Shorts, 12/24.

"For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early 20s then, working off and on, driving a cab, setting up the stage at rock shows, writing occasional pieces for the Village Voice." So begins a memoir of sorts by Mark Edmundson in the American Scholar.

He had two obsessions: "[Robert] Altman and [Woody] Allen are in their ways adroit anti-filmmakers. The medium they worked in is all about Titanism. It loves amazing acts, heroic leaps, kisses of world historical grandeur. Allen and Altman ran against the formal predispositions of movies without being any less entertaining." Good reading, via Bookforum.

Chris Stangl opens Pt II of The Ballad of the Hermeneutic Circle.

New blog on the block: Intense Guys: "Great Movie Moments, One Clip at a Time."

Craig Keller: "I've translated into English the following excerpts from the greater part of an interview with Jacques Rivette, conducted by Jean-Marc Lalanne and Jean-Baptiste Morain for the March 20th, 2007 edition of French culture-weekly Les Inrockuptibles."

At AICN, Capone interviews Cloverfield director Matt Reeves. In the London Times, Christopher Goodwin recounts the series of events that've kept movie buffs talking about the movie for months.

Twitch's Todd Brown strongly suspects that Lars von Trier's Antichrist is on again. Related: the trailers for all of LVT's features.

"It's OK to be confused by Richard Kelly's Southland Tales," Thomas Rogers assures us in Salon. "In the hopes of helping you make sense of the movie, we've decided to unravel Southland Tales as we've done for Mulholland Drive, The Wire and, of course, Donnie Darko." A synopsis and FAQ follow.

Also: "What kind of year was it for independent film?" Andrew O'Hehir takes that question to publicist Jeremy Walker, IFC Entertainment prez Jonathan Sehring, superheroine producer Christine Vachon and Facets Multi-Media director Milos Stehlik and observes, "[O]ver the three years I've been conducting a year-end survey of the indie biz, one grand theme has emerged. You could almost call it a gigantic free-floating anxiety, rather than a theme: Nobody has a clue how audiences will be watching adventurous, modestly scaled, sub-Hollywood films in five or eight or 12 years, but everybody's pretty sure they won't be watching them the way they are right now." Karina Longworth comments at the SpoutBlog.

Scott Foundas visits the set of Changeling, the 28th film Clint Eastwood's directed and finds state-of-the-art technology being used to keep things quiet and almost eerily efficient.

Also in the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas meets Homayoun Ershadi.

"Does every Brazilian love a fascist? That's the question raised by the new film Tropa de Elite, which is on its way to becoming one of the country's most popular movies of all time," writes Holmes Wilson for In These Times. "The protagonist in Tropa de Elite, or 'elite squad,' is a cop who kills for revenge, executes corrupt cops and tortures suspects - including children - for information. And the film's phenomenal success is frightening."

"There's plenty to admire in Jeff Nichols's debut feature, Shotgun Stories. I grew up in southeastern Arkansas and often wondered why nobody ever set a movie in a world I could recognize. Now, somebody has tried. And bless his indomitable heart." Derek Jenkins, who guest edited that excellent "Southern Movie Issue" of the Oxford American earlier this year, is one of three Arkansas Times staffers to weigh in on the film.

The Vatican has now officially condemned The Golden Compass, reports Philip Pullella for Reuters.

Variety's Adam Dawtrey reminds us that JK Rowling, Philip Pullman and Roald Dahl's widow all wanted Terry Gilliam to direct Harry Potter, The Golden Compass and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, respectively, but the studios nixed the idea at the outset each and every time. "That's the story of Gilliam's career. He's loved by fellow creatives, but he scares the suits to death." Now he's shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, "his first wholly original screenplay, and his most personal statement, since Brazil in 1985." And Brendon at film ick's got the first couple of pix.

