Shorts, 1/11.

"Appropriately for Fassbinder's fifteen-hour masterpiece, the process of coming up with a design for Berlin Alexanderplatz was epic." A terrific entry from Eric Skillman at Criterion's On Five, complete with samples of designs that didn't make the grade. For more, see his own Cozy Lummox. Ed Howard, in the meantime, has been watching and blogging his way through Alexanderplatz.

Will you happen to be anywhere near Smithville, Texas, tomorrow? Think you might want to be an extra or even a "featured" extra (you might get to speak a line or two) in Terrence Malick's next film, Tree of Life? Chris Garcia has some information you may be interested in.

David Bordwell's recently spent some time in NYC with Amos Poe and describes, among other things, one of Poe's latest projects, "a city symphony, a lyrical tribute to the looks and sounds of New York. It joins the tradition of Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov, as well as Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921) and Jay Leyda's Bronx Morning (1931). It also reminds you that Poe has roots in the downtown avant-garde. In 1972 - 1975, he often watched works by Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Bruce Baillie and Jack Smith at Millennium Film Workshop, and he made films for its Friday night open screenings. As a result, Empire II carries premises of lyrical and Structural cinema into the digital era."

David Pratt-Robson examines "Shadow Play in Early John Ford."

"Henry Hathaway deserves more attention," argues Dan Sallitt. "Granted that many of his films are not up to the standard of his best; granted even that his very best films may still leave a bit of room for uninflected Hollywood conventions to play out. Still, his reputation as a competent craftsperson seems all wrong. Hathaway doesn't merely execute other people's ideas: there's a distinct Hathaway tone that can transform the material it operates upon."

"Christian Bale is in negotiations to join Johnny Depp in Michael Mann's upcoming Public Enemies," report Josef Adalian and Michael Fleming in Variety. Via Vulture, which has more news of what's up-n-coming, including this from Fleming: "Director Paul Greengrass has set Amy Ryan and Greg Kinnear to star alongside Matt Damon in the untitled Iraq war thriller that [began] shooting [on Wednesday] in Spain."

And Tatania Siegel reports that Salma Hayek's coming back to work, joining John C Reilly in Paul Weitz's "horror drama" Cirque du Freak.

"Despite its somewhat misleading title, Scream... and Die! (1973) is an interesting film directed by José Ramón Larraz that is well worth a look if you enjoy unusual European thrillers," suggests Kimberly Lindbergs.

At Movie Morlocks, kjolseth turns to the printed word for further insight into Horrors of Malformed Men.

"Directed by Jeffrey Jeturian (this is his seventh feature), The Bet Collector will be familiar to anyone who spends time trolling the film-festival circuit," writes Manohla Dargis. "Shot hand-held in smudgy digital video, the movie borrows the wavering, no-frills, fly-on-the-wall visual style (and make no mistake, it is a style) that, partly because of those influential Dogma-ticians Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, has become a tiresome cliché in fiction as well as in nonfiction film." But "Jeturian and [screenwriter Ralston] Jover are far too busy guiding us into their story, their ghetto, their world, with its wretched poverty and despair, its police corruption and sudden, horrifying violence, to allow Amy either to flower fully or to wither on her own personal, individual terms."

Also in the New York Times:

• "[W]hile I am happy (or at least willing) to take my children to the latest animated or tweener-star-driven 'family' movies - with their singing chipmunks and chirpy Loch Ness Monsters - we gravitate more and more toward age-inappropriate fare, exploring the grown-up realms of PG-13 and even, sometimes, R," writes AO Scott. "Some of these films may be too hot or too rough, but for that reason they may also be just right."

• Lynda Roscoe Hartigan's "mammoth catalog" Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination "accompanies the first retrospective of the artist's work in 26 years, a deliciously bountiful exhibition curated by Hartigan and recently on view in Washington, San Francisco and Salem," writes Leah Hager Cohen. "If you missed it, this book really is the next best thing: thorough, lavish, disturbing, beguiling."

