Shorts and events, 1/2.

"[T]he ultimate film critic's film of late is For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, which the Boston Phoenix's Gerald Peary premiered in Telluride as a work in progress and has been tweaking and selectively screening since," writes Rob Nelson for Filmmaker. "Well-named for having occupied Peary and producer Amy Geller for the past seven years and counting, Love of Movies devotes itself equally to spanning a century of print reviewing, lingering just a tad partially on Andrew Sarris's long volleys with opponent Pauline Kael (Peary is a self-described 'Sarrisite'), and to interviewing critics about their objects of desire, obscure and otherwise."

"[A]s [Tony] Gilroy discovered when he went searching for them on IMDB, ["Marcia & Lorenzo," the Reel Geezers] are hardly amateurs," writes Patrick Goldstein. "Lorenzo is actually Lorenzo Semple, 84. One of Hollywood's top screenwriters in the 1970s, he helped write movies for virtually every star of the day, notably Warren Beatty (The Parallax View), Robert Redford (Three Days of the Condor), Steve McQueen (Papillon) and Paul Newman (The Drowning Pool). His foil is Marcia Nasatir, 81, a longtime agent, pioneering woman production executive and producer of such films as The Big Chill and Hamburger Hill." Introduced to each other by Pauline Kael in the 60s, the "duo have been friends ever since, even though they disagree about nearly everything. When they got into a verbal brawl at a party last year, a friend sarcastically told them they should 'take the act out on the road.' Instead, they took their squabbles to the Internet."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz talks with Dan Katzir about Yiddish Theater: A Love Story.

"While speaking to MTV, Guillermo del Toro shed a bit more light on his rumored Frankenstein project, as well as talked more about possibly directing the two Hobbit films and the final Harry Potter flick, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," notes Erik Davis at Cinematical.

"If the venerating coverage surrounding Ingmar Bergman's death in July helped at all to pull the Swedish master back into favor, his sumptuous, haunting, and unusually tender 1982 magnum opus - presented for the first time theatrically in its original five-hour-plus television cut - should play to full houses as the first must-see of 2008," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "Restored to its rightful length for a two-week run at IFC, Fanny and Alexander proves that, at least as far as late-period, introspective, meditative, and unapologetically presentational filmmaking is concerned, sometimes more is more," adds Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun.

Looking ahead to Berlin & Beyond: New Films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Frako Loden previews Ulrich Seidl's Import Export, Robert Thalheim's And Along Come Tourists (Am Ende kommen Touristen) and Pepe Danquart's To the Limit (Am Limit). Also at the Evening Class, Michael Guillén looks back to a tribute to composer Miklós Rózsa.

On January 14, Arthur Magazine will be presenting "Two 93-Minute Films Involving Euphoriants" at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles.

"[W]hen There Will Be Blood's seething disquiet and almost unbearable undercurrents of tension at last explode, [Daniel] Day-Lewis kicks an already marvelous performance up to a ga-ga stratosphere of such baroque, gleefully theatrical intensity, the movie itself seems to have gone as mad as its protagonist," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "Love it or hate it, there's absolutely nothing else like it." But at Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince argues that "[T]his is Paul Thomas Anderson's worst film to date." Meanwhile, Josh Modell talks with PTA for the AV Club.

"As opposed to the depressing number of films these day with pre-fabricated soundtracks comprised of songs designed to show off the director's hip quotient, the Control soundtrack succeeds as a history and aural documentary of Joy Division by virtue of the expertly chosen tracks, with snippets of the film's dialogue interspersed," writes Peter Law for Open Letters.

New blog on the block: io9. "Strung out on science fiction."

Posted by dwhudson at January 2, 2008 1:50 PM