Shorts, 2/22.

"'You really think No Country for Old Men, that movie was better than ours!' [Paul Thomas] Anderson hooted. 'C'mon, do you really believe that?' The Bagger was flattered that anyone cared about his opinion on films, even if it was someone who kept telling him that he knew nothing. Mr Anderson laughed one more time, clapped the Bagger on his back and wished him on his merry, misguided way."

As Michelle Orange might put it, Zachary Wigon drops the S-Bomb in a piece at the House Next Door on "the effusive critical praise of No Country" before dropping another:

The critical reaction to the Coen Brothers' film was symptomatic of the same kind of post-ideological shifting that Zizek referred to in his numerous examples [in "Passion In The Era of Decaffeinated Belief"] - it was symptomatic of criticism shifting its emphasis from content to form, from dominance over the work of art through interpretation to submissiveness beneath the work's formal powers. To submit to a film's aesthetic workings without thinking about what those workings imply, as [AO] Scott so happily did, is to turn off the critical faculties of one's mind. It is the same kind of turning-off that allows propaganda films, which can contain reprehensible content but gorgeous stylization, to work so powerfully.

Stuart Jeffries meets Bernardo Bertolucci: "Significantly, it was during the making of The Conformist that Bertolucci went deeply into Freudian analysis. Up to that point, his earlier films such as Before the Revolution, The Spider's Stratagem and even The Grim Reaper, had been made under Godard's influence. Do you feel you grew up in making The Conformist? 'Completely. At a certain moment I had to be careful not to be imitating, not to be a forger, to do Godard fakes. I think it's not only my experience but the experience of a lot of people of my generation.'"

Also at/in/etc the Guardian, David Thomson on Jennifer Jason Leigh; and Chris Wiegand introduces a series of clips from La Dolce Vita.

"Since 1985, with his first novel, Days Between Stations, and now with Zeroville, his eighth - and best - novel, [Steve] Erickson has been a singular voice in American fiction, for my money our most imaginative native novelist," writes Charles Taylor in the Nation. Zeroville is "about what happens when the idea of movies as communal experience gives way to the idea of movies as private obsession."

"In embarking on the mammoth, open-ended project that is The New Cult Canon, I face the scary and exhilarating prospect of a journey with no set course and no planned destination, but there was never a question that I'd be leaving port with Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "To my mind, Donnie Darko is the quintessential cult movie of the last 20 years."

The Telegraph draws up a list of "the 100 best films" of all time.

"Like strange desert creatures, a little girl and her blind grandfather emerge from storm-shifted sands, dust themselves off and set out on a journey with no map or timetable in Bab'Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul, a film steeped in Sufi mysticism and as transcendent as that opening sequence," writes Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times.

Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm "may lay it on too thick with its You Go, Girl! message, but in the end it does bring to life a remarkably amusing and strange secret history," writes Tamara Strauss in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey reviews My Blueberry Nights, "a below-par film from Wong Kar Wai," and The Boss of It All, which "has a devilish central idea, and a bone-dry comic tone reminiscent of [Lars] von Trier's masterful TV serial The Kingdom." And Sheila Johnston talks with von Trier for the Telegraph, where Sukhdev Sandhu reviews the same pair of films.

Christian Johnston is in Lebanon, shooting a film "about a group of armed foreigners who come to Beirut and almost set off a factional war by mistake." Robert F Worth reports from a nervous set.

Also in the New York Times:

• Jennifer 8 Lee's got a list: "City Room, after polling experts, friends, family and the guy in the next cubicle, picked out a list of films (one for each decade) which, like Michael Clayton, seemed to capture the contemporary New York of the eras in which they were made."

• "If the attention span of Charlie Bartlett didn't wander here and there, the movie might have been a high school satire worthy of comparison with Alexander Payne's Election," writes Stephen Holden. "But as it dashes around and eventually turns soft, it loses its train of thought." Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in the Chicago Reader, is reminded of Pump Up the Volume: "[I]t may provoke audiences as much as [Allan] Moyle's movie did 18 years ago." More from Carina Chocano (LAT), Jim Emerson, Ella Taylor (LA Weekly), Scott Tobias (AV Club) and Elbert Ventura (indieWIRE); and Cinematical's Erik Davis talks with screenwriter Gustin Nash.

• Manohla Dargis has seen Rashomon. She knows Rashomon. Rashomon is a favorite of hers. Vantage Point, you're no Rashomon. More from Brandon Fibbs (cinemattraction), Shawn Levy (Oregonian), Scott Tobias (AV Club), Kenneth Turan (LAT) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon).

• "The flesh is weak but the spirit is indestructible in Cover, a ham-fisted morality tale eager to prove that infidelity may be bad but playing with a member of one's own team is infinitely worse," writes Jeannette Catsoulis.

"In a recent story in the Nation, Chris Hayes used 2,200-plus words to argue why progressives should back Sen Barack Obama," notes Brian Cook in In These Times. "I'll use only seven: Obama's favorite TV show is The Wire. It's certainly true, as Hayes noted, that Obama, like every presidential candidate, won't be saying one word about the prison-industrial complex or the disastrous consequences of the 'war on drugs.' But it's heartening to think that at least he's tuning in to one of the few public forums that fiercely drags such issues into our consciousness."

Conrad Veidt has Erich Kuersten at Bright Lights After Dark thinking "that the twisted end product of sexual repression can actually be beautiful; longing even at its most wretched and stunted can still be transfigured into art."

New blog on the block. David Cairns's Shadowplay, via Girish.

Rob Humanick's VHS Blog-a-Thon is on through February 28.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Ed Hardy Jr.

Online quick snicker. Cory Doctorow's got one at Boing Boing.

Online gander. "More Stars Than There Are in HUAC" at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

Posted by dwhudson at February 22, 2008 8:20 AM