Shorts, 1/28.

"This film wasn't made for the benefit of those who are unacquainted with Polish history." In the New York Review of Books, Anne Applebaum explains why Katyn is "a classic Wajda movie." She tracks reaction to the film inside and outside Poland and comments on Wajda's reasons for making the film in the first place: "Wajda said he wanted to reach 'those moviegoers for whom it matters that we are a society, and not just an accidental crowd.'"

"We have travelled some way from second world war classics The Longest Day, The Great Escape, or The Bridge on the River Kwai," writes David Hearst, who covered the Chechen war for the Guardian. Back then, "the collective cause - the fight against fascism," was "just":

After Vietnam, Apocalypse Now and Platoon, this paradigm has been reversed. The individual can only see clearly by taking leave of his senses, because the collective cause is so wrong. In Iraq there is no collective cause, just individual survival.... The Battle of Haditha consciously eschews judgment, although if it points the finger at anyone it is the marine officers who sanction the shootings as they take place, recommend the staff sergeant for a bravery award, and then hang him out to dry when the truth emerges. The Iraqi insurgents also have their evil alter ego in al-Qaida. It is not history, because both the war in Iraq and the court caseare still going on. It is not fiction, because it actually happened. But it is not documentary, either. It is a blend of all three, for an age that does not pause for judgment."

Also in the Guardian, Maddy Costa meets Donmar Warehouse artistic director Michael Grandage, whose "sparse, heart-wrenching production of Othello" stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor and who's lined up a season featuring "Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and - the big draw for many - Jude Law, playing Hamlet." Grandage "has transformed the Donmar into 'a big house of ideas,' focusing on lesser-known plays and European writers, work that is cerebral and emotionally challenging, with a passion that has proved, for audiences, unexpectedly exciting and enticing."

And Hadley Freeman on Waitress, Knocked Up and Juno: "It is surely no coincidence that these films are emerging from a country that has had eight years of ultra-conservative Republican rule."

"There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score," writes Alex Ross in the New Yorker. "[Jonny] Greenwood's sources of inspiration are easily identified. He has worshipped Olivier Messiaen since his teens, and during his university stint he encountered the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose assaultive avant-garde creations of the 1960s - notably the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima - inspired the glissandos of There Will Be Blood."

As for the film itself, Chuck Tryon writes, "I found the film's bleak characterization of the oilman, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), and the religious huckster, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), to be a pretty compelling critique of the seemingly intertwined politics of oil and religion." Spoilers follow.

"Guillermo del Toro is in talks to direct back-to-back installments of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, which is being co-financed by New Line and MGM." Borys Kit has the story at the Hollywood Reporter.

"Aesthetically, Andrew Bujalski is Maurice Pialat's cousin," suggests Ignatius Vishnevetsky. "He is also Pialat's opposite. We see the same techniques in their films, but used for completely different reasons."

At Alternet, Sue Katz reports on the making of a four-hour celebrity-studded series "based on the words of the original primary sources for Howard Zinn's unique perennial A Peoples History of the United States, now approaching sales of 2 million copies."

"Perhaps the most overtly Bressonian of Pedro Costa's body of work (albeit suffused with the brooding shadows of a Jacques Tourneur film), Costa's first feature, O Sangue, nevertheless bears the characteristic imprint of what would prove to be his familiar preoccupations: absent parents, surrogate families, unreconciled ghosts, the trauma and violence of displacement, the ache (and isolation) of longing," writes acquarello.

"Santouri the Music Man, a harrowing account of a greatly gifted artist's slide into heroin addiction, is another sweeping yet incisive film from Dariush Mehrjui, one of Iran's most accomplished and courageous filmmakers for four decades," writes Kevin Thomas. Also, Undoing is "a sleek neo-noir set in Koreatown's underworld. Around the edges it's arty, murkily plotted and derivative of too many other movies, but at its core it is impassioned and gains power and traction as it goes along."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "Day," which has just won one of the United Kingdom's most important awards, the Costa prize, concerns itself with Alfred Day, a British airman who, five years after the end of World War II, has returned to Germany where he had been a prisoner of war and participates as an extra in a movie about that experience." Thomas McGonigle reviews the latest AL Kennedy novel. Related online listening tip. Ed Champion talks with Kennedy.

With Jerry Springer: The Opera set for a two-night run at Carnegie Hall (Tuesday and Wednesday), Charles McGrath meets its star, Harvey Keitel: "Seated at a little table, with two volumes on Buddhist meditation in front of him along with a giant green crystal, he touched on all the legendary names of [the Method] acting movement - Stanislavski, Boleslavsky, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg - and threw in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther for good measure. Acting, he kept saying in the course of an hour's conversation, was a 'journey.'"

