Shorts, 12/28.

The Austin American-Statesman's Chris Garcia spots news of the spaghetti western the Coen brothers are planning. Sounds like there will be gore.

"Filmmakers create meaning and context through montage," writes Dave McDougall at Chained to the Cinémathèque. "The image, like the word, contains meaning only in the interplay between context and image, whether the context is intrinsic or extrinsic to the image itself."

"What is it with all these movies showing New York City utterly obliterated?" asks Sewell Chan. "To be sure, movies showing New York being destroyed are nothing new — and have a long history in cinema. (New York Magazine's Vulture blog recently had an item on the Top 10 movie destructions of New York.) But the resilience of the urban-destruction theme seems notable - and, after a brief post-9/11 lull, the theme seems more prevalent than ever."

Also in the New York Times:

• "To a degree that would make any adult desperate to get into the film industry jealous, [Malcolm Mays, 17] has mustered the support of studio executives, a powerful producer and a top talent agent," writes David M Halbfinger. "It would be easy to tell this as the story of a bunch of Hollywood people doing a good deed in time for Christmas, except that it isn't. They all say they hope to get as much out of Mr Mays as he gets out of them."

• For Neil Genzlinger, Alien vs Predator: Requiem "may not be classic sci-fi like the original Alien, which it has in its DNA, but it's a perfectly respectable next step in the series."

• Joanne Kaufman reports on Paramount Vantage's efforts to make all its releases carbon neutral.

Daniel Anker "should be commended for bringing up the debate over whether 'Holocaust movies' are inherently suspect, or if it's worse to avoid the topic altogether," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "But [Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust] merely mentions the controversies; it doesn't really engage them."

The celebrity screenwriter was about to go the way of onscreen smoking until - in the year of the writers' strike, oddly enough - along came Diablo Cody (Juno) and her media-ready backstory. In one of the chapters in that story, she was an editor at City Pages. Matthew Smith conducts the homecoming interview: "Following her Golden Globe screenwriting nomination earlier in the day and a media marathon around town, Cody arrived a little worn out but game. Within minutes she was on a roll and ready to talk about the upside and downside of sudden fame, her second thoughts about calling herself 'Diablo,' and why she showed up drunk to her first meeting at City Pages."

"In less than a decade the Iranian Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi has become one of cinema's most potent lyric poets," writes Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times. "From an amalgam of broad comedy, gentle absurdity and the harrowing consequences of war, he sparks a deeply humanist alchemy in unsentimental tales peopled by nonprofessional actors. Half Moon, Ghobadi's fourth feature since his 2000 debut, A Time for Drunken Horses, strikes a more forthrightly elegiac tone than any of his preceding work."

Stephen Applebaum talks with Tony Leung for the Independent.

The Washington Post's Bonnie S Benwick talks with Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney about King Corn.

"Noel Coward wrote a musical for her, she was wooed by Hollywood, and Kenneth Tynan declared her legs to be 'the eighth wonder of the world,'" writes Sam Jones in the Guardian. "But the British actor and singer Pat Kirkwood, who died on Christmas day aged 86, was equally famed for her friendship with the Duke of Edinburgh - a friendship that was the subject of gossip and innuendo for decades."

"If Atonement registers as a disappointment, unmet expectations can be partially ascribed to outsized anticipation," writes Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot. "Joe Wright's highly successful debut, the Academy Award–nominated Pride and Prejudice, tagged him as a legitimate filmmaker sensitive but never fully enslaved to the rhythms of literary adaptation, while Ian McEwan's source book was one of the more universally and justly lauded contemporary novels in recent memory."

A Sweeney Todd roundup:

• "Just in time for Christmas, director Tim Burton is painting theaters across the country red and green: red with gallons of movie blood, green with the faces of queasy moviegoers when they discover just what kind of gorefest they've wandered into," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "Burton's turned Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's musical Sweeney Todd into a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie for the Schubert Alley set."

• For Josef Braun, writing in Vue Weekly, "this morbid tale has become strangely bloodless."

• Mark Salisbury talks with Helena Bonham Carter for the Los Angeles Times.

• Blogging for the Guardian, David Thomson predicts and Oscar win for Johnny Depp.

"Although Charlie Wilson's War is more watchable than such dreck as In the Valley of Elah or De Palma's discombobulated Redacted, it is worse than either just because it is so slickly watchable," writes Armond White. But Dan Sallitt's pleasantly surprised by Charlie.

At the AV Club Kyle Ryan talks with Reilly and Kasdan about Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

In I'm Not There, "[Todd] Haynes may be on to something, about Americans' 'changeability,' but, unhappily, the idea is never pursued in any depth," writes James Brewer at the WSWS.

"What makes a star?" asks Ken Russell. "In my experience, there are ten attributes, which one is either born with or learns, to qualify for stardom." Also in the London Times, Ed Potton talks with Harry Connick Jr.

In Slate, Constance Casey notes the ways some movies get gardening right, while many get it wrong.

Online listening tip. The December 17 edition of the BBC's On Screen features an interview with Andrew Piddington (The Killing of John Lennon), a report on Berlin's "thriving film industry" and a talk with producer Graham King (The Departed, Young Victoria). Thanks, Jerry!

Posted by dwhudson at December 28, 2007 5:27 PM