Weekend shorts.

John McElwee on White Heat: "For a picture nearing sixty, it's more energized still than any crime thriller I could name from the 40s."

The Testament of Dr Mabuse "is a masterpiece, every bit the equal of M," argues Dan Eisenberg.

"What Happens Next tells the story of movie writers from the silent era, when DW Griffith could keep the narrative of his sprawling epic The Birth of a Nation entirely in his head, to today's miserable existence in which writers can earn multimillion dollar payments for scripts, but only after interminable drafts and a wretched subsistence in 'development hell,'" writes Colin Shindler in the London Times. "The conclusion this week of the screenwriters' strike will certainly increase their royalties, but it is unlikely to eradicate their intrinsic sense of grievance." Via Bookforum.

"Flights of fancy went so far in 1929 that the right dress, the right tuxedo and a big enough soundstage made for the great escape," writes Nathan Kosub for Stop Smiling. "If there is a deeper joy to be found (in fact, there are many) in the four films in the Lubitsch Musicals set from Eclipse than the perfection of Maurice Chevalier's eye roll, it is the actress Jeanette MacDonald, whose Philadelphia finesse of the thanklessly independent woman suggests how selfish - in the face of so much lightness of song, smiles and romance - Ernst Lubitsch's earliest directorial efforts in the United States really were."

Kimberly Lindbergs tells the story behind Richard Burton's Doctor Faustus, defends Elizabeth Taylor against the "completely tasteless, catty and unprofessional" remarks made by Judith Crist and Pauline Kael at the time - and has a good couple of clips, too.

Kristin Thompson discovers ways "to find even more hilarity in [Bob] Clampett's cartoons beyond simply watching them."

"Both My Brother's Wedding and Killer of Sheep are not really narratives as much as they are documentaries about the films' actors and actresses, who are themselves members of [Charles] Burnett's community and thus the very subject of the two works," writes Eric Dienstfrey at Flickhead.

The latest entry in Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon": Morvern Callar. Also at the AV Club: David Wolinsky talks with Daniel Johnston.

"Certain aspects of Diva's plotting ring quaint more than 25 years on - not only that the story's intrigue is strictly of the analog variety, with its sought-after cassette tapes, but also that [Cynthia] Hawkins is able to exercise so much control over the distribution of her work," writes Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "But the breakdown of the systems that used to make art less accessible but more exalted, not to mention our ever-increasing focus on celebrity, only makes the film feel more relevant, not less."

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij reviews Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, Antonello Grimaldi's Quiet Chaos and Madonna's Filth and Wisdom.

A "disconnect between exterior appearances and interior states makes Before I Forget one of the most unexpected surprises I've seen in some time," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"Michel Gondry's current exhibition at Deitch Projects in SoHo is more than an extravagant promotion for the new movie he wrote and directed, Be Kind Rewind," writes Ken Johnson. "This project, also called Be Kind Rewind, is a serious but flawed effort to carry over into the real world the film's idealistic, anti-commercial fantasy of do-it-yourself creativity." Related: In the Tisch Film Review, Gleb Sidorkin advises you to "go swede something."

Also in the New York Times:

• "[Will] Ferrell's latest star vehicle, a raunchy, R-rated goof written by Scot Armstrong and directed by Kent Alterman, isn't as tenderhearted as Mr Ferrell's Elf, nor does it hit the surreal peaks of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, with its jazz flute solos and gang fights between news teams," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "But like many of Mr Ferrell's recent films, Semi-Pro finds the sweet spot between sports melodrama and parody, and hammers it for 90 diverting minutes." More from Kevin Crust (Los Angeles Times), Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Joe Leydon (Variety), Nathan Rabin (AV Club), Nick Schager (Slant), Bradley Steinbacher (Stranger), Scott Weinberg (Cinematical), Chris Willard (Premiere) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon). And Shawn Badgley talks with Ferrell for the Austin Chronicle.

• Matt Zoller Seitz also reviews Bonneville and finds its "no-fuss treatment of religion is as deft as it is unexpected." More from John Oursler (Reeler) and S James Snyder (New York Sun).

• Stephen Holden: "Cinderella meets 'The Ugly Duckling' in Penelope, a muddled, charm-free fairy tale whose title character, played by Christina Ricci, is a rich girl born with the snout of a pig." More from Sean Axmaker (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Meghan Keane (New York Sun), Brendan Kiley (Stranger), Tasha Robinson (AV Club) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon).

• "Told from three perspectives, Vivere is a slight story freighted with serious emotional baggage, its raw undercurrents constantly at odds with its fairy-tale sensibility," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. More from Carina Chocano (Los Angeles Times).

• Again, Jeannette Catsoulis: "Directed by the Louisiana native Bethany Ashton Wolf (who also wrote the film with Jace Johnson), Little Chenier is an overripe soap in which brooding and sweating substitute for energy and structure."

• Back to Matt Zoller Seitz: "David Novack's documentary Burning the Future: Coal in America is as upsetting as it is informative." More from Aaron Hillis in the Voice: "Your inconvenient truth du jour is that the filthy-lunged coal industry - which still provides over half of this country's electricity - is responsible for detonating five million pounds of explosives daily to remove the Appalachian mountaintops, an ecological Hiroshima that turns West Virginia's much-needed groundwater into a tumor-causing slurry."