Also in the New York Times:

• Motoko Rich meets Brian Selznick, whose "obsessions with old French movies, automatons, clockworks and the filmmaker Georges Méliès inspired [The Invention of Hugo Cabret], which earlier this month won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children."

• "As of Friday, when David Moreau and Xavier Palud's film The Eye creeps into multiplexes around the country, this young movie year will already have seen two English-language remakes of Asian horror pictures," notes Terrence Rafferty; the other one, in case you've already forgotten, was One Missed Call. "Rhythm is often the most significant difference between Asian horror movies and their American versions: the good Far Eastern directors know that the most interesting part of any ghost story is the buildup, the dawning dread that gradually makes the world feel alien, uncanny."

• How She Move, a feature by the director Ian Iqbal Rashid (Touch of Pink) about a disaffected young woman competing in dance contests, is the latest incarnation of the up-by-your-bootstraps musical drama," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "There's nary a twist you don't see coming. But the film's strong acting, spectacular dance routines and culturally specific details turn clichés into catharsis. It's the sort of film that sends you home with a spring in your step." More from David Denby in the New Yorker.

• Jeannette Catsoulis takes on Meet the Spartans, a spoof as "redundant and tasteless as Queen Margo's crab-infested chastity belt." More from Joe Leydon.

• Also: "Simultaneously delicate and earthy, Alice's House anchors its soap-opera plotlines - adultery, avarice and incipient blindness - in the tired body and vaguely ruined features of its dreamy heroine." More from Martin Tsai (NY Sun).

• And: "In the intriguingly layered documentary Orthodox Stance, a determined young boxer strives to prove that the laws of God and the laws of the ring need not be at odds." More from Bruce Bennett (NY Sun) and Lauren Wissot (House Next Door).

• "You may view Untraceable, as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn," writes Stephen Holden. "Or you may stand back and see it as a cleverly conceived, slickly executed genre movie that ranks somewhere between Seven and the Saw movies in sadistic ingenuity." More from Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), John Lichman (House Next Door) and Ryan Stewart (Cinematical). And Joe Leydon talks with Diane Lane for the Houston Chronicle.

• Samuel G Freedman reports on Ethan Isenberg's efforts to make a documentary about Rabbi Soloveitchik. Who? "Within the Orthodox sector, he had been so revered as a philosopher, Talmud scholar and teacher of young rabbis that he was known, in worshipful tones, as The Rav, The Rabbi, a proper noun implying there were no equal."

• Margy Rochlin tells the story behind HBO's In Treatment. More from Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker and John Leonard in New York.

• Melena Ryzik reports on what writers have been doing to stave off boredom and frustration during the three months they've been on strike.

• "Once a dumping ground for movies considered virtually unwatchable, the direct-to-DVD pipeline is becoming increasingly important to mainstream film franchises," reports Brooks Barnes.

To further catch up with a few more of the movies that opened this past weekend, first, The Air I Breathe:

• "The mad dash to summarize the year in film is only now coming to an end, but allow me to rush ahead and prematurely pronounce The Air I Breathe the best bad movie I'll see in '08: So risibly pompous it has the meta-effect of making filmic conventions translucent, it really can't get much better (i.e., worse) than this," writes Kristi Mitsuda in indieWIRE.

• "Why do so many 'independent' movies look and sound exactly alike?" asks Matt Singer at IFC News. "Isn't that kind of a contradiction with the whole independent thing?"

• "Ah, January, hallowed dustbin for projects half-baked, too-cooked, or both, as in the case of this overstuffed noir actioner from Korean-American newcomer Jieho Lee," sighs Ella Taylor in the Voice.

• "The Air I Breathe has a more random arrangement of star power than Southland Tales, and its conceits are a lot harder to figure out," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Forest Whitaker, Kevin Bacon, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Andy Garcia have never been impeccable performers, but they look like frayed magazine cutouts in this uneven mash-up of jagged conflicts. It's particularly frustrating to watch Whitaker, the strongest thespian of the bunch, desperately mine for gold in a narrative landslide."

• "A hard-boiled allegory that consists of four vignettes whose characters bleed from one episode into the next, the film was inspired by a Chinese proverb that divides life into four categories: happiness, sorrow, pleasure and love," explains Stephen Holden in the NYT. "What unfolds is a flashy example of the everything-is-connected mode of filmmaking embodied by movies like Short Cuts, Crash and Babel, but the connections in The Air I Breathe are paradoxical philosophic abstractions lacking geographic and cultural resonance."

Lost in Beijing:

• "A nervy love-quadrangle story that contains much less than the sum of its attractive parts, Lost in Beijing is just the kind of lost generation film that a country entering the full throes of a yuppie consumer crisis would be expected to make," writes Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com.

