Shorts, 5/28.

An irreverent viewer is going to think of Monty Python every five minutes. And yet. The sheer anguished seriousness of the work, the sense that human beings might well be reduced to the bare essence of their distress, and that a camera could catch them in this condition, do offer one answer to my question. These people are interesting because they are unconvincing in mimetic terms: any attempt at richness of character would hopelessly compromise their poverty of spirit, which is all they have. Even the touch of ludicrousness helps; it is part of their penitence.

At Harper's, Wyatt Mason posts the opening paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and comments: "Here a style of writing can be understood as a style of seeing - a 'cold glaucoma' is metaphorically over the eye of the world; a metaphorical beast by a pool has eyes literally 'dead white.' Eyes teem, in fact, through the dark landscape of this fable about the blinding of the world, a world at which a reader is made to peer, through its language, for visions. Whatever else a film version of The Road may offer, that drama of seeing won't - can't - obtain. We'll see everything."

"We're in a Golden Age of documentary filmmaking right now," writes Steve James at the IFC (At the Death House Door makes its television debut on the IFC tomorrow). "Yet I don't see a commensurate growth in the number of 'longitudinal documentaries' - ones like Hoop Dreams or Stevie or Barbara Kopple's American Dream (which Peter [Gilbert] shot) that track people's lives and stories over several years. For me, longitudinal docs are the most deeply satisfying form."

"The Malaysian filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad tells deeply personal and intensely humanistic stories based largely on her own experiences," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "For her fourth film, Mukhsin, she revisits the loving and liberal family of her previous features, continuing her portrait of one woman's journey from childhood through adolescence and marriage." More from Mary Block in the L Magazine.

"A strange, bitter sensibility was stirring in even [the Zellners'] goofiest of outings, and it is this sense of anti-pathos that blooms into full blown bittersweet misanthropy in Goliath," writes David Lowery in Hammer to Nail. "Their observant style calls to mind the old cinematographers' adage about lens lengths: what's a tragedy in close-up becomes comedy in a wide shot. Suffice to say, this is a film with a lot of wide shots."

Fernando F Croce for Slant on American Teen: "The problem isn't so much with the subjects per se as it is with the film's insistently slick, reductive attempts to mold them into real-life counterparts to characters from some John Hughes comedy circa 1986."

In FilmInFocus: Kaleem Aftab on Spike Lee's passion for soccer.

"The critical consensus on [Scarlett] Johansson's voice is that it's flimsy and expressionless, and that it's buried deep beneath the record's cottony, somewhat synth-heavy production," writes Stephanie Zacharek, reviewing the new collection of Tom Waits covers, at Salon. "But I'm here to make a confession: I like Anywhere I Lay My Head, and if Johansson 'can't sing' - a claim that's debatable anyway - she is at the very least part of a long, proud tradition of actors who 'can't sing' and who have nonetheless made wonderful, or at least extremely enjoyable, records."

"At present she is knee-deep in preparation to play Condoleezza Rice in Oliver Stone's film W, about the Bush administration." Laura Barton interviews Thandie Newton. Also in the Guardian: Francesca Martin notes that Ben Whishaw is a very busy fellow.

Online listening tip. "Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese's excellent 1985 film After Hours - a significant portion of the movie's first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from 'Lies,' a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great LA-based radio artist who's gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet." Andrew Hearst has the monologue. Via Ed Champion.

Online viewing tips. "Trust Me, You're Going to Love This." Tim Lucas has some trailers for you.

Posted by dwhudson at May 28, 2008 4:13 PM