Weekend shorts.

"In almost every movie you go to these days you'll see another screen - a television, a computer, even another movie screen - within the screen you're watching," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "In 1964, when Marshall McLuhan submitted, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that 'We have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time.... We approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness,' it might have sounded a little over the top. Not so much now."

"What is this fascinating new film theory known as cognitivism?" David Bordwell offers a primer with linkage.

FilmInFocus interviews the SpoutBlog's Karina Longworth.

Profiling Stanton Kaye for the LA Weekly, Steven Mikulan notes that before setting up Infratab with his wife, Terry Myers - it's a company that specializes in radio-frequency identification tags (RFIDs), tiny transmitters that are making it possible to pinpoint whereabouts and make date profiles instantly accessible anywhere - he was a filmmaker: "Kaye's magnum opus, In Pursuit of Treasure, completed while he was an American Film Institute fellow in 1972, has never been shown and remains locked in an AFI vault." What makes this doubly interesting: "During a few years in the 1970s, the fate of both Kaye's career as a promising filmmaker and AFI itself were inextricably bound together."

John Lichman does a little compare/contrast: "[Takashi] Miike and [Takeshi] Kitano take their Yakuza in the disillusioned sense.... But it is fitting that these two directors have such similar views portrayed through drastically different styles (Kitano, reserved and sudden; Miike, lavish and self-indulgent - dare I break out the 'disgustingly decadent' too? I shall.) The best examples of their own fascination with the genre have to be Miike's Dead or Alive: Hanzaishia/Dead or Alive: Birds and Kitano's Takeshis'." Also at the House Next Door: Once and for all, which is the best dramatic series "in the history of American television? Andrew Johnston makes the case for The Wire; Alan Sepinwall goes for The Sopranos; and Matt Zoller Seitz argues for Deadwood.

"It was only when their grandfather Perry Henzell passed away, a little over a year ago, that my children took in how significant his influence had been around the world," writes Justine Henzell in the New Statesman. "Of course, they knew he was the co-writer and director of Jamaica's first feature film, The Harder They Come. My son had the poster over his bed; his sister was old enough to actually watch the film. But they were a little surprised by the magnitude of the tributes and obituaries that streamed in."

"In his second feature film Andalucia, director Alain Gomis again explores immigrant identity after his debut feature L'Afrance." Boyd van Hoeij talks with him at european-films.net.

Children of Glory opens on March 14 in the UK. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas looks back on the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

Also in the Guardian:

• Simon Hattenstone talks with Brian De Palma (Redacted), Nick Broomfield (Battle for Haditha) and Paul Haggis (In the Valley of Elah) about why America "has turned its back on all Iraq war films."

• Jude Rogers: "The London Nobody Knows... was forgotten for many years, but has become better known in recent times, and has now been released on DVD."

• Tim Parks on Bertolucci's The Conformist.

• Stuart Jeffries talks with Forest Whitaker.

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Irma Vep.

David Edelstein recommends "two hideously depressing but also enraging documentaries about unchecked growth and the collateral damage in its wake - i.e., the Earth and everyone on it. The Unforeseen is a poetic and high-minded meditation on American developers' manifest destiny and the cancer it introduces into the natural world. Burning the Future: Coal in America, despite its generalized title, is firmly anchored in West Virginia, that Appalachian bastion of beauty and blight. The latter has the more visceral impact."

"Burkina Faso has an established cinema culture; one of liveliest in West Africa, its dual character makes it somewhat unique," writes Noah Butler for Facets. "On the one hand, there is a culture of producing films. On the other hand, there is a culture of consuming them - watching them, critiquing and comparing them, buying them on the street."

David M Halbfinger checks in on The Dark Knight and Christopher Nolan's indie filmmaking habits: "[H]e's still scribbling new dialogue on the set, improvising camera moves as he goes, letting his actors decide when it's time to move on and otherwise racing through each day as if his money might run out. It's just that his jazz combo of a crew has mushroomed into a philharmonic."

Also in the New York Times:

• Matt Zoller Seitz: "Shot in battlefield hospitals in Iraq and rehab centers in the United States, Fighting for Life takes an unflinching look at the physical sacrifices of soldiers and marines, and the fortitude of the doctors and nurses who treat them." More from Nick Pinkerton (Voice).

• AO Scott on 10,000 BC: "The wooden acting, the bad dialogue, the extravagantly illogical special effects may well, in time, look pleasingly cheap and hokey, at which point the true entertainment value of the film will at last be realized. Meanwhile back in the present, there is an awful lot of high-toned mumbo-jumbo to sit through." More from Peter Hartlaub (San Francisco Chronicle), Keith Phipps (AV Club), Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon). Steven Goldman talks with Roland Emmerich for the Guardian.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Eyes popping and mouths agape, Martin Lawrence and Raven-Symoné mug their way through College Road Trip as if it were a silent movie - which, come to think of it, would have been a lot less irritating."

"Pedro Almodovar's Volver, Lajos Koltai's Evening, and especially Jasmila Zbanic's Grbavica: Land of My Dreams, share a commonality in subject with Irina Palm in that all four concern solitary mothers who are liberated by the revealing of secrets," writes Adam Balz.

Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Chet Mellema on Faces: "[W]ith a careful and discerning eye, the nuances and subtleties in each character's facial expressions, glances and body language - expertly captured by Cassavetes's close-up and wandering camera techniques - reveal more about their weaknesses and insecurities than they would otherwise willingly share."

Cineuropa's "Film Focus": Lenny Abrahamson's Garage, which has just opened in the UK. Reviews: Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Ryan Gilbey (New Statesman), Wally Hammond (Time Out) and Anthony Quinn (Independent).

"My Name Is Albert Ayler offers a close reading of the titular musician, a saxophone colossus who pushed the emotional limits of free jazz, but it also tells a broader story about the strange currents of American avant-garde music," writes Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. More from Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Josh R salutes Anna Magnani in what would have been her 100th year.

Noel Murray and Keith Phipps present an Alan Moore primer at the AV Club.

In Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Mark Harris "reminds us how long and frustrating, and above all how mysteriously contingent, the process of making movies is," writes Sarah Kerr in Slate. "And, by extension, how easily the icons of any era might have been utterly different from the ones we've come to know."

The cinetrix recommends Steve Erickson's Zeroville.

Adam Ross's interviewee of the week: Bob Turnbull.

A list from Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly: "Six Awful Films Whose Titles Unintentionally Double as Kick-Me Signs."

Another from Annalee Newitz at io9: "The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life." Via Chris Barsanti.

Mike at goatdog: "Top Ten Films of 2007, or Time to Move On."

The founders of Television Without Pity are off "to pursue dreams and ambitions"; the site will carry on.

Online listening tip. Joel Heller talks with Crazy Sexy Cancer filmmakers Kris Carr and Brian Fassett.

Online viewing tip. "Kenneth Anger's paean to Disney rodent memorabilia, and one of his most recent works, turns up at the Grey Lodge," notes John Coulthart.

Posted by dwhudson at March 8, 2008 2:06 PM