• "Poised as a gritty study in urban loneliness, Lost in Beijing instead becomes lost in clichés." Fernando F Croce in Slant.

• In the Voice, Nick Pinkerton finds but one redeeming asset: "No performance registers quite so much as the capital city itself, a burgeoning-but-sepulchral range of skyscrapers receding into a sheetrock-toned sky."

• "There are, at last count, something like 17 million stories in this naked city," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, and Li Yu "relates a tale that is at once representative of the social and economic tensions afflicting 21st-century China and ripely, improbably melodramatic. The director and her cast work in a rough, naturalistic style, but the narrative offers both the pleasures and the limitations of old-fashioned class-conscious pulp. In spite of its raw, explicit moments, the film is at heart a sturdy morality tale about innocence and corruption, wealth and want, sex and power."

The 2008 edition of Rambo:

• It has "its own kind of blockheaded poetry," writes AO Scott. "The first installments in the cycle were better films than polite opinion might lead you to believe. At the time their politics made some people nervous, but to dwell on Rambo's ideological significance was (and still is) to miss his kinship with the samurais and gunslingers of older movies. [Sylvester] Stallone is smart enough - or maybe dumb enough, though I tend to think not - to present the mythic dimensions of the character without apology or irony."

• But at the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz, can't get around the politics: "The I-word is never spoken in Rambo, yet in its coded way, the film makes a case for why we are in Iraq and should stay there until the job is done, whenever that may be."

• More from Bruce Bennett (New York Sun), Kevin Crust (LAT), Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), David Edelstein (New York), Peter Martin (Cinematical), Nathan Rabin (AV Club) and Nick Schager (Slant).

• For the Los Angeles Times, Choire Sicha talks with Julie Benz.

Chris Cagle on an "impossible" shot in Zodiac: "[I]t strikes me that [David] Fincher exemplifies two primary uses of CGI in non-spectacle-oriented cinema. First, there's the cost-saving or verisimilitude-creating measure for historical/geographic setting; where a classical film would build backlot sets or use glass painting, the CGI film can "create" objects, buildings, and scenery. Second, there's the stylistic flourish."

Darren Hughes illustrates the ways Abderrahmane Sissako's camera "is obsessed with relationships and with the geography (geometry?) of social interaction."

Girish is "curious to know: what film magazines do you search out, read, and find valuable?"

Two interviews newly "Full-text-ified" at the Believer: Miles Marshall Lewis with August Wilson and Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster.

"Was five time Oscar nominated (and once winning) actress Susan Hayward a great actress?" asks Raymond de Felitta. "Or was she a basic studio starlet who evolved into a dark and expressive force that came to represent the dark side of the postwar feminine cliché?"

"You know things have gone a bit wonky when the light relief among this year's Oscar nominations comes from a tale in which the CIA covertly arms the mujahideen during the 1980s Russian invasion of Afghanistan," writes Andrew Collins. "This is, without a doubt, the best crop of mainstream American films we've seen for more than 30 years."

Also in the Observer: Elizabeth Day meets Claude Mendibil, who spent two months taking dictation from Jean-Dominique Bauby as he composed what would become The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (excerpt): "In [Julian] Schnabel's film, Mendibil is played by Anne Consigny, who has captured exactly her quiet self-containment and her expressive silences."

And Philip French launches a new series, "Screen legends." First up: Spencer Tracy.

"I've had loyal TFE reader Felippe send me a rundown of what's going on over at Fernando Meirelles's Blindness blog," notes Nathaniel R.

Edward Copeland presents his "film awards for 2007," while Andrew Bemis posts an annotated top ten. Then, another top ten and more from Steve at Film Damaged.

"Every year the glossy magazines pour on the love for Austin's mighty film scene," blogs Chris Garcia. "It's only January, yet already we're blushing and shuffling our feet about the compliments coming in."

The Independent profiles Julie Christie; also, Lesley O'Toole talks with Jennifer Garner.

Happy 10th, Nick's Flick Picks!

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Paul Clark.

"Christian Brando, the troubled eldest son of the late famed actor Marlon Brando, has died from pneumonia at a Los Angeles hospital, an attorney said Saturday. He was 49." Robert Jablon reports for the AP.

Online cover art. The White Stripes at Sleevage, the Strokes at Golden Fiddle.

Online browsing tip. "More Annie Leibovitz Celebrity Disney Dream Photos" at the Disney Blog, via Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical.

Online listening tip. Steve Erickson talks about his new novel, Zeroville, on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online viewing tips. Yair Raveh presents a "2008 Oscar Viewing Companion," adding up to a couple of hours.

Posted by dwhudson at January 28, 2008 9:24 AM