Shorts, 7/26.

"American film criticism has, traditionally, never been a cushy vocation with a guaranteed income; it has always been nourished by the financial sacrifices of the vast majority of its finest practitioners." A historical overview with a brief glance at a possible future from Phillip Lopate.

Also in FilmInFocus, David Parkinson describes producer William Castle's fears that Rosemary's Baby was well and truly cursed; and a talk with Chuck Tryon all about the Chutry Experiment.

Peter Watkins's Privilege "is an astounding fireball, and could not have been mistaken for a normative movie even by 1967 standards," writes Michael Atkinson. "Like several Watkins films to come, it's a frank portrait of a near-future dystopia, where the already pervasive forces that so terrified Watkins in the ‘Nam era have seized complete control of Western society, exploiting our mass desire to surrender autonomy and collectivize as an obedient throng."

Also at Moving Image Source, David Cairns on a telling sequence in Blind Date: "The prowling around in this scene far exceeds any narrative need to establish place, and shows [Joseph] Losey's obsession with moving the viewer through space, almost for the sake of it (no wonder Last Year at Marienbad would impress him so deeply in 1961)."

Another fine collage of text, imagery and clips at DC's: "Entry level: Luchino Visconti's 'German Trilogy' (1969 - 1973)." Also: Dennis Cooper once wrotes a screenplay for Carter Smith; he tells the story behind this cliffhanger-and-gay-porn-spiked feature and posts the first 20 pages; Cooper hears Smith is still interested in making the film: "I'm pretty skeptical that Warm is ever going to get made, but we'll see."

"Counting Down Ten Sadly Underseen Films." Do take a look at what Aaron Hillis has done with this list for IFC.

Emile De Antonio's "America is Hard to See is a film whose heart and mind is in the right place; but like its subject [Eugene McCarthy], that's about all it is." Tom Sutpen at Bright Lights After Dark.

Daniel Kasman sees, for the first time, a film by Kinoshita Keisuke, and shares his notes in the Auteurs' Notebook: "Immortal Love strikes me as very modern in its stylization, and very modern for 1961, absorbing lessons of camera bravura both from the rise of art-cinema in the 1950s (Fellini, Rossellini), popular cinema turned 'art-cinema' from Japan (Mizoguchi, Kurosawa), and latter day Hollywood stylists getting wilder in the 1950s like Welles, Hitchcock and Minnelli."

"Kim Novak - a major star if not a major actress - had something to offer that was a far cry from updated Hayworth or imitation Monroe," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "In point of fact, Novak was more beautiful than either actress, yet paradoxically she was also less of a fantasy. Marilyn Monroe was plainly a comic-strip figure and a fantasy wish-fulfillment that simultaneously converted all the men in her orbit into both fathers and infants, whereas Hayworth apparently lived up to her own self-characterization: 'Men go to bed with Gilda but they wake up with me.' But Novak was real from the get-go, and it's tempting to think that her humble Midwestern origins had something to do with her reality."

Gerald Bartell reviews David Kaufman's Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door for the Washington Post.

"Kim Jee-woon, who has an impressive track record of having successfully tackled a wide range of genres, from sports comedy (The Foul King) to horror (A Tale of Two Sisters) and European-style film noir (A Bittersweet Life), now turns his sight on the western," writes Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org, noting that viewing The Good, the Bad, the Weird is "a lot like watching a witty pastiche of great westerns, a la My Name is Nobody, rather than a great western itself.

"In a move that could have a big impact on indie film sales and distribution, online film rental service Netflix is shuttering its film financing and acquisition arm Red Envelope Entertainment." Gregg Goldstein has more in the Hollywood Reporter. And Anthony Kaufman has even more at indieWIRE.

Also via Movie City News: "Two years after the success of Lonelygirl15 - the groundbreaking YouTube serial that turned out to be not the DIY diary of a 16-year-old girl but the work of three wannabe auteurs in Beverly Hills - Web video has finally captured Hollywood's imagination." The focus of Frank Rose's piece for Wired is Gemini Division, starring Rosario Dawson.

And also in Wired: Scott Brown puts together an oral history of WarGames.

"The end result of genre television hero Joss Whedon's intriguing episodic short film Dr Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog suggests a brighter future for mainstream entertainers than previous attempts at digital programming have suggested." Eric Kohn in Stream. And the actual numbers? Jeffrey McManus does some "back-of-the-cocktail napkin guesstimation." Via Waxy.

More Kohn, more Stream: A talk with stop-motion animator Nick Hilligoss.

Congrats to David Lowery and his fellow cast and crew on the impending theatrical release of of Ciao.

