Shorts, 6/15.

At Stream, Jamie Stuart reconstructs the decision-making process that eventually resulted in In Spring, a delightful and, for a few hours, popular short film that was quickly knocked offline. It is, as Stream notes, "currently unavailable for public viewing." Jamie: "In the end, I found In Spring to be one of the most successful shorts I've made. In its own way, it's a summation of everything I've been doing these past four years. It doesn't have a meaning in terms of a message - its meaning comes from its juxtapositions of images and verbal text."

Northwest Film Forum has news of Robinson Devor and Charles Mudede's next project. In just a matter of days, the team behind Police Beat and Zoo will begin shooting North American, a story of an airline pilot who has a mental breakdown in mid-flight based on true events.

At the SpoutBlog, Steven Boone crashes the set of Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest and interviews first-time screenwriter Michael Martin.

"Variety reports that [Paulo] Coelho's spearheading a project to adapt his book, The Witch of Portobello," notes Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical. "But he's not looking to sell it to a big studio, or whip up a run-of-the-mill indie production. Instead, he wants to create a fan-made film mash-up."

"Visioneers is a feature film about an alternate reality where people's lives are drained of all joy by their mindless work. Eventually they begin to explode from unhappiness." Roxanne Emadi talks with the film's makers. Also in the Stranger: "The Tracey Fragments never stops to ask whether Tracey is sane or not," writes Annie Wagner. "The pleasure is in watching [Ellen] Page stomp all over any answers."

Jonathan Rosenbaum presents a piece on John Cassavetes commissioned by the Torino Film Festival for last year's retrospective. It now appears for the first time in English.

"What is the political purpose of Speed Racer's two-dimensionality?" asks Daniel Kasman. "That a film which forgoes time and space can address nothing but the abstract? (Are the profit-motives and spectacle only abstractions anyway?) That a move towards digital cinema of this kind threatens to disconnect cinema from the real world and move to a realm solely of ideas? Not to be nostalgic, or even idealistic, but Godard's movies of this late 1960s era seem the best answer. The process of making a movie like Sympathy for the Devil embraces a cinema of (certainly abstract) ideas and ideology, yet one fundamentally produced by a direct - and obvious - engagement of the world around it, right then and right there."

Rouben Mamoulian fan Filmbrain has nabbed a DVD of the director's second film, City Streets: "Though I'm far from being fully versed on 30s Hollywood cinema, I can't think of another American film that so calls to mind the masterpieces of the early Russian cinema."

"Sweden, Heaven and Hell is one of those movies that best come alive when watched in solitude in the after-midnight hours," muses Tim Lucas. "It struck me, unexpectedly, as a Ballardian picture, empathic but strangely clinical, the kind of movie that entices one (at least entices me) to think about exploring it further - not in the form of a review, but in a work of experimental short fiction. It's not so much about Sweden, I gather, as it's about a place in the imagination called Sweden."

The AV Club presents an annotated list of "25 worthwhile documentaries about ambitious outsiders." And the latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" is Wet Hot American Summer.

"Applying the tartrazine-fuelled pop-cultural aesthetics of Japanese TV to the overblown narratives of the Depression-era Hollywood weepie sounds like a dreadful idea on paper, a recipe for glitzy postmodern style-over-substance," writes Tom Huddleston. Which only serves to make Memories of Matsuko all the more astounding: yes, it's vibrantly, often toe-curlingly, bright. But it's also stunningly inventive, crammed with ideas and emotional truth, high on the possibilities of cinema." Also in Time Out London, Dave Calhoun on In Search of a Midnight Kiss: "This debut indie flick is a crude, funny and tender riff on romance with a script that crackles with deadpan, spiky humor."

Glenn Kenny recalls meeting Jose Mojica Marins (Coffin Joe), "one of the handful of filmmakers to whom the phrase 'pulp subversiveness' genuinely applies."

"Since Franklin D Roosevelt, only three presidents haven't cited a western as their favourite film," notes Rich Hall:

For the record, Jimmy Carter's was Gone with the Wind, technically not a western. For Reagan it was It's a Wonderful Life: saccharine twaddle, but what the hell, Reagan was a cowboy. And for Gerald Ford, Home Alone. I don't know what to make of that. Maybe Home Alone was the only film Ford ever viewed. For all other presidents it's been Stagecoach (Lyndon B Johnson), Bad Day at Black Rock (John F Kennedy), High Noon (Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, George W Bush), My Darling Clementine (Harry S Truman). Why? Because America is a nation that believes almost religiously in individualism and self-reliance, the two values that inform every western. And, like the western hero, a president carries a sense of impending obsolescence. He has exactly four years to clean up the town. That's a High Noon scenario.