• Matt Zoller Seitz on Beyond Belief: From Ground Zero to Boston: "This documentary feature by Beth Murphy follows Susan Retik and Patti Quigley, 9/11 widows from suburban Boston, as they try to raise money to help war widows in Afghanistan."

• "Photographers - how they work, what they shoot, and their sources of inspiration - are the subject of a weeklong documentary series that begins Monday night on the Sundance Channel," notes Philip Gefter. "The documentaries, made over the last decade by 10 independent filmmakers and assembled for the series, feature a broad range of photographers including William Eggleston, Tina Barney, Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe and his mentor Sam Wagstaff, among other lesser-known artists."

• Charles McGrath profiles Richard Price, whose new novel is Lush Life - reviewed by David L Ulin for the Los Angeles Times.

"Once upon a time in the not-too-distant future, there unlived a zombie named Otto," writes Matt Riviera. "From the grave of Queer Cinema emerges the gay zombie movie, in the form of German-Canadian co-production Otto; or, Up with Dead People."

"An epic work like The Gates deserved nothing less than the artistry of the Maysles to capture its tortuous path to completion in the winter of 2005," writes David Blum in the New York Press. "And the result is a classic narrative, with the typical and stunning simplicity that has marked the Maysles brothers' work since the 1960s."

"Documentary Shorts Are Seeing New Opportunities For Life." Agnes Varnum reports for indieWIRE.

"If you're being reductive - and we are - you can boil cinema history down to the story of six years that altered the course of the movies. Here's how film journeyed from the Vitaphone sound system to torture porn." As told by six Guardian contributors.

Also: John Patterson on two films "so embarrassing or offensive that the people who own the rights seem ashamed to rerelease them" - Song of the South and Mandingo. And Cath Clarke talks with Paul Andrew Williams about what he's been up to since London to Brighton.

As noted below, the new issue of Artforum features a piece on Paranoid Park by Amy Taubin. But there's more worth noting, of course, including Robin Maconie, Morton Subotnick and Björk on Karlheinz Stockhausen, Barrett Watten on Frank O'Hara and editor Tim Griffin on the state of the magazine:

[T]he predicament of the Sots artists - utterly distinct from ours, of course, inasmuch as their activities put them in political peril - reminded me of those criticisms often levied at Artforum by parties on either end of the art-world spectrum: specifically, that our texts are too abstract and arcane (whereas they ought to entertain and, by extension, promote) or else our advertising pages are too copious (with the overtly commercial venue rendering suspect any contrarian attempt to theorize art and culture more generally). Indeed, after reading [Boris] Groys's outlining of Sots art's prophetic quality, wherein radical juxtapositions of name-brand products and political iconography forecast the living proximity in contemporary Moscow of Lenin's mausoleum and Gucci and Armani boutiques, I began to see the juxtaposition of Rancière and Saint Laurent just a little bit differently.

Sean Axmaker looks back on the life and work of Ousmane Sembène.

"A Walk to Beautiful will leave you speechless two times over - first with despair, then with joy," writes Kenneth Turan. "Neither unmentionable subject matter nor nonexistent commercial prospects can keep this documentary from having a power over your heart that is unparalleled."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Agustin Gurza on The Man of Two Havanas: "The focus on the father-daughter relationship provides a fascinating frame to look at the much-studied Cuban revolution with a fresh eye, even as it seems on the threshold of change."

• Kenneth Turan on Summer Palace: "It's the swirling story of love in a time of revolutionary upheaval, a film where personal chaos mirrors the political to mesmerizing and unsettling effect. It's the story of the Tiananmen Square generation that treats the restlessness of youth not as an indulgent cliché but as something painfully real." More from Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

• "Romulus, My Father is the poignant, occasionally harrowing - though high-spirited and seemingly incandescent - story of a young boy growing up in the Australian bush not long after the end of World War II," writes Carina Chocano. "The high spirits come courtesy of Kodi Smit-McPhee, who plays young Raimond Gaita, the Australian philosopher on whose memoir the movie is based."

• "There's a retro quality to the horror thriller The Lost that serves it well," writes Gary Goldstein. It "succeeds as both a superior crime drama and a haunting cautionary tale."

In the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas talks with Stefan Ruzowitzky about The Counterfeiters.

"I'll take [Frank] Langella's conflicted novelist any day over Daniel Day-Lewis's showboat of an oil tycoon," writes Godfrey Cheshire, reviewing Starting Out in the Evening for the Independent Weekly.

Mike Ryan posts of best-of-07 list; and Dennis Cozzalio wraps the Muriels.

In this week's Times Literary Supplement: Marina Warner on Beckett and Michael Gorra on Conrad.

Twitch and Bloody Disgusting are teaming up. This is not a merger - just great news for both sites.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Marty McKee.

Online browsing tips. Via Anne Thompson, Paul Schrader's new site and Men's Vogue's "50 Most Influential Films." On men's fashion, that is.

Online listening tip. Slate's new "Cultural Gabfest."

Online viewing tips #1 and #2. Jonathan Rosenbaum talks about retiring after 20 years with the Chicago Reader - and much more. Parts 1 and 2. Thanks, Lawrence! Who also asks, "What if Saul Bass had designed the opening titles for Star Wars?"

Online viewing tip #3. Scott Macaulay's found one that'll make you wonder: Is this for real? Chuck Tryon assumes it is and raises the first of many questions that'll pop to mind as you watch.

Posted by dwhudson at March 1, 2008 3:08 PM