Shorts, 5/27.

"I've seen 2001 well in excess of 100 times (it is, without peer, the greatest motion picture ever made), in formats as disparate as 70mm, laser disk, VHS, broadcast TV, DVD and even the awful, scratched, discolored 35mm print, complete with a missed reel change, at Tribeca." Jamie Stuart in Stream on how "different formats play 2001 differently, as is true of all films."

David Bordwell presents "a tribute to cuts I admire. Warning: Superb as Eisenstein's, Ozu's and Hitchcock's cuts are, I'm deliberately leaving them out. Too obvious!"

"To my eye, the stylistic verve of directors like Welles, Wyler, Preminger, Hitchcock, Stevens and Ophuls - and Negulesco - relied on an aesthetics of exaggeration," writes Chris Cagle. "This exaggeration supplemented the invisible storytelling yet did not become outright expressionism."

Elizabeth Day introduces a conversation with Christina Crawford:

It was the first tell-all celebrity memoir, the first book to talk so openly or with such clarity about a childhood allegedly punctuated by psychological and physical abuse. It caused a sensation, left an indelible imprint on the cultural consciousness and stayed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 42 weeks. In the years that followed the children of Bette Davis and Bing Crosby wrote similarly excoriating parental memoirs, and the 1981 film adaptation starring Faye Dunaway became a cult hit. Joan Crawford's reputation took a battering so ferocious that it has never fully recovered....

Now, 30 years after publishing Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford is reissuing the book with a new introduction and afterword, supporting testimonies from contemporaries and more than 100 pages and photographs that were cut from the 1978 edition.

Also in the Observer:

• "The book-length interview with a film-maker is now an established form, and the most important series in English is the one started by Faber 20 years ago with Scorsese on Scorsese," writes Philip French. "Now comes Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, the 24th book of the series, and it is one of the longest and best of its kind."

• Roy Williams: "When I think back over the countless number of war films I have seen, and knowing what I know now - that there were black soldiers killed on the beaches of Normandy, there were West Indians serving in the RAF during the war (my own father included) - I have to ask myself, why aren't their stories on the big screen, whereas a tale about the white men who hoisted that flag on Iwo Jima is? Will black people's lives ever be as interesting as white people's?"

• Rafael Behr reviews Standard Operating Procedure, the book.

• A quick Q&A with Malcolm McDowell.

"Gianni Amelio will shoot a French-language adaptation of Albert Camus's autobiographical last novel The First Man with Claudia Cardinale attached to star," reports Nick Vivarelli for Variety. Via Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical.

Shooting has just wrapped on The Road, John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel. Charles McGrath talks with Hillcoat, special effects director Mark Forker and with Viggo Mortensen, mostly about Kodi Smit-McPhee, "an 11-year-old Australian who plays the son and bowled everyone over when he tested for the part, greatly reducing the anxiety filmmakers feel when casting a child. Some of the crew privately referred to him as the Alien because of the uncanny, almost freakish way that on a moment's notice he switched accents and turned himself from a child into a movie star."

Also in the New York Times: "Steve James and Peter Gilbert, the director and cinematographer of the 1994 high school basketball documentary Hoop Dreams, are the co-directors of At the Death House Door, which they hope will renew debate about the death penalty," reports Felicia R Lee. "'It's the kind of film we gravitate to, letting one person's story tell you about a much bigger issue,' Mr Gilbert said in an interview."

In the Los Angeles Times, Gina Piccalo tells the remarkable story behind Blindsight; Susan King talks with Zev Yaroslavsky, "one of the leading activists in the international movement to free Soviet Jews, who, for many decades, were essentially prisoners in their own country" and who "talks about his experiences in the movement in Laura Bialis's new documentary, Refusenik." Also: a quick chat with Arthur Dong about Hollywood Chinese.

Acquarello: "In a way, Robert Todd's Rising Tide represents a continuation on the themes of obsolescence and disposability that runs through Our Former Glory and In Loving Memory, a reverent, quietly observed collage on the changing face of manual labor that, like Johan van der Keuken's Springtime: Three Portraits, captures a way of life that is slowly becoming extinct in the face of technology, globalism, and mass production."

Also: "Adapted from the novel by postwar author Aya Koda (the daughter of Meiji-era novelist Koda Rohan) and filmed in the same year as the banning of prostitution in Japan, Mikio Naruse's Flowing is something of a corollary to Kenji Mizoguchi's Street of Shame, a complex and richly textured panorama capturing a transforming way of life within a community of women whose increasingly uncertain livelihood depended on the patronage of men."

In the Guardian, Ronald Bergan remembers Joy Page and Laura Barnett talks with Ashley Walters.

For the New York Sun, Gabrielle Birkner meets Agnès Troublé (agnès b..

Tasha Robinson talks with Joan Cusack for the AV Club.

Gwynne Watkins lists the "5 Kinds of Twist Endings."

Online browsing tip. "New Yorkers pride themselves on celebrity-sighting nonchalance. But if we happen to spot Clive Owen and Julia Roberts loitering about - in this case, shooting Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy's new spy thriller, Duplicity - our blasé front may just fall away." Sara Cardace introduces a New York slide show.

Online listening tip. "Susan Batson has been called the 'Oscar coach.' She takes big Hollywood actors and makes them better." And she's a guest on On Point.

Posted by dwhudson at May 27, 2008 4:07 PM