Shorts, 5/10.

"The first screen portrayal of Dracula was so eerie, some critics asked whether the actor himself could be a vampire. But since his death, little has been done to resurrect Max Schreck's reputation - until now." For Reuters, Dave Graham reports on Stefan Eickhoff's biography, Max Schreck: Gespenstertheater.

Jason Wood in FilmInFocus on the state of Mexican cinema: "[P]eriods of cinematic famine lead to ones of high productivity and critical and commercial success before local talent migrates to Hollywood and the cycle begins all over again." A historical overview follows. Also, Architect and designer Calvin Tsao picks five films for their design.

"Alexander Payne is turning to TV, signing on to direct HBO's dark comedy Hung," reports Michael Schneider for Variety.

"[A]lthough Romeo, Juliet and Darkness is a film that deals with the Holocaust, it's never made the centrepiece of the story," writes Ian Johnstone at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "You can't really say that Jirí Weiss is some kind of forgotten Czech master. He's pretty representative of a certain kind of Eastern Bloc cinema of the fifties, solid, intelligent, underpinned by an ethical humanism, along the lines you find in an early Wajda film like A Generation or a film from the Soviet thaw like Ballad of a Soldier."

Kathryn Hughes in the Telegraph:

There will be great poems from Dylan [Thomas], including the funeral favorite 'Do not go gentle into that good night,' and that modern classic Under Milk Wood, but there will be heroic loving and fighting, too. Marathon drinking bouts, endless public fisticuffs and an early death for Dylan at not yet 40 are also on the cards. There will be three children, brought up in chaos, and a strange, bitter half-life for Caitlin, endlessly quarrelling with her late husband's trust for money to bring up her family (a fourth child, born when she was almost 50, arrived courtesy of the last of her many, many lovers).

Part of this extraordinary story has been made into a film, The Edge of Love, by John Maybury. It stars Sienna Miller as Caitlin and Matthew Rhys as the poet, with Keira Knightley as Vera Killick, a friend of Dylan, who witnessed some of the most turbulent years of the marriage. The powerful script is by Sharman Macdonald, Knightley's mother.

But to begin at the beginning....

Anthony DeCurtis tells a happier tale of another Dylan. He talks with Suze Rotolo about her new book, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Also in the New York Times:

• Manohla Dargis on What Happens in Vegas: "The cynicism about human beings (us included) reeks as much as the filmmaking." More from Carina Chocano (Los Angeles Times), Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Ed Gonzaliez (Slant), Tim Robey (Telegraph), Richard Schickel (Time), Scott Tobias (AV Club), Scott Weinberg (Cinematical) and Mary Elizabeth Williams (Salon). And a bit of fun at the Vulture.

• "Needless to say, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead is not for every taste," writes Nathan Lee. "But within the context of its genre - the satirical sexploitation zombie chicken gross-out musical extravaganza - it is just about as perfect as a film predicated on the joys of projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea can be." More from Ed Gonzalez (Voice), Rob Humanick (Slant) and Benjamin H Sutton (L Magazine). And Sean O'Neal talks with Lloyd Kaufman for the AV Club.

• "Until it crosses a shadowy line dividing serious comedy from distasteful exploitation, The Babysitters has the makings of an incisive satire of greed and lust in suburbia," writes Stephen Holden. More from Ed Gonzalez (Voice), Mark Olsen (LAT), Mark Peikert (New York Press), Nick Schager (Slant) and S James Snyder (New York Sun).

• "Male midlife crisis presents as pathological self-loathing in Meet Bill, an imperative to which the only sane response is: No thanks," writes Jeannette Catsoulis.

• "Michael Madsen, best known as the sadistic Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, has appeared in his share of B movies, and Vice won't catapult him to the A list," writes Andy Webster. "But the film, a muddled, disposable crime thriller, has modest merits."

• "The Da Vinci Code brought to the masses the theory that there exists a lineage traceable to Jesus and Mary Magdalene," writes Laura Kern. "The sensationalistic documentary Bloodline further explores this supposition, one that is gospel to some and totally ludicrous to others." More from S James Snyder (New York Sun).

