Dog Day Shorts: 8/12.

Max Goldberg on 99 River Street, which screens tonight at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley: "Noir hounds are accustomed to a certain amount of clunky dialogue and thin characterizations — which makes a fable like 99 River Street all the more startling for its streamlined morality. Underrated B-director Phil Karlson takes the well-trod story of a wounded prizefighter and crafts a psychological powerhouse every bit the equal of Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning Raging Bull (1980)."

Director Taylor Hackford (Mr. Dame Helen Mirren) will be making a biopic about legendary playwright Tennessee Williams. Tenn, reports Variety, "focuses on how Williams' tumultuous upbringing -- complete with a scornful father, depression, conflicts about sexuality and watching his beloved sister institutionalized and lobotomized -- fueled the conflict in such plays as The Glass Menagerie and the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire. [Financer Michael] Ohoven said the script was a close parallel to Capote, which turned the In Cold Blood author's relationship with two murderers into a riveting drama."

Tangentially related, Mary-Louise Parker, star of Showtime's darkly comic series Weeds, is heading to Broadway next January in a revival of Henrik Ibsen's famous play Hedda Gabler, which will be adapted by Christopher Shinn.

Andrew Johnston, Time Out New York's TV critic, writes on The House Next
Door about what Mad Men learned from another seminal TV show. "The Sopranos launched a golden age in American TV--Deadwood, The Wire, The Shield...you know the drill--but most of Chase's acolytes have been content to stick with relatively conventional serial narratives (even if shows such as The Shield took the serial in bold new directions by embracing the novel as thoroughly as Chase has the short story). Only [Mad Men creator Matthew] Weiner has seen fit to fully embrace Chase’s vision and offer a sort of fractal drama--one that contains conventional continuity, to be sure, but also one where the narrative model is layered rather than strictly linear, and in which it takes quite awhile (unlike with B5 or The X-Files, which wore their complexity as a badge of pride) to realize that the whole is more than the sum of its parts."

Glenn Kenny: "Turns out I'm one of those unhip sobersides who can't quite get with Tropic Thunder. But I think my reasons are valid." His whole review is over on The Auteurs Notebook: "Given the incoherence of its satirical aspirations (the film does end with a suggestion that everyone involved still loves this business we call show), and finally too scattershot to really make it as parody, Tropic Thunder is best appreciated as a goof. Provided you can stomach it." (So many different groups are now protesting various aspects of the film that I feel like I should see it to a) have an opinion, and b) see if it's satire or spoof. - ed.)

On IndieWire, Michael Koresky travels to Vicky Cristina Barcelona: "[Woody] Allen's seemingly unavoidable need to narratively underline extends to his choice of overlaying Vicky Cristina Barcelona with an omniscient male voice-over, which lends the film the emotional clarity of short fiction but also a nattering, collegiate stuntedness. It's understandable that critics would harp on this decision, as it's a fairly bald-faced ploy for some sort of distanced academicism that the film doesn't necessarily earn or require, but it's a shame that this example of Allen's rehearsed fussiness (he's done this sort of narration before, most successfully in the more coherently clinical dissection Husbands and Wives) distracts many from those moments where Allen actually is trying something different."

Great read: Elliot Gould talks to the Guardian's Ben Walters. Gould introduced his 1970 cult film Little Murders at a screening last weekend and tells Walters that Jean-Luc Godard almost directed it. "'He took me for a walk round the block,' Gould recalled. 'It was 57th Street, Carnegie Hall. He said, 'If my wife and children ask me to tell them I love them, I tell them to go fuck themselves.' I said, 'That's very strong, Jean-Luc, but I don't think I'm there yet.' The eventual director, [Alan] Arkin, apparently received an appreciative note about the film from Jean Renoir."