• Striking writers and the Weinstein Company have struck a deal "similar to the one reached last week by United Artists," report Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes. "According to [Harvey] Weinstein, the deal contains provisions that will allow it to be superseded by any agreement ultimately reached with the major companies through their bargaining group, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers." In a separate piece, Cieply shifts the NYT's take on the strike a tad, writing that the WGA's "militant tactics may be creating fissures within the guild. In particular, some writers wonder whether they are actually doing more harm to themselves than their opponents."

• "[T]o hear it from [Chris] McGurk, the former vice chairman of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Danny Rosett, [Overture Films'] chief operating officer, what distinguishes their company are an ownership structure and a business model that allow them to set their sights relatively low," reports David M Halbfinger.

• Neil Genzlinger on The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie, a self-described "faith-and-values-based property."

"Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern 'literary' fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history." For the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Bowden profiles David Simon, creator of The Wire.

In the New York Sun: Teeth opens next week; Steve Dollar talks with director Mitchell Lichtenstein and star Jess Weixler.

"Russia's boom has also revived the fortunes of the country's film industry.... The Foundation for the Support of Patriotic Film was established in 2005 by a pair of associations representing veterans of the military and secret services." And, as Alexander Osipovich reports in the Wall Street Journal, the movie they pumped $15 million into, The Apocalypse Code, isn't exactly a critical darling. Via Bookforum.

"The Original Generation X brought us post-punk and cyberpunk, heavy metal and hip hop and hardcore, DIY and zines, Seinfeld and The Simpsons, Master of Puppets and Pulp Fiction and Do the Right Thing, Microsoft and Apple. Howard Stern, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Arsenio Hall, Rosie O'Donnell and Conan O'Brien are OGXers; so are the Hollywood Brat Pack and the New York (literary) one; and Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis and Steven Seagal; and Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace; and Al Roker, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer; and Madonna, Prince, Bon Jovi and the Jackson 5. Plus: Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee." Joshua Glenn goes back to work on his "Generational Periodization project."

When The Diving Bell and the Butterfly "premiered in New York and Los Angeles this past fall, it received torrents of critical praise that I found both astonishing and baffling," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "It is not a negligible film by any means, but seeing the New Yorker's David Denby hail it as the 'reinvention of cinema' - only one of the extravagant laudations it received - left me wondering if we'd seen the same movie. I spent several days discussing this with two friends who were also in the small cadre of dissenters on Diving Bell, and various reasons were bandied as to why so many critics would go bananas over such a middling movie."

"Not, perhaps, since the 'what-is-that-astronaut-doing-in-a-Louis-XIV-bedroom' finale of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has a movie's ending so provoked and polarized viewers." The movie is No Country for Old Men, and, in the Los Angeles Times, Glenn Kenny argues: "The more one examines the differing parts of No Country - starting from its title, which is from the Yeats poem Sailing to Byzantium - the more its seemingly off-kilter ending makes sense, revealing itself as the only possible ending for the picture." Related: In the London Times, Stephen Dalton "meets those elusive pimpernels of the anti-interview, the Coen Brothers," and the Telegraph's Lucy Cavendish talks with Kelly Macdonald.

Honeydripper "may have slipped through the cracks of December's big-ticket releases (most of them showing-off bad intentions), but it's easily [John] Sayles's best film in a good while," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

"The differences between cinephiles and suburbanites with toddlers aren't as great as they might appear," suggests Richard Prouty at One-Way Street. "Both groups are concerned with pleasure and social capital. They just simply talk about these topics in different ways."

In the Guardian, Emine Saner says hello to Jason Isaacs.

For the London Times, Kevin Maher profiles Control's Sam Riley.

Lou Lumenick's made me laugh out loud.

Online slow-scrolling tip. Tom Sutpen posts another miniseries at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: "movie directors and the means of production."

Online listening tips. Jerry Lentz reminds me that Francine Stock's got some good programs coming up - and archived - for the BBC.

Online viewing tip #1. David Poland lunches with Saoirse Ronan.

Online viewing tip #2. Jürgen Vogel stars in Die Welle, opening in Germany in mid-February. Todd Brown's got the trailer at Twitch.

Online viewing tips. Ray Pride's Apichatpong Weerasethakul collection.

Posted by dwhudson at January 11, 2008 3:49 PM