The Visitor is one of several films to come out in this election year that deal directly with the subject of illegal immigration," writes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun. "The movies are considerably less dogmatic than a recent slew of Iraq war documentaries that have essentially preached to the choir. For the most part, as the makers of the recent immigration dramas frequently insist, that's because their stories are about characters rather than issues."

Kira Cochrane talks with Lisa F Jackson about the harrowing stories she tells in The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. Also in the Guardian:

• "It was Mable John who, with Smokey Robinson, told Berry Gordy Jr back in 1959 that it was time to stop schlepping his tapes around major record companies and start a label of his own." Richard Williams talks with her about Honeydripper.

• "[T]here is one aspect of The Office's legacy that is less than sparkling - the British films that used its actors as their selling point," writes Owen Gibson. "The presence of Martin Freeman (Tim), Mackenzie Crook (Gareth) or Lucy Davis (Dawn) in the cast list has helped secure funding for a run of movies that at best were sporadically amusing (Confetti) and at worst downright terrible (Sex Lives of the Potato Men). Now that the latest, Three and Out, has hit the buffers, it could spell the end for this curious British filmmaking subgenre."

• Peter Bradshaw on Jirí Menzel's I Served the King of England: "The pseudo-sensuality is annoying and the supposed absurdism and satire are flimsy."

The latest entry in Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon": The Rules of Attraction. Also at the AV Club, Tasha Robinson catches up with Fast Times at Ridgemont High and: "Darryl Roberts's big-hearted, fuzzy-headed message movie America the Beautiful offers a thorough illustration of the limitations of good intentions," writes Nathan Rabin. "Looking and sounding like Cee-Lo Green's lumbering, effete uncle, Roberts blunders amiably and cluelessly through his amateurish eyesore of a documentary on society's obsession with beauty, perpetually searching for a thesis that will transform a shambling mess of half-baked thoughts and pointless digressions into a real documentary."

Jason Killingsworth talks with Scarlett Johansson for Paste.

Adam Ross's interviewees of the week: "The gentlemen at Kindertrauma have an interesting business plan: readers will never forget their site simply because the nightmares they've had since reading it will likely never end."

Michael Russell talks with Chiwetel Ejiofor about Redbelt.

For the Los Angeles Times, Susan King talks with Claude Lelouch about Roman de Gare.

A Previous Engagement:

• "I'm not big on those Pauline Kael-style encomiums to great actors in mediocre material, but that's exactly what we've got here," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "[Juliet] Stevenson is so incandescent - so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy - in her role here as Julia Reynolds, a married woman from Seattle who's returned to Malta to fulfill a 25-year-old promise to meet her former lover, that she lifts writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin's ordinary middle-aged rom-com above all its abundant clichés."

• "Take a frustrated wife and her sexually inept husband, add a dollop of temptation (a French accent can't hurt), and plunk it all down in an exotic location," sighs Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "The world may roll on, but the dreams of the everyday housewife are as predictable as the tides."

• "A great actress even in a not-so-great comedy is fully worth the price of admission in these far from halcyon days, both movie-wise and world-wise," advises Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"Britain's most talented black and ethnic minority actors, writers, producers and directors have been picked to meet the most powerful studio executives in the American film industry." Arifa Akbar reports for the Independent, where Andy McSmith notes that Evelyn Waugh fans are riled up over the way this summer's Brideshead Revisited tweaks the plot of the novel.

"The 9th Annual Golden Trailer Awards were held in Los Angeles last night with what seems like a thousand winners announced in all sorts of categories representing movie marketing." Christopher Campbell's got the list at the SpoutBlog.

Online wow. BLDGBLOG: "Airborne electricity grabs hold of a volcanic plume - in this case, Chile's Chaiten volcano, which began erupting last week "for the first time in some 9,000 years.'"

Posted by dwhudson at May 10, 2008 12:22 PM