Shorts, 4/9.

"Sometime in the late 1960s, I asked Jean Renoir what he thought of Ernst Lubitsch," writes Peter Bogdanovich in the New York Observer. Now if that sentence alone isn't catnip for cinephiles... Anyway: "He raised his eyebrows and said, enthusiastically, 'Lubitsch!? But he invented the modern Hollywood.' By 'modern Hollywood,' Renoir meant American movies from about 1924 to the start of the 60s. Before Lubitsch's arrival to California from Germany in 1922 (to make a Mary Pickford vehicle called Rosita), Hollywood films were under the overwhelming influence of DW Griffith... [Lubitsch] brought European sophistication, candor in sexuality and an oblique style that made audiences complicit with the characters and situations." And since "Lubitsch is always fun and often as good as it gets," Bogdanovich has been watching a lot of his work on DVD; he takes us on tour, title by title.

Related online viewing: Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Frank Capra and Robert Altman on the Dick Cavett Show. (Thanks, Jerry!)

The Pulitzers have Gary Dretzka thinking back to the impact Roger Ebert's 1975 award may have had; he then traces the evolution of film criticism in newspapers up to the present day. This and Michael Atkinson's latest are the entries to read in today's batch in the current round of the whither-criticism panic. Read all of Atkinson's entry, but here's what he's building up to: "If writing in America is a matter for the common denominatorship, then we're all freelancers, and we'd better face up to it."

In the New York Times:

• "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science." With Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia (Amy Adams and Meryl Streep, respectively) and PJ Hogan's Confessions of a Shopaholic (Isla Fisher) shooting in and around New York, Michael Cieply asks around, trying to assess the state of the genre that hates its name. Glenn Kenny comments.

• Brooks Barnes: "A lonely newt, a strong-willed Scottish princess and modern-day elves are among the stars of 10 new animated movies from Walt Disney Studios and its boutique animation unit, Pixar." Much more on what's on the drawing board from Ben Fritz and Dade Hayes in Variety. Lots of 3-D on the way - which is what they're talking about at the House Next Door.

• "It wasn't enough, apparently, for Zora Neale Hurston to write a great American novel and to blaze trails for black women as a scholar and an artist," writes Mike Hale. "In Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun, an American Masters documentary on Wednesday night on PBS, we learn that she also pioneered a very 21st-century genre: the unreliable memoir."

This is not the angle Andrew Schenker takes at the House Next Door: "If we can locate a central crux to Hurston's literary achievement, Jump suggests, it's in her ongoing project - encompassing both novels and anthropological work - to document a vanishing way of life: the behaviors and customs of Southern black culture.... Hurston created as vivid a fictional world as any of her contemporaries - only perhaps Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County stands as a more fully-imagined depiction of the variegated fabric of a Southern community."

"To label Chukiat Sakveerakul's The Love of Siam as simply a gay teen romance is to misjudge its power and intention," writes Francis Cruz. "Within the two and a half hour running time (the director's cut is reportedly four hours long) of the film, Sakveerakul essays not only the two young leads' reunion and inevitable attraction but also a family's slow and painful road to accepting a long-delayed reality."

"What happens when you put a group of maximum-security prison inmates through the rigors of a 10-day Buddhism boot camp?" asks Julia Wallace. "This is the intriguing premise of The Dhamma Brothers... But the film's flabby, rambling narrative structure, which introduces too many bit players without giving enough background on either prison or meditation, prevents us from getting a good sense of who these men are, how they change over the course of the film, or what effect Buddhism really has on them."

Also in the Voice, Aaron Hillis reviews Young & Restless in China, a "four-year survey of Chinese Gen-Xers... [F]or a film that assumes its audience is cultured enough to know of the Chinese government's abuses, why condescend by giving the subjects clueless English voiceovers instead of subtitles when many of them speak of how they've Westernized in order to succeed?" For Louis Proyect, though, this is "an eye-opening documentary about social change in China today."

Among the new guest bloggers at FilmInFocus: Producer Keith Griffiths.

"It was not an audience of cinephiles; indeed, it was not the usual film festival audience at all. Oscar Redding's The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark was about to have its world premiere at the 2007 Melbourne International Film Festival, and the city's theatre-makers, theatre-goers, and even a few of its theatre critics, had flocked to the RMIT Capitol Theatre in their air-kissing, turtlenecked droves." Matthew Clayfield talks with Redding for RealTime.

For Film & Video, Bryant Frazer talks with Wong Kar-Wai about My Blueberry Nights; and with Jason Kohn about Manda Bala.

It's "Sex on Film" month at Premiere; Karl Rozemeyer talks with Brian De Palma about his femme fatales; also, Paul Verhoeven.

At the WSWS, Joanne Laurier finds Stop-Loss "a generally worthy effort, whose real strengths deserve recognition. Its limitations too, however, which express ongoing problems, merit thinking about."

Skip The Ruins; catch Creature from the Black Lagoon instead, recommends James Rocchi.

"Daisy Kenyon is not noir, no matter what the box says," insists Vince Keenan. "Daisy Kenyon is melodrama. Pure melodrama. Uncut melodrama. Schedule I grade melodrama. And as such, I couldn't get enough of it."

Jonathan Lapper salutes Paul Robeson @ 110.

Online desktop. Vanity Fair's "Inside Dylan's Brain."

Online listening tip at Coudal Partners: Ian Fleming talks with Raymond Chandler for the BBC.

Online viewing tip. At the main site, Erin Donovan has a new list, "Top 10 Environmental Documentaries That Don't Rhyme With A Schminconvenient Schmuth." Which is great, of course. But still. Supplement those with Al Gore's latest short presentation at TED. It's rattling.

Posted by dwhudson at April 9, 2008 3:04 PM