Shorts, 2/27.

"Amos Vogel is arguably the person most responsible for contemporary New York City film culture," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine. "'Amos was doing his thing at the peak of conformist white-picket-fence Eisenhower America, people wanted something different,' says Paul Cronin, director of the 2003 documentary Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16, recently released on DVD as part of DK Holm's book Independent Cinema. 'This notion of popular culture was kind of irrelevant; there was just culture.'"

"Without question, José Mojica Marins is one of the true mavericks of the fantastic cinema, a truly unique filmmaker and one of the genre's most assertive personalities." Tim Lucas's essay appears in Jose Mojica Marins: 50 Anos Carriera.

Now online: Sam Kashner's Vanity Fair piece on the making of The Graduate.

"If Abel Raises Cain is a little thin at points - we never learn exactly how [Alan] Abel was able to make a living for so long as a not-for-profit hoaxer, nor where the funding for his more elaborate ruses came from - it's also an invigorating and often hysterical look at a gifted comic and the nation of dupes he continues to use as his medium." Joe Keohane in Slate.

The Circuit's Michael Jones notes that Arthouse Films is putting its catalogue on iTunes. Go on, click their name. There's an amazing selection here.

"For a filmmaker who supposedly makes the same (or similar) films each time around, Hong Sang-soo has grown remarkably with each of his last films," writes Daniel Kasman, who caught Night and Day at the Berlinale. "From Tale of Cinema's quietly devastating self-reflexivity (and self-reflection) to Woman on the Beach's focus on Hong's female characters and even greater nuance in the entwining of relationships and plot, Hong has now taken the same jump as Hou Hsiao-hsien, making a film overseas in France. And with this new location, treated in the same low-key, modest way as all of Hong's vacation spots, drinking restaurants, and spare apartments, the director has achieved a wonderful subtlety in the small rhymes and structures in his often mirroring and doubling stories of personal frustration and sexual desire."

Anne Feuillère talks with Cédric Klapisch about Paris for Cineuropa.

"Before BitTorrent, it was the forbidden, it was sin, it was legendary." Katherine Follett catches up with Cocksucker Blues and writes at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "There is, in fact, everything you'd expect, imagine, fear, or hope from rock stars at the top of their game. Drugs, T&A, celebrity cameos, TVs accelerating earthwards at 32 feet per second per second. But it all ends up being a lot less cool than it sounds."

On a roll lately: A Film Canon.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Cheryl Eddy talks with Shane King and Arne Johnson about Girls Rock!, which they hope will inspire more all-girls rock 'n' roll camps throughout the country.

"Semi-Pro's much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn't nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had done up to that point - except maybe Dick, which nobody saw and even fewer remember," writes Robert Wilonsky. Then, after catching his breath, he adds, "Seems this is what it's come down to with Ferrell: grading his movies in various shades of enh as each one blends into the next till they're all one giant gray blob of feh. Which sells short the semi-funny Semi-Pro - essentially Major League clad in 1970s short-shorts, topped with a few 'fros for fun. Still, you seen one Will Ferrell sports comedy, you're good. Too bad you couldn't have started with this one." Eli Goldfarb in the L Magazine; Nathan Rabin talks with Ferrell for the AV Club.

But also in the Voice:

• Ella Taylor on Vivere: "I like writer-director Angela Maccarone's ambition, but her technical ingenuity exceeds her grasp of potentially complex emotions, which get stuck in a groove of mawkish self-pity."

• Julia Wallace on Beyond Belief: "This slack-paced doc, which follows Patti Quigley and Susan Retik, two soccer moms who lost their husbands on 9/11, as they raise money for widows in Kabul, is earnest and moving, but it meanders its way through a story of dubious dramatic interest."

• Aaron Hillis on Bonneville: "Three middle-aged Mormon ladies from Idaho tie scarves around their heads, don sunglasses, and fly across the American landscape in a convertible like they're Thelma and Louise, yet this rarity in cinema - a graying cast in a female-bonding adventure - couldn't be more dull-humored or predictably maudlin without just calling itself The Bucket List 2."

• Nick Pinkerton: "Penelope's influences are right up front - there's the Amelie music-box wistfulness tinkling all about."

• Ernest Hardy on Little Chenier: "What makes this movie worth a lazy-afternoon rental is the largely wonderful cast (in addition to [Johnathan] Schaech, there's Clifton Collins and Chris Mulkey), whose solid ensemble work is marred only by [Frederick] Koehler's gratingly clichéd depiction of mental disability."

"Ridley Scott is to direct a film about the 1986 Reykjavik ballistic missile summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev," reports the Guardian. Michael White wonders who might play the leads.

Also, Sheila Whitaker: "James Quinn, who has died aged 88, was best known for his tenure as director of the British Film Institute (BFI) from 1955 to 1964. This period gave cinema its high profile: the London film festival was established in 1957; the National Film Theatre was built on the South Bank; a lectureship in film studies was established at the Slade School of Fine Art; television was added to the BFI's remit and its first festival of world television was held in 1963, although this was probably ahead of its time."

And Sanjoy Roy lists his favorite films featuring critics.

Another list from Kurt Halfyard at Twitch: "ten modern testaments to tears or perhaps endurance tests of empathy."

And suddenly, the Cinema Strikes Back writers pop their best-of-07 lists on us.

Johnny Ray Huston's got a list, too, sparked by A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory's engagement at the Roxie Film Center. At Pixel Vision, he recalls more Factory-related features.

"I consider Roadblock to be Charles McGraw's best film noir," writes Steve-O at Noir of the Week.

For the Los Angeles Times, William Georgiades talks with Rachel Cline about her second novel: "My Liar centers on two women in their 30s: Annabeth Jensen is an insecure film editor in between jobs who meets glamorous director Laura Katz at a party. The two form a friendship that becomes a partnership when Laura hires Annabeth as an editor on her new independent feature, Trouble Doll. At the heart of the narrative is an act of betrayal. A third character, David, is Annabeth's doomed boyfriend, a librarian turned late-night DJ at KCRW. The fourth character would be Los Angeles in 1994."

Patrick Z McGavin talks with Cristian Mungiu about 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days for Stop Smiling.

AJ Schnack gathers comments on and raises questions about Michael Moore's plans for a "Doc Night in America."

Kevin Lee has a problem with Mick LaSalle; a comment that follows calls out Stephen Hunter.

Kimberly Lindbergs wishes Elizabeth Taylor a happy 76th.

"The history of UA is one of the great artistic triumphs on screen," declares Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent.

Online viewing tip. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has the trailer for The Fall, "Tarsem's long awaited, long in production second feature." Which is being "presented" by David Fincher and Spike Jonze.

Online viewing tips. William F Buckley, Jr on YouTube. "Mr Buckley's greatest achievement was making conservatism - not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas - respectable in liberal post-World War II America," writes Douglas Martin in the New York Times.

Posted by dwhudson at February 27, 2008 2:18 PM