Weekend shorts.

"[M]y adolescence happened while the state was utterly transforming the lives of each and every individual Chinese. In many ways it is still like this today - perhaps not as pronounced, but each political change, each policy shift has an immense influence on individual lives. And so when I began to make movies, this is where my attention turned." Jia Zhangke in what is, clearly, a highlight of Good Magazine's "China Issue; editor Jaime Wolf has been posting related blog entries in the meantime; for example, he presents a "Chinese Pop Primer" with an accompanying Muxtape.

"Jiang Rong's big-advance (well, for a Chinese title...) Wolf Totem has been getting an extraordinary amount of attention in the US and UK this spring, with a big build-up up to its publication, but from the looks of it Ma Jian's Beijing Coma is the far more interesting Chinese-novel-event of the season," notes the Literary Saloon, pointing to Chandrahas Choudhury's rave in last week's Observer and quoting from Tash Aw's in the Telegraph: "Once in a while - perhaps every ten years, or even a generation - a novel comes along that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction."

Cineuropa's Bénédicte Prot reports on Michael Haneke's next film, Das Weisse Band (The White Tape), his first in German since the original Funny Games: "The film - which once again explores the cruelty at the heart of the director's work, here in the form of ritual punishment - is set in a school in the German countryside in 1913, before the rise of Nazism. Haneke looks at the educational system that prepared the way for an entire generation's descent into fascist ideology, a subject and era that have not yet been tackled in film, as the director is keen to point out." He's aiming for a release about a year from now.

"Tilda Swinton will star in Italo helmer Luca Guadagnino's Io sono l'amore (I Am Love), a romantic drama in which she will play a foreign society matron in Milan who falls for a young chef," reports Nick Vivarelli for Variety.

"In a major step forward on The Hobbit, Guillermo del Toro has signed on to direct the New Line-MGM tentpole and its sequel." Dave McNary reports for Variety. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir argues: "It's not a good idea.... At least on the surface, it's a natural fit, and I hope my premonition is wrong. But this whole project smells to me of hubris, and indeed of something worse: It smells of George Lucas."

"The most bizarre thing about the new intelligent-design propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed isn't that former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein is being paid to extol a pseudoscience whose hypotheses can't be tested (everyone has a price), or that the film compares science with Nazism and Stalinism (though it does, repeatedly and remorselessly)," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "What's truly weird is that the filmmakers don't seem to understand the tenets of intelligent design." More from Steven Hyden (AV Club) and Andy Klein (LA CityBeat). And the Guardian's Danny Leigh rounds up more bloggish reactions.

"A would-be erotic thriller with no heat and zero chills, Deception has the kind of glassy, glossy sheen and risible story that mean to suggest Basic Instinct but instead invoke lesser laughers like Jade and Sliver," writes Manohla Dargis. More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Jim Emerson (RogerEbert.com), Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times), James Rocchi (Cinematical), Nick Schager (Slant), Bradley Steinbacher (The Stranger) and Scott Tobias (AV Club).

Also in the New York Times:

• "In Swaziland, one of Africa's smallest countries and its sole remaining absolute monarchy, the prevalence of AIDS and starvation ensures an average life expectancy of 31 years," writes Jeannette Catsoulis. "But Without the King, Michael Skolnik's subtly perceptive documentary, avoids a tone of first-world outrage; leaning more toward understanding than blame, the film examines a country forced to choose between tradition and survival." More from Bruce Bennett (New York Sun) and Louis Proyect.

• "Bomb It isn't the first documentary to address the history and evolution of graffiti culture, and it probably won't be the last," writes Laura Kern. "But what distinguishes Jon Reiss's lively, sure-handed film from the rest is that it widens the spectrum by taking a comprehensively international viewpoint."

• "With the arrival of the comically exuberant action-adventure-romance Tashan in theaters on Friday, the Great Bollywood Bikini Question of 08 - will she or won't she wear one? - was finally answered," writes Rachel Saltz. "Readers, she did."

• Allen Salkin on the legal squabbling over The Secret.

• "Bebe Barron, who with her husband Louis composed the first electronic score for a feature film - the eerie gulps and burbles, echoes and weeeoooos that accentuated invisible monsters and robotic creatures in the 1956 science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet - died Sunday in Los Angeles," writes Dennis Hevesi. "She was 82."