Patrick Goldstein researches the research screenwriter Peter Morgan's been doing on The Special Relationship, the projected third part of his, you might say, Cool Britannia trilogy (following The Deal and The Queen), this one examining how Tony Blair and Bill Clinton got along during the three years that their respective administrations overlapped.

Michael Fox checks in on Bay Area films in production at SF360, where Hannah Eaves launches a new column on digital media, this one focusing on fair use.

"Reading both Jane Mayer's stunning The Dark Side and Philippe Sands's The Torture Team, I quickly realized that the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television's 24: Jack Bauer." Slate's Dahlia Lithwick: "As Sands and Mayer tell it, the lawyers designing interrogation techniques cited Bauer more frequently than the Constitution."

"What distinguishes the Bond books, apart from the floggings and the Floris, is the simple moral world they inhabit." Geoffrey Wheatcroft heads off on several worthwhile tangents in his piece on Ian Fleming in the New York Review of Books.

Michael Guillén talks with Don Bachardy about Chris & Don: A Love Story. Related notes: Rob Christopher.

"This week, Benh Zeitlin, director of the oh so glorious SXSW winning short film Glory at Sea, was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces in Independent Film," writes Brandon Harris. "I had the pleasure of profiling Benh for the magazine's new issue and recently I caught back up with him to talk about his film, the burgeoning new film collective Court 13 and whatever else came to mind."

For the Age, where Stephanie Bunbury talks with Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne about Lorna's Silence.

Like Ozu's I Was Born But..., "Hiroshi Shimizu's Children in the Wind, based on the children's story by Joji Tsubota, also eloquently (and poignantly) captures the children's confused reactions to the contradictions and irrationalities of a complicated, adult world," writes Acquarello in the Auteurs' Notebook.

"Tomas Alfredson has crafted one of the most memorable films I've ever seen with his latest effort, Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)." Blake Ethridge talks with him for Twitch.

In the Voice:

• Aaron Hillis on Late Bloomer: "Japanese writer-director Gô Shibata's self-described concept of 'a handicapped Taxi Driver subverts the adversity-triumphing disabled character in the same way Crispin Glover's stilted avant-curiosity It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. does, with both films failing to convey how seemingly simple men of limited faculties could suddenly become multiple murderers." More from Jeannette Catsoulis in New York Times: "Weird, wicked and wonderfully perverse, Late Bloomer pulses with frigid energy. Watching it is like having your finger trapped in a light socket: no matter how much it hurts, you can't quite tear yourself away." And more from Simon Abrams (New York Press) and Martin Tsai (New York Sun).

• "No Regret begins as a perceptive glimpse into a specific gay subculture, then descends halfway through into Korean melodrama hell," writes Vadim Rizov; "put both parts together and it's still ahead of the ghettoized gay movie par." In the NYT, Nathan Lee notes that director Leesong Hee-il "presents a remarkably frank portrait of low-rent South Korean homosexuality (the film was a succès de scandale at home), alert to the varieties of sexual identity colliding with economic need."

• Nick Pinkerton on Canary: "Writer-director Akihiko Shiota's dramatic strategies are limited to the point of monotony, a workmanlike vocabulary of glum location atmospherics and in-the-mix handheld hustling for when the yelling starts." More from Simon Abrams (NYP) and Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT).

• Scott Foundas on Bustin' Down the Door: "The title of director Jeremy Gosch's engaging, elegantly made surf documentary describes the oftentimes brash methods employed by a pack of scrappy foreigner... to make names for themselves at a time (the 1970s) when surfing was still more of a local (i.e., Hawaiian) pastime than a global professional sport." More from Rob Humanick (Slant), Nathan Lee (NYT) and Nick Plowman.

• Jim Ridley on The Animation Show 4: "Less hit-or-miss than the long-running Spike & Mike packages of drawn-to-the-dark-side filth, this touring animation program curated by Mike Judge (this time without co-founder Don Hertzfeldt) has hit its stride." More from Nathan Lee (NYT), Matt Noller (Slant) and S James Snyder (NY Sun).

• Ruth McCann on Red 71: "Watching this film for the sake of plot (or indeed audio quality) will make you suicidal, so instead enjoy the handful of character actors who spring delightfully (and inexplicably) into [director Patrick] Roddy's competently aimed shots." More from Martin Tsai (NY Sun).

"This week, in defiant mode, [Harvey Weinstein] went on a PR offensive, claiming that malicious rumours about the alleged demise of his Weinstein Company were being gleefully exaggerated by jealous former rivals." Guy Adams surveys the battlefield.

Also in the Independent, Kaleem Aftab talks with Robert De Niro about Barry Levinson's What Just Happened? and about why the Screen Actors Guild should not go on strike.

"Writing criticism requires taking the vague feelings and conflicting impressions we often take from the theater and wrestling them to ground, not spouting the first thing that comes to mind." The Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano reflects on the need to reflect. Also: Kate Aurthur defends Neil Marshall's Doomsday.

