Shorts, 5/14.

"The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (Faber & Faber), a studious, informative, often astutely argued new book by Phoenix contributor Chris Fujiwara, abounds with horror stories of Preminger's sadistic ways," writes Gerald Peary. Those stories told, "he leaps boldly from tainted biography to the purity of Preminger's artistry, seeing mastery and even a moral vision in the filmmaker's Hollywood oeuvre."

At the AV Club: Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon) and Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie, The Postal Service) talk about, among other things, of course, their respective minor roles in movies.

For indieWIRE, Jason Guerrasio checks in on five indies currently in production: Gigantic (with Paul Dano and Zooey Deschanel), Peter and Vandy (with Jason Ritter and Jess Weixler), Phantomschmerz (producer Matthias Emcke's directorial debut), The Seminar with Robert McKee (a doc; trailer's at the site) and Ry Russo-Young's You Won't Miss Me (with Julian Schnabel's daughter, Stella).

Movie City News is running Larry Gross's 1982 48 Hours diaries.

For the Los Angeles Times, Margaret Wappler talks with Eleanor Coppola about her new book, Notes on a Life, "a free-flowing document that draws power from a steady accumulation of detail rendered in quiet, natural prose. It's the testament of a woman devoted to her family, seemingly at the disservice of her own artistic goals. But it's also not that simple."

"City of Ember is probably the first post-apocalyptic movie openly aimed at the under-18 crowd. But there have been others." And Joshua Glenn can think of a few.

"[A]re the new fertility film stars actually feminists?" asks Alissa Quart in Mother Jones. "The heroines of this year's conception flicks (Smart People, Baby Mama and Then She Found Me, as well as recent hits Juno, Knocked Up and the brilliant-but-forgotten Happy Endings) mostly procreated with someone of questionable character: Their stunted inseminators include a childlike ex-husband, a curmudgeonly near stranger, and the trashy boyfriend of a wacky gestational mother. Every one of these embryo pics presents itself as a comedy, but their real themes are dark as pitch."

Film blogs yelp a collective "WTF!?" as news breaks that Werner Herzog's directing Nicolas Cage in a remake of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. Variety reports.

Sujewa Ekanayake talks with Mary Bronstein about Yeast.

"Alfonso Cuarón has quite the task ahead of him in adapting Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, his potentially more challenging follow-up to Children of Men," writes Matt Prigge in the Philadelphia Weekly. "The charms of the novel, a structurally inventive tale of a teenage girl and a Holocaust survivor, are exclusively literary, but with the right radical approach, the tale could find a whole new life in cinematic form. As a warning on what not to do, Cuarón would do well to watch Fugitive Pieces, Jeremy Podeswa's unimaginative and literal-minded take on Anne Michaels's bestseller."

"Wounds from the Florida recount, still healing for many Democrats, are being ripped open again for some prominent former advisers to Al Gore," reports Edward Wyatt in the New York Times. "They say that a coming HBO film dramatizing the ballot battle after the 2000 election [Recount] unfairly blames them for the Democrats' failure to secure the White House."

Too good to be buried in the current summer movies entry: "What's surprising is how kind time has been to Days of Thunder," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "I wonder how Speed Racer will look to audiences 18 years from now.... What's authentically awesome about Speed Racer is the way it nimbly accesses the emotions buried within a blockbuster package and uses the digital medium not only to excite the senses but to come to an understanding, in the rush of excitement in our brain waves and in our follicles as the goose bumps rise, of why we should be reacting at all. This is, to me the mark of a work of pop art."

In Film International, Terry Hobgood offers an approving overview of the collection The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in a Global Context.

"Much like some of this season's other film highlights (In the City of Sylvia, Alexandra, Paranoid Park), Hou [Hsiao-hsien]'s latest foregoes plot restrictions for acute ambience and sustained portraiture," writes Max Goldberg. "I didn't respond to Flight of the Red Balloon as quickly as I did to the others, but it's the one I most want to revisit. Diffuse yet deep, Hou's vision erases the boundaries between his film and the worlds that surround it."

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey: "Battle for Haditha is like a realpolitik version of a 1970s disaster movie, sans soap operatics, Charlton Heston, or idle pleasure in the spectacle of order collapsing. It's tense, immediate, and vivid (if not quite so potently) in the way 2006's United 93 was."

"The title of 'first American independent filmmaker' seems to be thrown around quite a bit, often being assigned to John Cassavetes and his 1959 film Shadows, though the farther one looks back, the vaguer the term becomes and the more the possibilities increase (particularly in the silent era)," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine. "While historian Foster Hirsch has bestowed the title upon Morris Engel and his 1953 masterpiece Little Fugitive, the veracity of such a statement is of no importance compared to the film itself and its undeniable influence on the generations of filmmakers who came after."

"The documentary Quantum Hoops is firmly rooted in a premise that Americans love and hold dear as a reflection of our collective mythological character: the story of the feisty underdog battling seemingly insurmountable odds," writes Ernest Hardy.

Also in the Voice: "Like Amos Gitai's 1999 Kadosh, Israeli writer-director David Volach's first feature has scores to settle with Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, especially as dominated by literal-minded men," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Unlike Gitai's strident screed, however, My Father, My Lord (unfortunately retitled from the more aptly elliptical Summer Holiday) is a subtly discriminating view from within one family's agonizing spiritual crisis by a secularized filmmaker who grew up one of 20 children in the separatist Haredi community of Jerusalem."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Georgina Riedel "about the real-life inspiration for [How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer], tackling old-age sexuality, and her lack of desire to have a penis." And Michael Guillén talks with Elizabeth Peña.

Gill Pringle profiles Susan Sarandon for the Independent.

At Screengrab, Phil Nugent spots the return, sort of, of Mark Leyner, "a genuine literary star in the 1990s." Now he's worked with John Cusack on the screenplay for War, Inc.

Gabriel Shanks weighs his predictions against the actual Tony nominations. Nathaniel R parses the list for movie fans. More commentary: Robert Cashill and David Poland.

How do you get from, say, No Country for Old Men to Little Caesar? Matt Langdon's been counting degrees of separation.

"'Our aim, in the not too distant future, is to have every British film digitally restored,' Andrea Kalas, senior preservation manager at the British Film Institute boldly states." To Chris Evans in the Independent.

New Yorker editor David Remnick lists "100 Essential Jazz Albums."

Playing the Building: An Installation by David Byrne.

Online viewing tip #1. The Onion reports on the Blockbuster Museum.

Online viewing tip #2. Sean Dodson has the story behind And I Refuse to Forget.

Posted by dwhudson at May 14, 2008 2:30 PM