Shorts, 1/9.

"So how did we go from Maude to Juno? If American screenwriters are currently in the grip of Keeping-My-Baby-itis, what was the epidemic's sociocultural tipping point?" asks Joshua Glenn at Brainiac. "After several days of online research, during which I scoured TV.com and the Internet Movie Database, not to mention the websites of anti-abortion, feminist, and pro-choice organizations, I've got a few answers." Background (with clips, the works): Parts 1, 2 and 3.

Filing an entry for Artforum's "Diary," Andrew Hultkrans recalls Saturday's celebration of J Hoberman's 30-year run at the Village Voice. AO Scott, "looking like a close relative of Thomas Frank," interviewed Hoberman onstage at the Museum for the Moving Image: "AO then posed the film critic's dilemma: underpaid cheerleader or serious historian? J responded that there is a such a thing as film culture, and it should be treated with the same spirit of inquiry and breadth of analytical reference as any body of history."

In the Valley of Elah "has been criticized by those who inspired it. In fact, Lanny Davis's true story is more harrowing than a fictionalized account could ever be." For the Independent, Rob Sharp talks with Davis "the short life and horrific death of his son, who had been a specialist with Baker Company, a prestigious section of the US Army, and of how he is still fighting for the truth."

"Ben X, Belgium's submission as Best Foreign Language Film for the 2008 Academy Awards, is about an autistic boy named Ben who retreats into the computer game fantasy world of Archlord to escape bullying." Michael Guillén talks with director Nic Balthazar. Also: A talk with director Özer Kiziltan and screenwriter Onder Cakar about Takva.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Max Goldberg recommends The Violin, "a plainly appealing sleeper that picked up major festival awards from Cannes to San Francisco as well as major props from star director Guillermo del Toro (quoted as saying, 'In The Violin lies the future of Mexican cinema')." Adds Dennis Harvey at SF360: "It's a superb movie - and also something of a throwback, as it consciously recalls the 1930s-50s 'Golden Age of Mexican Cinema' highlighted by such dramatic realists as early visionary Fernando de Fuentes and Spaniard Luis Buñuel in his Los Olvidados expat period."

Back in the SFBG: "Persepolis is at once history lesson, timely look at fundamentalism's most tragic elements, and insightful peek into that most relatable of topics, the confusing spiral of young adulthood," writes Cheryl Eddy. Related online viewing tip: A Link TV interview with Marjane Satrapi.

"Does your evaluation of a film change over time?" asks Girish. "Are there examples of 'revisionist evaluation' of films or filmmakers in your viewing history?"

Via Bookforum:

• "The very technology that provided cinema its 'complicated' façade has also provided cinema with its epitaph!" exclaims K Hariharan in the Hindu, looking ahead to a more liberated and diversified art in the 21st century.

• For the Boston Globe, Mark Shanahan talks with Alice Kelikian, chair of the film studies program at Brandeis University, who tells him, "Today, film studies has to include visual culture as a whole: photography, video, animation, even reality TV. The varieties of media, digital and otherwise, change endlessly, and we need to comprehend the revolution."

• Two book reviews: Paula L Woods in the Los Angeles Times on Hollywood and Crime: Original Crime Stories Set During the History of Hollywood and Mikita Brottman in PopMatters on Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics.

Multi-part reading: Thom at Film of the Year on Hollywood and WII in 1942: parts 2 and 2; and Raymond De Felitta on Singin' in the Rain: parts 1, 2 and 3.

"[D]oes Nosferatu deserve its reputation as one of the signature works of pre-sound cinema?" asks Tom Huddleston. "It lacks the emotional weight of Murnau's own Sunrise, or the globetrotting, epic scale of his Faust. It didn't revolutionise the form to the extent Potemkin or Birth of a Nation did, nor does it create a unique, instantly recognisable other world such as those seen in Metropolis or The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It is on the surface a more straightforward, simpler work than any of these, relying on more primal human responses: fear, revulsion and dread. And yet it endures, its reputation undimmed."

Also in Not Coming to a Theater Near You: My Winnipeg is "an amalgamation of dubious fact and outright fiction, in which [Guy Maddin] continues to probe our vexing attachment to our memories with his signature cinematic style," writes Chiranjit Goswami.

"I'm Not There is affective as well as intellectual, and that it feels 'intimate' even though it is all clearly distanced - or, better (to risk a Blanchotian formulation) that it makes us feel the intimacy of that very distance," writes Steven Shaviro.

"Unlike other radical directors [Fassbinder] had no interest in social realism," notes Owen Hatherley in the Socialist Worker. "Instead, his films are stylised, often cold and glossy, unafraid of glamour and artifice. The lack of counter-cultural machismo was intended as a more insidious, stealthy way of getting a left wing message across - a critical, alienating misuse of Hollywood devices deployed as a political weapon."

Talks in the Los Angeles Times: Gina Piccalo with Angelina Jolie and Michael Ordoña with Javier Bardem.

Nicole Kidman's pregnancy wouldn't ordinarily be a Daily-type item, but as Michael Perry reports for Reuters, it does mean that she's pulled out of Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. More than a few Berliners are disappointed Kidman won't be filling the celebrity news hole left by Tom Cruise once Valkyrie finally wrapped, but as Variety's Ed Meza and Michael Fleming report, a replacement's already lined up: Kate Winslet.

At Cinematical, Ryan Stewart, noting that Phillip Noyce will soon be directing Scarlett Johansson in Mary, Queen of Scots, wonders whatever happened to his Amelia Earhart biopic that was to star Hilary Swank. Also, a peek at Diablo Cody's screenplay for Jennifer's Body, a horror movie about "a high-school sex bomb and all around homecoming queen type who is also possessed by satanic forces."

"Everyone loves Saul Bass," writes Jaime Morrison. "I recently came across some commercial work he'd done for television in the 50s, and upon doing some google-sniffing to search out more information, was surprised to find none of it was already represented on the web. With that in mind please consider the following images my small contribution to the digital remembrance of all things Bass." Via Coudal Partners.

New blog on the block: La Daily Musto.

The NYT tracks fallout from the writer's strike: As Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert return (Bill Carter and Jacques Steinberg; more from Salon's Heather Havrilesky), the Golden Globes awards ceremony shrinks to a news conference (Michael Cieply and David Carr).

Also in the NYT, Charles McGrath profiles Keira Knightley.

Google and Panasonic are teaming up to make Internet-enabled TVs, Reuters reports.

Online listening tip #1. DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus and campaign consultant Tad Devine are on the Leonard Lopate Show to discuss Primary, Tanner 88, The War Room and Primary Colors.

Online listening tip #2. Nathaniel R talks with Marisa Tomei.

Online viewing tip #1. Michael Atkinson points to "the full and final version of the CBS pilot I co-wrote, co-produced and co-created last year (getting mileage out of those WGA-designated credits), Babylon Fields."

Online viewing tip #2. David Poland lunches with Tim Burton.

Online viewing tips. Jerry Lentz forges on.

Posted by dwhudson at January 9, 2008 4:12 PM