"For his upcoming film Paris, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the French capital, [Cédric] Klapisch regular Romain Duris will play the pivotal role of a possibly terminally ill Parisian, while the director has also recruited some of France's finest talent to star alongside Duris, including Juliette Binoche, Albert Dupontel, François Cluzet, 2007 French Shooting Star Mélanie Laurent, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard and Gilles Lellouche. The film will premiere in France in February 2008." A preview from Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"Sold internationally by Wild Bunch, the French/Irish co-production Dorothy Mills by Agnès Merlet is already shaping up to be one of the big titles of 2008," reports Fabien Lemercier for Cineuropa.

"The bravest and most important movie musical of the last several years isn't even close to being the best film musical this year - the mysteriously perfect Once is probably going to be my favorite, with an honorable mention for Hairspray, and however I wind up reacting to Sweeney Todd fitting in there someplace as well," writes Bob Westal. "Colma: The Musical - which had only a token theatrical release in San Francisco and San Diego, after a healthy run on the festival circuit - is flawed in the way of most films from first-timers, but it reconstructs the modern musical in ways none of those other films dare. There are moments in it that just may outshine any musical made in decades."

Dustin Luke Nelson talks with No Country for Old Men cinematographer Roger Deakins for InDigest. Via Movie City News.

Nathaniel R meets "Jennifer! Jason! Leigh!"

Steven Boone's conversation with Armond White? There is a Part III. Earlier: Parts I and II.

For Apple, Joe Cellini talks with Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch about editing Youth Without Youth. Via Movie City News. At the AV Club, Scott Tobias talks with Coppola.

"New York street photographers and indie filmmakers say their First Amendment rights are still at risk under newly revised regulations put forth by the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting," reports Anthony Kaufman in the Voice. "Following a summer-long outcry from artists and activists over the first draft of rules published on May 25 - which largely prohibited shooting in the city without a permit and $1 million insurance policy - the city redrew its guidelines and released a friendlier version on October 30. But the battle is far from over."

Also in the Voice: "As befits a movie that enjoyed cult status virtually from the moment it premiered in late 2003, Bad Santa exists in multiple versions," notes J Hoberman. "There's the original release, sanitized by anxious elves at then-Weinstein-owned Miramax; there's the so-called Badder Santa, released on DVD the following summer, which claimed to restore a number of deleted scenes; and there's the director's cut, which appeared on DVD late last year and is now having its theatrical premiere.... This third Bad Santa may be the shortest version but, in every way, it's the strongest."

Raymond De Felitta's been writing up an appreciation of Jane Russell.

Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica on Jean Rollin's Lost in New York: "After a series of failures in attempting to get new projects off the ground in the mid-80s, Rollin made one of his most personal films yet, and, as Pete Tombs and Cathal Tohill argue in Immoral Tales, 'a final salute to his twenty five year struggle to find a place of his own inside the commercial film world.'"

Girish:

So, here are my concerns: (1) If silent film accompaniment exists primarily to fill the void of silence, we can probably agree that's an aesthetically weak raison d'etre. (2) Irving Thalberg once said: "There never was a silent film." Can we use this as evidence to claim that it's natural for every silent film to be accompanied by music? The history of silent film development demonstrates this to be not so (more on this in a moment). (3) Does silent film music exist to echo or underline moods and feelings during the course of a film? If so, isn't this kind of musical accompaniment somewhat redundant? Worse, can't such an approach actively dilute the power of image-driven silent cinema?

As always at Girish's place, comments - good comments - ensue. And somewhat related: John McElwee's fascinating entry on the Vitaphone.

Mainland Chinese have been flocking to Hong Kong to see the uncut version of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, reports Howard W French: "The phenomenon of so many people voting, as it were, with their feet has highlighted the public's rapidly changing attitudes toward the long unquestioned practice of government censorship of the arts, and prompted debate about the way films are regulated in China."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Had it been made a decade ago, Steep would have been relegated to ESPN or the video sections of sports stores," writes David Browne. "Steep is a sign of how legitimate so-called action sports have become, and the peculiar ways that this mainstream crossover manifests itself." Browne looks into how this has come to pass. While Steep "often sounds like a promotional film," it's "undeniably impressive," offers Stephen Holden. In Slant, Nick Schager calls Steep "a skin-deep history lesson on extreme skiing." And writing in the Voice, Aaron Hillis wonders, "Is the lifestyle of an adrenaline junkie any less self-destructive than a drug addict's?"

