Shorts, 1/30.

"Last year marked the tenth anniversary of Xiao Wu, a low-budget Chinese film that was never distributed in the United States. In 1997, few could have anticipated this work would usher in a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, or have guessed that director Jia Zhangke would become one of the world's leading auteurs while still in his early thirties," writes Andrew Chan.

In a related piece at the House Next Door, Andrew Schenker: "If Jia's four previous features trace the trajectory of a rapidly modernizing China by focusing on a group of young men and women who either bear direct witness to change (Platform) or who have already absorbed it (The World), then this latest feature, Still Life, offers an entirely different perspective by directly transplanting its unwitting central figure from the margins of history to its turbulent center."

Robert Elswit has won the ASC Cinematography Award for There Will Be Blood. Related online viewing: David Poland asks Anjelica Huston about Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, which many have noted bears at least some debt to her father.

Brainiac Joshua Glenn casts Spielberg's The Trial of the Chicago 7.

In the Los Angeles Times, Noha El-Hennawy talks with Khaled Youssef, co-director (with Youssef Chahine) of Heya Fawda (Chaos), "which has elicited a storm of controversy over its ruthless critique of the police establishment in a state where the guardian of the ruling regime is believed to be the iron fist of the security apparatus rather than genuinely politically legitimate. While exploring the most notorious extrajudicial practices of the police, the movie explicitly condemns the regime of President Hosni Mubarak."

"I'm off to hang with American right-wingers obsessed with the threat of Islamic terrorism.... We're here to watch a documentary called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West." Steven Wells reports on an odd evening out.

Also in the Philadelphia Weekly, Sean Burns: "This rape-happy Rambo is amazingly disturbing and weirdly hung up on unsettling psychosexual flourishes. In other words, Stallone is a lot like Mel Gibson, only without the talent."

"At once cowboy and Indian, GI and VC, Rambo was arguably the great pop icon of the Vietnam War," writes J Hoberman, looking back. "Or rather, this puppy-eyed, Nautilus-built killing machine was the great pop icon of the decade-after Vietnam War revisionism that characterized the reign of Ronald Reagan. It's as though the ongoing political discourse, with some politicians claiming to be the new Reagan and others denying it, had conjured his reappearance: Rambo redux." Related: A terrific, essay-length comment from Godfrey Cheshire at the House Next Door: "[T]he political mindsets shaped by that era don't fade as quickly as its action icons; they are with us still."

Back in the Voice:

• Meet the Spartans has Aaron Hillis contemplating leaving the country. But! Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness is a "beautifully daffy road-movie musical is as inspired, whimsical, and commercially unconcerned as its protagonist."

• Julia Wallace on Praying With Lior, "a hardcore tearjerker."

• Abigail Deutsch: "If Live and Become strikes you as a vague title, the young protagonist of 's film would despairingly agree."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth comments on the news that the Detroit Free Press will not be replacing "forcibly retired film critic Terry Lawson, and will fill his coulmn space with wire reviews.... There's no question that smaller films have the potential to be hurt the most by the wildfire-spread of wire reviews, especially when it comes to films of specific regional interest. But in the longterm, the hope is that dedicated moviegoers who are accustomed to a relationship with a no longer practicing local critic will go online, where they can develop new relationships with critics based not just on geography, but maybe more significantly, based on genre concentration and personal taste."

Derek Halm looks back a few years to the point when "Godzilla's allegorical significance needed to be altered for the monster to remain relevant. The last great Godzilla film, Shusuke Kaneko's Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)... recognized this. One self-referential scene has the characters wondering why Godzilla always returns to Japan. Kaneko's answer is embedded in the question: Japan needs to recognize the horrors it has inflicted on others and its own people."

Also at PopMatters, Bill Gibron on evil kids and what needs to be done about them. On screen, anyway.

"No one can take away Juno's $100 million gross or marketing savvy, but its loyalists are now in the position of having to defend a film whose assiduous charm, like Little Miss Sunshine's before it, is suddenly its biggest liability," writes ST VanAirsdale, commenting on the Oscar race for Vanity Fair. "I know it's an honor just to be nominated, Juno, but I really wish you had quit while you were ahead." Not Andrew Sarris, though.

Meantime, Crash is going to be a TV show. Variety's Brian Lowry gets to "thinking about how studios might turn the trick with the current crop of best-picture candidates, including how they'd be sold and which networks would be the most logical fit." Via Joe Leydon.

Christopher Nolan, currently completing post-production on The Dark Knight, remembers Heath Ledger in Newsweek: "I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly."

Guardian theater critic Michael Billington has "a sneaking feeling that few new movies bear comparison with the best of the past." Also, news bits: Julie Christie gets married; Mark Romanek walks away from The Wolf Man; and Sean Young checks into rehab after heckling Julian Schnabel. Cut to the video.

Online viewing tip. Arin Crumley: "Social Checks & Balance in the Digital Karma Information Age."

Posted by dwhudson at January 30, 2008 11:23 AM