the Brooklyn-bound No 4 train to Atlantic Avenue."

"The 'I didn't like' and/or 'I couldn't relate to' argument about movie characters is far more common than anyone ought to wish it to be," sighs Glenn Kenny, and what's more, only film critics - not literature or theater critics, for example - actually get away with it.

Nathaniel R interviews Max von Sydow: parts 1 and 2.

In the Observer, Amy Raphael profiles Chiwetel Ejiofor and Craig McLean talks with Eva Green.

The documentary Substitute "shows a side of a top footballer's life that the public rarely sees," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent.

"Like 300, Beowulf is an animated gore-fiesta that should have 15-year-olds around the country screaming for a sword and a trip to the nearest Blackwater recruitment office," argues Alexander Zaitchik at Alternet.

"The specialized film business, the true specialized film business, not the studio specialty business, is undergoing a dramatic change," IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring said in a speech at the Gotham Awards that indieWIRE's running:

Many of my colleagues in the film community complain that there are too many movies - the music business doesn't complain that there are too many songs, the publishing business doesn't complain that there are too many books, the television business doesn't complain that there are too many shows, artists don't complain that there are too many paintings - yet our business complains that there are too many movies. I can assure everyone that independent filmmakers are not going to stop making movies - they all have stories to tell - it is up to the distribution community to be creative and help filmmakers find a way to reach their audiences.

"The new Film and Video Act is being railroaded through Thailand's National Legislative Assembly by the Ministry of Culture," warns Wise Kwai. Among other restrictions, the Act would introduce the world's first PG-25 rating - that's right, no one 24 or under allowed. Via Ray Pride.

In Newsweek, Jason Overdorf reports on "the transformation of India's prolific but chaotic film industry."

Online viewing tips. "Since October's horror clips round-up was such a romp, we're giving December's festivities the same treatment. With all of the saccharine, musical, happy, sad and depressive cinematic depictions of the seasons, this should be an interesting line-up." Phil Morehart launches "31 Days of Xmas (and Hanukkah)" at Facets Features.

Posted by dwhudson at December 3, 2007 8:38 AM