• "A business course on cutthroat capitalism disguised as a slacker comedy: That's the kindest way to describe Michael Lehmann's Flakes, a movie that shares the smug, hipper-than-thou sensibility of its sour protagonist, Neal Downs (Aaron Stanford)," writes Stephen Holden. "One look at Aaron Stanford's chain-smoking, long-haired musician in a Hanes t-shirt and you know Flakes wants so badly to be hip," sighs Paul Schrodt in Slant. More from Julia Wallace in the Voice and John Lichman at the House Next Door.

• "The hyperactive sequel National Treasure: Book of Secrets sends its archaeologist hero, Ben Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage, flexing his deadpan), on a globetrotting quest that might have been devised after a long night of Wikipedia surfing," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "Like its predecessor, National Treasure, this sequel amounts to a bunch of crossword puzzle answers stitched together with explosions, chases and displays of intuitive reasoning that the Twin Peaks FBI agent Dale Cooper would reject as too right-brained."

• "PS I Love You looks squeaky clean and utterly straight and very much removed from the shadow worlds in which [Hilary] Swank has done her best work," writes Manohla Dargis. "Yet as directed by Richard LaGravenese, who shares screenwriting credit with Steven Rogers, it has a curious morbid quality." Then there's Nick Schager in Slant: "[I]t's hard to think of any female star who could salvage PS I Love You, a bromide-filled contrivance in which Swank's Holly gets over the death of her beloved Irish husband Gerry (Gerard Butler) with the help of letters written by Gerry and then sent to her after his death." For the sake of all Voice Media publications, Ella Taylor's suffered through this one as well.

• "To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master." Michael Cieply mulls that one over with a few industry folk.

• Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann bicker amicably over what actually constitutes a real Christmas present.

"For Andrew M Gordon, an associate professor of English at University of Florida, Spielberg's canon is deserving of the best in Freudian and Jungian consideration," writes Phil Hall, introducing his interview with the author of Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg.

Also at Film Threat: Don R Lewis talks with Aaron Katz about Quiet City.

Which Kevin Lee quite likes.

David Lowery proves that it is possible, ten years on, to fondly remember Titanic for good reason.

"My impression is that the general direction of the pans in The Passenger are from left to right," notes Zach Campbell. "[I]t is as though the camera is reading the material of the image it is creating, that is, analyzing its framing as it simultaneously records."

For SF360, Laura Irvine talks with Ivan Jaigirdar about his new Bollyhood Café.

"When it comes to blaxploitation horror films, the genre doesn't get any better than Sugar Hill," writes Kimberly Lindbergs.

"How weird is John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes?" asks Carina Chocano. "Almost indescribably weird, though also strangely involving." And Andy Klein has a good long talk with Turturro for the LA CityBeat.

Back in the Los Angeles Times: "A little history: In the 1950s, aspiring American writers declaimed poetry in smoky cafes," writes Seth Greenland. "A decade later, they were writing songs for bands that materialized at the nexus of inspiration and dissipation before disappearing in a fog of 'bad vibes.' By the 1970s, all this had been supplanted by that bastard stepchild, the screenplay." But now, it's novels. Greenland, himself "a recovering screenwriter who is now a novelist," has an idea or two as why this has happened.

Also, interviews with Oscar hopefuls: Mark Salisbury with James McAvoy and Michael Ordoña with Keri Russell and Ellen Page.

"[A]mong Juno's distinctive charms is that it seems to have disarmed both sides of the family values debate," notes Ann Hulbert in Slate. "And the feat gets pulled off in the wry style of the eponymous hero: The film doesn't offer up a formulaic or fervent call for family harmony. Instead, it takes idiosyncratic aim at everybody's pieties." Related online viewing: Shadowplay's opening titles for Juno, via Drawn!.