• Also: "Iris Burton, a chorus girl in the 1940s and 50s who later started a talent agency that represented many of the top juvenile actors in Hollywood, including River and Joaquin Phoenix and Henry Thomas, the wide-eyed little boy in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, died on April 5 in Los Angeles. She was 77."

• An AP report: "Joy Page, the stepdaughter of Jack L Warner, a president of the Warner Brothers studio, who made her film debut as a Bulgarian newlywed in Casablanca, died on April 18 in Los Angeles. She was 83."

"Tough to even think this was an intended antidote to Altamont." Colin Fleming on Cocksucker Blues, where Bill Gibron revisits the career of Rod Serling: "Just like the decision to sell his interest in The Twilight Zone backfired when CBS parlayed the program into rerun gold, Serling's choice to not personally oversee Night Gallery would end up destroying his dream of a weekly series success."

"If you've ever been dumped, had your dreams crushed, had your very identity stripped inch-by-inch from you by unfeeling hands (that covers about all of you is my guess), then Substitute will resonate with you," writes Stuart Jeffries, who talks with soccer player and filmmaker Vikash Dhorasoo.

Also in the Guardian: Emily Barr floats a theory or two as to why there aren't any good, never mind great films for kids anymore; and John Patterson on the comeback of the American penis.

"Given the amount of big money involved in film, you'd think that the story of on-screen strikes has been one of wealthy producers trying to demonise non-compliant workers," writes Daniel Trilling in the New Statesman. "But from the cheery, singing factory girls led by Doris Day in The Pajama Game (1954) onwards, this hasn't been the case."

Ready to argue about which are the 100 best films again? The Telegraph is.

In the Tisch Film Review, Dene-Hern Chen isn't quite sure what to make of the "odd" doc, Belarusian Waltz.

"On the one hand, when faced with the end of the world, there is really nothing you can do except bear witness to it in some form, which here means documenting it with video," writes Steven Shaviro, reviewing Diary of the Dead. "On the other hand, even if the video is uploaded onto the Net, it is unclear whether there will be anyone left to watch it - the witness lacks an audience. Such is the antinomy on which the film ends, and I think that it is a profound one. We have moved from being a 'society of the spectacle' to being a society of participatory and interactive media."

"Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted - indeed, we have helped to articulate - such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment," proposes Michael Chabon in an essay the Los Angeles Times has excerpted from Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. "The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve."

"A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties is only partly about Dylan," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "[Suze] Rotolo has written a perceptive, entertaining and often touching book about a remarkable era in recent American cultural history, about a way of living, of making art, that couldn't have happened at any other time or in any other place."

At Cinemascope, Talia Lavie has a good talk with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus about working with Fassbinder and Scorsese, Nicholson and De Niro.

Gill Pringle talks with Christina Ricci for the Independent.

In the Los Angeles Times, Tina Daunt talks with Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro about Body of War.

Interviews in the London Times: Kevin Maher with Danny Glover and Janice Turner with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: "Call him Dylan, or Fletch, or even Dr Rosenpenis - but don't call him easily amused."

Nick Dawson in FilmInFocus: "As a way of making my blogging in this space a little more adventurous, I've decided to embark on a little experiment: For the foreseeable future (i.e. as long as I can sustain it), every daily blog entry will be in some way connected to the previous day's post." And recently, he's been smashing seemingly unrelated cultures up against each other. Also, a brief history of red band trailers.

Bruce Bennett's piece in the New York Sun on the state of shorts is actually tied into Tribeca, but doesn't need to be. He talks, for example, with Matthew Modine, "who grew up working in a drive-in theater owned by his family, compares moviemaking before and after the digital revolution with the defining creative threshold that separated black-and-white from Technicolor."

Online viewing tip #1. Twitch's Todd Brown has the trailer for Mamoru Oshii's Sky Crawlers.

Online viewing tip #2. With Julia Kots's Naturalized, Nextbook launches a series of online short films.

Online viewing tip #3. Via Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay, Very Independent Producers, with Ted Hope and Christine Vachon.

Posted by dwhudson at April 26, 2008 4:43 PM