Shorts, 4/22.

"Surprise winner The Girl by the Lake swept the David di Donatello awards, taking home 10 statuettes, including Best Film, Best Director and Best New Director for Andrea Molaioli (40), who beat out his two teachers, Nanni Moretti and Carlo Mazzacurati, for whom he previous worked as AD." Camillo de Marco reports for Cineuropa.

André Téchiné will soon begin shooting La fille du RER (The Girl on the Train) with Catherine Deneuve and Émilie Dequenne, reports Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net, where he's got news of other projects in the works as well.

"Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee is returning to the gay genre with a movie revolving around the Woodstock music festival." According to the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein, Taking Woodstock will be based on Elliot Tiber's Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life.

At Treehugger (happy Earth Day, by the way), Jeremy Elton Jacquot passes along word that Al Gore will indeed be making a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.

Slate has a transcript of Edward Norton's chat with Washington Post readers about the National Geographic TV series Strange Days on Planet Earth.

AICN is running a very, very early review - by one Gordon Shumway - of Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon.

Lou Lumenick passes along news that Elvis Mitchell has landed a regular show at TCM

Anne Powers profiles soldier turned antiwar activist Tomas Young, subject of Body of War.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Shaw talks with Doug Benson about Super High Me. Related online viewing: Mark Bell talks with Benson and director Michael Blieden.

"If Charlie Wilson's War (brand-new on DVD) is an entertaining mishmash, oddly less than the sum of its remarkable parts, the story it has to tell is one of the most fascinating, improbable and haunting yarns in recent world history." For Salon, Andrew O'Hehir talks with the real Charlie Wilson - not just about what went down in the 80s but also about what we should be doing in Afghanistan now.

"In 1984, the British Conservative government banned scores of horror films under the Video Recordings Act in response to a media orchestrated moral panic. They became known as Video Nasties. Good sense was gradually restored, and since the mid 1990s most of these films have become available again. There are 73 Video Nasties in all, and I aim to watch them all." Via Steve Bryant, Ben explains the Video Nasty Project.

Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook:

Jacques Rozier is a name few American fans of the French New Wave will recall, but the writers - and by then, filmmakers - of the Cahiers du cinema who literally defined the New Wave jumped all over Rozier's feature debut, the quite hard to see Adieu Phillipine (1962). Between that and Du côté d'Orouët (1973), the only two features of the director I've been able to see (the excellent 1964 documentary short on Brigitte Bardot, Paparazzi, is available on Criterion's DVD of Contempt), Rozier carves perhaps the most remarkable niche of all: a director jumping into the New Wave as if it was a natural means of expression. Featuring none of the zany energy, genre-hopping, American-film referencing, and formal assuredness of the more well-known members of the movement, Rozier in these two features embraces verité influences and a focus on young lives, culture, and sensibility to create veritable fictive documentaries on French urban youth.

In the Threepenny Review, Frederick Wiseman describes, step by step, his approach to editing a film: "The editing is finally finished when I go through the film and try to explain to myself why each shot and sequence is in the film. I have to express in words both my rational and non-rational decisions. Since I like talking to myself, this is the last pleasure of the editing process." Via Alison Willmore, who also Greil Marcus's piece in the new issue: "[W]e all have memories of things we did not experience: cultural memories that have taken up residence in our minds, built houses, filled them with furniture and appliances, and commanded that we live in them. These sorts of memories come from all sources, but especially from movies - and so, before I come back to the blank memory I started with, I'm going to talk about David Lynch's Blue Velvet."

"Films labeled melodrama are too often maligned, but have a fine pedigree in the American cinema." The Siren on what we talk about when we talk about melodrama.

"Hollywood has convinced itself, against considerable evidence, that audiences insist on happy endings," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "How, then, to account for two of the most popular movies ever: Titanic and Gone With the Wind, and, of course, the Godfather movies? Frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn if the ending is happy or sad, as long as it's right."

"Sometimes I think Anne Tyler is the greatest unacknowledged influence on the last two decades of American indie cinema - or at least that subset of indie cinema that tends to dominate Sundance. I'm thinking of those small-scale character comedy-dramas in which a repressed main character - sad, lonely, getting older, seemingly set in their ways - learns to embrace life again thanks to a chance encounter with a dynamic, 'exotic' new friend or lover." Paul Matwychuk finds a way into The Visitor, "Tom McCarthy's beautifully executed followup to his 2003 debut The Station Agent."

"There aren't that many pockets in our economy where the possibilities for pluralistic expression and communication are relatively unaffected by monetary considerations, but the blogosphere is one of them," writes Girish. "I find great promise in this flowering of generalism and its empowerment of non-professionals." And he asks: "Why do you blog?" Goodness, some of these comments that follow are mini-essays themselves.

FilmInFocus's latest "Behind the Blog" interview: Matt Zoller Seitz.

New blog on the block: August Ragone's The Good, the Bad, and Godzilla. Via Kimberly Lindbergs.

Welcome relaunch: Granta.

In the New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon talks with Isabella Rossellini: "It's not so hard to watch Casablanca, because I wasn't even born. But it's very difficult to see Autumn Sonata because that is the mother that I remember."

And at the site: "Well, there's life in that old dog yet," blogs Stanley Fish. "My editor thought that a column on French theory would elicit a small number of responses from readers interested in continental philosophy. More than 600 comments later, it is clear that terms like deconstruction and postmodernism still have the capacity to produce excitement and outrage."

Patrick Goldstein on Al Pacino and Robert De Niro: "The two icons of 70s New Hollywood, heroes to a generation of young actors and filmmakers, have become parodies of themselves, making payday movies and turning in performances that are hollow echoes of the electrically charged work they did in such films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King gets a quick chat with Shotgun Stories director Jeff Nichols.

Mark Mordue talks with Elmore Leonard for Stop Smiling.

"Alexander Payne's Election (based on the novel by Tom Perrotta) may, in fact, work even better now than it did when first released a few years ago," argues James Rocchi.

David Poland previews Hollywood's summer.

Michael Swaim for Cracked: "How To Make Your Own Judd Apatow Movie."

From Aaron Hillis in Spin: "Sound and Vision: 2008's Rock Movie Roundup."

Michael Guillén talks with Carl Martin of the Film on Film Foundation. From the mission statement: "We envision a vital film culture in which repertory screenings figure prominently on the cinematic landscape, and film - actual film - is not just an object of nostalgia but a living medium of expression."

Online gaze. At Shorpy, "Double Feature: 1939."

Online listening tip #1. The IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore present an "Indie Summer Movie Preview."

Online listening tip #2. "Harlan Ellison & Robin Williams Discuss LRH."

Online listening tip #3. Who would Hollywood cast as the three remaining presidential contenders? David Greene looks into it for NPR.

Online viewing tip #1. Via Fimoculous, "Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett."

Online viewing tip #2. La Constellation Jodorowsky. Thanks, Jerry!

Posted by dwhudson at April 22, 2008 3:59 PM