The New York Times has asked Jeanine Basinger, author of The Star Machine, to review Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard: "Some shout hurrah and some shout humbug..."

Also:

• Mark and Michael Polish are working on two comedies which they're shooting back-to-back, keeping their budgets low. John Anderson talks with them about Manure, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Téa Leoni and Kyle MacLachlan, and Stay Cool, starring Chevy Chase, Winona Ryder and Sean Astin.

• "Mad Men, which returns to AMC on Sunday, distills the moment in the American century when the buoyant certainty that came with winning a war and running the world was beginning to crack," writes Alessandra Stanley. More from Heather Havrilesky (Salon) and Troy Patterson (Slate). Meanwhile, Scott Tobias talks with series creator Matthew Weiner for the AV Club.

• Wilborn Hampton on the Barefoot Theater Company's production of Dog Day Afternoon: "Given the physical impossibility of mounting anything on a stage that could compare with Sidney Lumet's gripping movie, [Francisco] Solorzano has done a creditable job, although it raises the question: Why even attempt to turn the story into a play? The result is more a curiosity for fans of the movie than any elucidation on Frank Pierson's Oscar-winning screenplay."

• Julie Bosman gets John Waters to confirm that he's writing a Hairspray sequel.

Johnny Ray Huston and Max Goldberg each offer their takes on The Exiles; also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Erik Morse on Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

In the Stranger, Sean Nelson addresses "the whole dilemma of being an ardent fan of Polanski's movies":

Because of what we know and think we know, it's never easy to find the line between the artist and his work. Because there is no such line. Because the Polanski who made so many titanic works of cinema is the same Polanski who escaped from the Nazis is the same Polanski who not only lost his wife and unborn child to the Mansons but was initially accused of the murders in the press is the same Polanski who gave a 13-year-old girl champagne and a quaalude fragment then had sex with her on the floor of Jack Nicholson's living room. If the 20th century happened to anyone, it happened to Roman Polanski. And as [Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired] shows, it's still happening to him.

The latest addition to Scott Tobias's "New Cult Canon" at the AV Club: Devil's Advocate.

Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog on A Colt Is My Passport: "Billed as a noir, the film feels more like a thriller with Left Bank overtones, i.e. more Albert Camus than Jean-Luc Godard."

"[U]nderstanding how a film generates meaning and communicates with the audience is a really useful guide to help budding screenwriters develop their own craft." Trevor Johnston launches a new column at the Script Factory with an "under the bonnet" look at WALL•E.

"The Kurdistan regional government is rolling out the red carpet for the motion picture business, hoping that Hollywood can help showcase their land, culture and tortured history for the world." Alexandra Zavis reports in the Los Angeles Times.

"Superheroes and comic book adaptations have graced Turkish cinema for about three decades as part of a remarkable era," writes Emrah Güler in the Turkish Daily News. "These B-films, with homemade special effects and the most bizarre story lines, are now a treasure for pop culture aficionados in Turkey and even for some filmgoers abroad."

"Maybe one reason we can all relate to superheroes in these depressed times is that this year's batch has had to deal with a lot more shit, and it's turned them into assholes." For VF Daily, Julian Sancton asks Frank Miller, Guillermo Del Toro and Zack Snyder what they think.

"I'm against the idea of a 'guilty' pleasure in the same sense that I don't believe anyone can enjoy something ironically," writes Tyler Coates at This Recording. "Did you really spend six weeks growing that 'stache simply as a goof that only you think is funny? Fuck you! I don't waste time watching movies with Anna Faris because I think I'm hilarious - I'm doing it because I think she's hilarious."

Sean O'Neal talks with Teri Garr for the AV Club.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Scott Knopf.

In the Guardian, David Thompson considers Brendan Fraser.

"Estelle Getty, the diminutive actress who spent 40 years struggling for success before landing a role of a lifetime in 1985 as the sarcastic octogenarian Sophia on TV's The Golden Girls, has died," reports the AP's Bob Thomas. "She was 84." Jessica Coen comments at Vulture.

In the Guardian, Ronald Bergan remembers Evelyn Keyes.

Nathaniel R indexes Best Pictures From the Outside In - five episodes so far.

The cinetrix finds a good comic.

Online viewing tip #1. Alan Yentob interviews Werner Herzog - and talks to others about Herzog. Thanks, Jerry!

Online viewing tip #2. "Corporate Cannibal, the new Grace Jones video (directed by Nick Hooker) is utterly astonishing." An analysis from Steven Shaviro.

Online viewing tip #3. Joanna Jurewicz's Goyta at Nextbook.

Posted by dwhudson at July 26, 2008 4:11 PM