"We're just ending a season in which a series of highly touted dramas about the Iraq War and its domestic consequences have flopped both critically and commercially," notes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "Meanwhile, the real ground zero of our geopolitical distress, Afghanistan, like Freud's 'return of the repressed,' reappears as the setting and subject of two works that unequivocally deserve to be hailed as among the year's most fascinating, worthwhile and successful entertainments." And they would be The Kite Runner and Charlie Wilson's War. More on Kite Runner from Steve Erickson in the City Paper: "A competent director with little personality, Marc Forster never finds a style appropriate for the tension underlying the period."

In the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams talks with Tamara Jenkins, whose The Savages is recommended by Shaun Brady. More on that one from Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger and Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

James Mottram talks with Mischa Barton for the Independent, where Sheila Johnston interviews Josh Brolin.

Interviews in the Guardian: Matthew Hays with Gus Van Sant, Laura Barnett with Mickey Rooney, Andrew Purcell with Jason Bateman, Patrick Barkham with Henry Winkler, Xan Brooks with Tang Wei (Lust, Caution) and John Patterson with Joel and Ethan Coen. Also, Paranoid Park gets Steve Rose thinking about skateboarders in movies.

Steven Shaviro: "I've been reading Steve Erickson for quite some time; he is one of my favorite living American writers. His new novel, his eighth, Zeroville, is one of his best ever - I am inclined to say it's the best thing he's written since Arc d'X (1993)."

Wired has brought David Byrne and Thom Yorke into the same room to talk about the future of the music industry. You can listen to audio clips from the conversation as well. Then Byrne lays out a few "Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists - and Megastars." Via Rex Sorgatz.

Also Wired is Michel Gondry, as profiled by Jennifer Hillner.

Welcome to the NHK "represents the rise in the new anime fan, a Neo-Otaku," writes John Lichman at the House Next Door. "Someone who is painfully self-aware of what they are watching, yet refuse to admit it is anime."

"Much like other overlooked greats - M Emmet Walsh, Dylan Baker, Timothy Spall - [Philip Baker] Hall has taken roles destined for notoriety without ever eliciting much renown," writes Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Duck is above all else Hall's film, and rightly so: he is never absent from sight for more than a few seconds, and the role is delightfully atypical."

The Walker "seems to be the operative word. [Paul] Schrader's work refers only in passing and under duress, so to speak, to the political repression and moral degradation associated with the Bush administration," argues Joanne Laurier at the WSWS.

"Leukemia has claimed the life of Floyd Red Crow Westerman, the Native American activist, actor and country/folk singer best known for his roles in Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (as Sioux leader Ten Bears) and TV's Walker, Texas Ranger (as Uncle Ray Firewalker)," notes Joe Leydon. More from Michael Carlson in the Guardian.

Browse this: Dennis Cozzalio's "favorites out of the 80-some full responses to Mr Shoop's Surfin' Summer Quiz." Plus: "Professor Bertram Potts's Hella Homework for the Holidays Christmas Break Quiz."

Online seasonal desktop tip. "February 1940. Shoveling snow away from the movie entrance in Chillicothe, Ohio." At Shorpy.

Online browsing tip. The Art of Memory presents "some examples from Robert Motherwell/George Wittenborn's documents of modern art (1944-1972), covers and typography by Paul Rand."

Online viewing tip #1. Drawn! points to a short clip from Coraline, Henry Selick's feature based on the book by Neil Gaiman. Also, Ronald Searle's title designs for the 1970 Ronald Neame film, Scrooge.

Online viewing tip #2. Vulture listens and watches as the Beatnix, slipping into Hard Day's Night mode, cover "Stairway to Heaven."

Online viewing tips. At Filmmaker, Benjamin Crossley-Marra posts a couple of music videos by Cam Archer and Aaron Platt.

Posted by dwhudson at December 24, 2007 6:48 AM