Also in the Guardian:

• "Considering how modest its films were - sometimes filmed on Bolex cameras that could only shoot for around 40 seconds before needing to be rewound by hand - it's astonishing how influential the Free Cinema movement was." Simon Hoggart elaborates.

• Ryan Gilbey: "There's evidence that the big stylistic influence in contemporary British cinema is ... the TV show Skins."

• The dust-up between Ed Norton and Marvel over what sort of movie The Incredible Hulk was supposed to be (see Anne Thompson for the lowdown) has Andrea Hubert listing "Hollywood's prickliest" stars.

• "Why are British prison movies so infuriatingly mild?" asks John Patterson.

• Jon Henley meets Audrey Tautou.

• David Thomson riffs somewhat bizarrely on Angelina Jolie.

"Is it harder to break out of a British prison or to break into British film?" asks Jasper Rees. "The person to ask is Rupert Wyatt, a 35-year-old writer-director. The Escapist, a prison break-out movie starring Brian Cox, Damian Lewis and Joseph Fiennes, is his accomplished debut." Also in the Telegraph: Sheila Johnston talks with producer Rebekah Gilbertson about her personal connection with The Edge of Love; her grandfather, you see, once tried to kill Dylan Thomas.

"The Hollywood sign was our Everest once - artists and men of vision hoofed it up Mount Lee and (depending on one's receptivity to change and general placement on the deference to authority scale) defaced it, vandalized it, or created monumental public art from it ... because it was there." A brief history from Kevin Ferguson in the LA CityBeat.

"Grover [Crisp] brings a Film Person's sensitivity to the mission of film preservation," writes David Bordwell. "What does that mean? For one thing, he takes the long perspective. Film archivists think about how to store and maintain films for decades, even hundreds of years."

Cecil B DeMille "remains something of a joke among sophisticated cinéastes, largely because of his tin ear for dialogue," notes Andrew Sarris in his review of Simon Louvish's Cecil B DeMille: A Life in Art. What's more, "DeMille may have been too easily dismissed by the mostly liberal and left-wing film establishment because of his right-wing anti-union and anti-Communist activities during the cold war, particularly during the McCarthy and Hollywood-blacklist years." But "for all its length and copious detail, Louvish's biography is a great read and, incidentally, a fascinating history of a life lived to the hilt through a long, turbulent segment of our time."

Also in the NYT:

• "A movie of stark contrasts and zigzagging motives, Beauty in Trouble moves from the golden serenity of a Tuscan villa to the powdery chaos of a Czech garage without sacrificing thematic confidence or nuanced performances," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "As characters slide from sympathetic to despicable in the space of a single scene, the filmmaking team of Jan Hrebejk and the screenwriter Petr Jarchovsky (Up and Down, Divided We Fall) dares us to judge." More from Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun: "A film of disarming, down-market whimsy and a beguiling egalitarian curiosity about its own story world, Beauty in Trouble is a charming slice-of-life stroll to a destination that, though unsurprising, lies at the end of an authentically rough trail of compromise."

• "Ian Fleming's James Bond novels weren't immediately popular with American readers." Nor with American critics, notes Dwight Garner.

• Catsoulis on To the Limit. More from Darrell Hartman (NY Sun), Rob Humanick (Slant) and Noel Murray (AV Club).

• AO Scott on Pere Portabella's 1990 film Warsaw Bridge: "If the imagery and scenery suggest later Buñuel, the world-weary mood and suave discontinuity have more in common with the recent work of Jean-Luc Godard."

• Nathan Lee: Kicking It "has its heart in the right place, if not its mind or muscles."

"What Chinese Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang achieves in his documentary Up the Yangtze is remarkable," writes G Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle. "In one sense, he has created an epic - his backdrop is the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam project, the biggest hydro-electric project in the world and China's largest project since the Great Wall. In another sense, he has created an intimate film about two teenagers whose lives will never be the same."

Stone Wallace at Noir of the Week: "As stated in my recent biography George Raft: The Man Who Would Be Bogart, 1949's Red Light could almost be taken as a follow-up to Raft's They Drive by Night (1940)."

Sam Adams profiles Julianne Moore for the Los Angeles Times.

"Actor and writer Kwame Kwei-Armah joined a black British film group on a mission to meet some of the most powerful figures in Hollywood." And the Observer runs his brief diary.

Michael W Phillips Jr calls for a Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon: August 22 through 24.

Online listening tip. Errata's "Summer Speed Round."

Online viewing tip. At Shooting Down Pictures, Dan Callhan comments on Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (though "Pinter is more dominant here than Losey"). See also Kevin Lee's notes.

Online viewing tips. Taylor Mead at DC's.

Posted by dwhudson at June 15, 2008 7:10 AM